Civilization VI

I have apparently already given my brief thoughts on Civilization VI back in 2016, but I figured I would do it again, now that I played a proper match to completion and got to experience the DLC as well. After all, Civilization V was not nearly as good without its DLC. I will be focusing a lot on the changes since Civilization V, as that is the closest game to it.

Civilization VI is a 4X Turn-Based Strategy game, much like its predecessor. You start off with a singular city and no idea of the world, and expand into a sprawling country, battling over your borders, your culture, and your religion, while keeping your technological progress on track, your coffers full, and your public opinion nice and tidy. Each of the listed six elements is a resource, and a victory condition, with the exception of gold, where the victory condition is instead points after a certain amount of time, if you want to enable a time limit.
Religion was added as a new victory condition, which is a welcome change. The culture tree is functionally a clone of the tech tree now, which I suppose is also nice, as it gives more options, despite being unimaginative as a clone. Diplomatic victory has been changed from public voting to collecting "good boy points", which makes it more of a race than a popularity contest, but also means it's now essentially a time victory like Points and Science.

The major change of course is the district system, and I think they went too far with it. Each district and world wonder consumes its own tile. Districts determine which buildings you can build, and wonders have restrictions on where they can be placed. The problem is that the world is crowded, and there isn't nearly enough room for all of these. I think it is a major problem, how you can really mess up your city layout by not planning ahead, or if you take someone else's city. With districts being limited by population as well, you could just get stuck, since there's no way to remove or replace districts. It adds strategic depth, I'm sure, but not enough to justify how damn frustrating it can be, and this really outweights all the small improvements they added.
But to quickly fire off a few positives as counterpoints for those who might care: Strategic resources now actually accumulate into stockpiles. City state influence is no longer decided by who's the richest, but has its own mechanic. You can't just plop a city next to someone's empire and expect it to stay up - the loyalty system ensures that large city clusters will convert owenership of any small or lone cities very near them. Great Persons (except Culture related ones) now have unique abilities instead of just being resource boosts.
Most of the rest of the game is the same though, so you won't have a fundamentally different experience either way.

Overall, I feel like Civilization VI goes multiple steps forward from its predecessor, but also as many steps plus one backward, ending at just a slightly less enjoyable experience, and that's not counting the unsightly cartoony artsyle. It's not a bad game, but I would expect something better after a decade or so. Would I recommend it? I guess if you really like Civ V and just want a slight change in scenery, but not in other cases. Just stick to Civilization V.

PS. For what it's worth, the match I played to completion wasn't actually called by the game. I had won the Culture victory, but the game refused to acknowledge it. Such a major bug has been in the game since launch.