This is not civ. It doesn't pretend to be civ. If you want a week long cozy game of civ, go buy civ. Or buy it anyway and leave a long review about how it's not civ. You do you.

If you are tired of civ and looking for something different, punchy, and an hour long: buy this game. Does what it says on the box: hour long deck building 4x. Good stuff.

As someone else pointed out, "a genre mash-up that doesn't maintain the appeal of either genre"

I love deck builders. I love Civilization-type games. It turns out, however, that mixing the two is a very poor match.

The main problem is that the deck-building removes elements of choice that are pretty important for a game like this. Particularly one which is so combat-focused. It's really rough when you need to build more military units and the cards won't let you.

A secondary problem is that Hexarchy isn't a great deck-builder even without the issues of mixing it with Civ. There's little in the way of card combinations, and nature of how technology cards add lots of cards to your deck leads to large, erratic decks.