History of the World

History of the World is a sweeping civilization game in which every player commands a different rising empire in each of seven historical epochs. An empire card determines your starting region, armies, and special character; event cards add migrations, leaders, disasters, and other one-use advantages. You expand across a world map, resolve battles with dice, erect capitals and monuments, and then score the regions where your current and earlier peoples still survive. Powerful empires are distributed through a balancing draft, so a weak position now may buy first choice in the next age. The central pleasure is continuity: Rome may disappear as an active power, yet its surviving armies and monuments can keep shaping the score centuries later. This entry covers the classic Ragnar Brothers/Avalon Hill system, not its streamlined Brief History or 2018 reimplementations.