Sovereign, an “open source” board game project from Ruben Hopmans, is a fairly abstracted civilization building war game. Build your cities and armies, advance your technologies, and attack other people. First to 7 points of one type (military, expansion, technology) wins.

The game was inspired by tinkering with Risk, but more resembles Civilization meets Antike. Still, combat is a series of unit combinations and dice rolling, so it’s not too Euro.

“Open source” in this case means free to print and play, shared under a creative commons license, and some of the evolving game rules and maps were suggested by others. And you are encouraged to play around with unit strengths.