Sid Meier’s Civilization: A New Dawn – Terra Incognita

This new expansion is packed full of content to push the boundaries of your civilization in every game. With Terra Incognita, you now have the option to explore your surroundings, exploring new environments and dynamically constructing the board as you play. Districts sprawl out from your cities to unlock new powers, new forms of government give your civilization an edge, combat has been redefined with the addition of armies, and ten brand-new leaders more than double the number of civilizations you could play in any game! Add in the fact that you can now play with up to five players, and Terra Incognita becomes an indispensable addition for every fan of Civilization: A New Dawn.

The Drive to Explore

Previously in your games of Civilization: A New Dawn, all of the map tiles were laid out from the very beginning of the game. You could see your entire world from edge to edge, and although your empires would advance across the map, you never had the chance to push past your borders into uncharted regions. With the Terra Incognita expansion, all of that changes.

Now, at the beginning of the game, you’ll establish a core area of map tiles, with each player’s capital tile placed along an edge of the core. The resources of these central tiles will certainly be hotly contested between the players, and this may drive you to explore new regions in search of an advantage against your opponents. Whenever you’re going to move a caravan or an army, if that figure is on the edge of the map and on a tile with a capital city, you can spend one space of movement to explore instead—pulling a new map tile, attaching it to your edge, and making your world that much larger. 

By moving from a tile with a capital city, this army can explore, adding a new tile to your map!

With your world becoming larger than you ever thought possible, it only makes sense that this expansion introduces a fifth player to share your world with. Terra Incognita includes everything you need to add a fifth player to your games of Civilization: A New Dawn, unlocking new layers of strategy and complexity to your centuries-long journey to establish your empire.

It’s not just a fifth player that you have to share your world with, however. There are now ten new leaders that you can play as, more than doubling the number included in the Core Set. You may play as Indonesia, using your extraordinary jongs to let your caravans and armies move across the water spaces of the map. Poland rewards you for leaning heavily on diplomacy, whereas the Zulu leader rewards you for pushing your advantage in combat. With ten new leaders included in Terra Incognita, you’ll find ten new ways to play the game, and a new unique focus card for every leader helps define your unique strategy even more.

The Districts of Your City

Not every new addition to the game in Terra Incognita pushes you into the great unknown swathes of the map. Many new mechanics, such as districts and governments, push you to focus more on what’s going on inside your own civilization.

It all starts with the new growth focus card. Every player starts with Irrigation as a new option on their newly extended focus bar. With Irrigation, you can reinforce your control tokens to bolster your defenses, but more importantly, you can use this focus card to place a district on a space adjacent to one of your cities!

There are five districts that you can choose from, and each one boosts your civilization in a unique way, provided you’re able to place it near the right terrain. A campus will enhance your scientific endeavors, a commercial hub can support your economy, while an encampment could defeat rival armies and barbarians or reinforce your defenses. An industrial zone can build cities or support your industry focus card and a theater square extends your control over more and more of the map.

These districts bring an undeniable advantage, but they can’t be triggered at the drop of a hat. A redesigned event dial now features the district icon, allowing you and your opponents to trigger all of your districts whenever this icon is selected. These reformed event dial also indicates when players can use another new addition to the game in Terra Incognita: changing their form of government.

Selecting your form of government is a crucial new addition with this expansion, and it has the potential to make your focus cards much more powerful. Depending on the government that you choose, you can resolve a specific type of focus card as if it were further to the right than it currently sits on your focus bar. To give a few examples, Democracy rewards you for devoting yourself to the sciences, while an Autocracy is ideal for military endeavors, and Communism lets you pour your energy into industry. You must choose carefully, however, because you cannot change your government at will—only when the event dial shows the designated icon.