One billion hours, veteran game designer Sid Meier notes in this light and enjoyable memoir, is an unfathomable length of time. And yet it took just six years for players to spend a billion cumulative hours on the fifth iteration of Meier's engrossing Civilization series, a nation-building game that has seen them shepherding their peoples from the foundation of their first city in 4000BC to an eventual victory through military, cultural or scientific might, millions of times over. What makes the Civilzation games so compelling? The fans are a cut above; I'd know as I am one of them, having racked up 530 hours on Civilization VI since I bought it at the beginning of lockdown. For Meier, good game design comes down, at its core, to a series of "interesting decisions".

Just like that, five days are gone. I fell into quite a few "One More Turn" traps over the weekend, looked up more than once to realize it was past 3 A.M., and I come before you now having made my way through three Civilization VI campaigns. I've got thoughts, both good and bad. But I'll say this up front: Civilization VI ($60 on Steam or Amazon) is better than Civilization V was at launch. Oh, the honeymoon's already worn off and people have started complaining that "Civilization VI isn't as good as Civilization V with all its expansion packs."

I should have known it'd be you, Teddy Roosevelt. I was keeping to myself, peaceably prepping rockets for Mars, and then your armada showed up. After all the gifts I sent! When you're swatting Yankee field cannons and battering rams with rockets and fighter jets, what's to complain about? I remember when we obsessed over absurdities like this in the Civilization games.

Firaxis is offering the first peek at "Civilization VI," the next chapter in the decades-old franchise that lets you play your way to global domination -- and it's coming with a major new twist. The game, in which players take on the roles of historical figures to build and expand empires, has always been densely packed -- particularly when it comes to building cities. Players have been able to stack their cities with specialty buildings like universities and monuments, but buildings have been packed together in a single tile. This adds a different dimension to creating your cities, giving players a sense of city layout and a chance to craft the character of a metropolis much more easily. With the luxury of space, you will be able to do much more focused city management, by setting up specialized districts within your city walls. You can set up a downtown, or an education district, for example.