Europa Universalis is a board game

Board game

A board game is a game which involves counters or pieces being moved on a pre-marked surface or "board", according to a set of rules. Games may be based on pure strategy, chance or a mixture of the two, and usually have a goal which a player aims to achieve...

 published by Azure Wish Editions and authored by Philippe Thibault. It covers the 1492-1792 period and allows six players to play the various powers of Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

 (Spain, France, England, Ottoman Empire, Portugal/Russia, Venice/Holland/Austria).

It was later turned into a video game by Paradox Entertainment

Paradox Entertainment

Paradox Entertainment owns rights to many intellectual properties, the most famous of which is Conan the Barbarian as created by pulp author Robert E. Howard and expanded upon by many other authors over the years. Other properties include Bran Mak Morn, Kull, Solomon Kane, Mutant, Mutant...

 under the name Europa Universalis

Europa Universalis

Europa Universalis is a grand strategy video game released on March 14, 2000 by Paradox Interactive and distributed in North America by Strategy First...

.

Description

This atypically long board game is announced with having a playing time of 360 minutes on the game box, but games typically can last for weeks (Board Game Geek estimates the playing time to be 15 days).

Material

About one thousand markers are used, as well as two 56 cm x 86 cm (22"x34") maps (one for Europe, one for the Rest of the World). The English rulebook is about 72 pages long.

Gameplay

The players have an extraordinary amount of control on what they do: economics, military, maintenance, discoveries, colonial investment. The drawback is that there is much accounting during the game (computing income, price changes, maintenance and purchases of military resources).

Official extensions

A first extension was published bringing (essentially) new rules about forts and missionaries and also a new set of objectives.

A second extension is widely circulated on the internet. It brought yet another set of rules (like palaces), including historical monarchs (with predefined characteristics) and fast combat system (that could divide by ten or more the time for one battle) and many new minor countries and counters. It was never published.

Variants

The mailing-list is quite responsive in suggestions and advices about the rules.

Two variants are quite circulated also: the event rewrite by Risto Majormaa and the Europa8 version by Pierre Borgnat, Bertrand Asseray, Jean-Yves Moyen and Jean-Christophe Dubacq (which introduces two more players, revised counters and maps, and is not finished yet). Both of these can be freely obtained either by download or by asking the authors.