The game plays up to six but is apparently best with four, for reasons of duration if nothing else. With four epochs to play through - each consisting of four turns, each turn a series of cards from every player - the game is long, although you can agree to play three or even just two epochs: plenty will happen in that time.
Everything occurs on a map. Depending on player count, some areas will be inaccessible, and yesterday that was half the board as I played the Trojans (green) against the Egyptians (purple). Set-up is simple: plonk some discs on your home turf: one disc is some nomads, two stacked are a settlement, three or four represent a city. Nomads from different civilisations can co-exist peacefully, but anything above a single disc in an area with your opponents also present triggers a competition.
But Competition is phase 3, and before that comes Growth Phase and Card Phase.
Growth is simple. For every settlement you have on the board and every set of two shallow seas you occupy, you get to add an extra disc to the board - either building up your existing presence or spreading out from it across the map. Each civ also has it's own little specialism that may come into play here: if Egypt has a city on the Nile, for instance, they gain additional discs and money (talents).
The Card Phase is simple too. But it's also brutal. Almost every card played has some kind of negative impact, some of them critical. Volcanoes for instant can obliterate the heart of a civilisation and The Breath of God (an Event: events are always played the instant they are revealed) screws everyone's plans up in a big way. To say it's swingy and chaotic is an understatement - it makes Battle for Rokugan seem like a gentle Euro. Four things help balance out the big hits however. One is the existence of Negate cards, that can cancel out another card's effect. Beware though - negate cards can be negated themselves, and a card used to negate a negate can itself be negated... and so on. And in a large deck of cards, they don't crop up as often as you might like.
Another is the Events, which often (not always!) give the player with the fewest points an opportunity to screw over the civilisation/s furthest ahead of them - usually by sending Barbarians their way. Third is the fact you can, instead of removing discs when instructed to by a shitty card, pay talents or discard cards instead - but this can be risky, as both can be helpful when we reach the competition phase later. The main thing though is the ebb and flow of power across the region - the classic get-the-leader of wargaming. This can happen not only from epoch to epoch and turn to turn, but even card to card. The ideal strategy is to somehow sit just behind the leader for the duration and never make yourself too much a target, but this isn't easy - when the leader takes a big hit (and they will!) you would be the new target.
Instead of playing a card on your turn, you can build one of the seven Wonders instead. These give your civilisation an ongoing benefit (unless someone buries them, to use the game's parlance) and also score you a point per round. But they are costly: you need to pay at least two discs from the map plus any three combinations of more discs/cards from hand/talents.
Investment cards are one of the few non-violent cards,
functioning like mini-Wonders.
Once everyone has passed (you can play Negate cards after passing) the Competition phase arrives, which is the resolution of contested areas. There's no dice rolling: instead discs get removed in ascending order of stacks: first the nomads, then the settlements, then the three-stack cities, then the four-stack cities. This is repeated until there is either a single faction left, or only nomads. But of course you can - as you would in the card phase - choose to pay talents or discard cards instead. And some cards are specifically Competition cards that can help you out in a specific fight, or even all fights this turn.
If you manage to wipe out an opponent's city and gain/keep control of an area, you also get to Loot: taking a talent and a victory point to recognise and reward your wrath.
Finally there is Reckoning phase, where some discs may be removed if someone dominates areas of the sea (ie controls all adjacent land areas) everyone scores points for cities and unburied (and occupied) wonders, turn order is decided (most cities first) and new cards are drawn for the next round.
There are a few wrinkles - epoch scoring, sudden death step (the epoch may end suddenly!) and the possibility of a struggling player to explode the board somewhat by going rogue with the Aeneas Step during epochs 1, 2 or 3. If you're wiped off the map or at least 5points behind everyone else, you can invoke this rule (once per game) and give yourself something of a boost, introducing up to 16 new discs to the map either as your existing civilisation or a new one. It sounds a lot, but as you have 50 at your disposal in entirety, and most may be in play at this point, it's not actually a move you'd seek to use as a planned strategy.
Yesterday I played Troy (green) versus Egypt (purple), and Troy began strongly. Not only did they start well, they accelerated into a lead of over ten points. I was concerned at this point that Troy were simply drawing the more fortuitous cards, and once a lead was established it would - in a two player game, at least - simply be built on. However thanks to the Events Egypt was able to rally, as Barbarians attacked from the east and the north (and the less helpful south, but never mind) burying Troy's wonder and halting their advances south as Egypt counter-attacked. Troy's focus on expansion meant they had a huge presence on the board, but Egypt now had more cities and were scoring more points. The Egyptians raced in a strong lead and held it - with the downside being that they now bore the brunt of Events themselves. But owing to fortune, less events were appearing, and Troy had to change tactics. Once Egypt deployed heavily in the north-east corner of the map, Troy ceded the region and sailed south to the Nile, attacking Egypt's three cities and attempting to wipe out the Wonder there.
Endgame. Troy have decimated Egypt.
Egypt used most of its cards to defend the wonder and the city, in the end keeping the wonder intact but losing it as both sides fought over it for most of the final turn of the final epoch. In hindsight, Egypt might have been better to let that one go and attack Troy elsewhere - the vast spread of green settlements had been turned into cities, and in the final count-up Troy galloped over the line to claim a resurgent win, 60-58.
It's kinda nuts. BGG criticism essentially all says the same thing - that the game has no arc; that each civilisation has no opportunity to build infrastructure or the kind of advancements that allow for a more strategic overall approach. It is a reasonable observation, but my impression is this isn't an oversight: the designers have made ACIS very deliberately bunfighty and swingy, asking the players to police each other and the resultant pretty mess representing the ebb and flow of empires building and crumbling over the years. I would agree that kind of chaotic fight is probably better with a shorter game than ACIS's three-plus hours, but my game yesterday lasted two and I enjoyed every minute.
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