Hello my name is Pedro, whanted to let you know I am happy to see that the work one day began in Valencia is still Growing.
Ok lets explain back in the mid 80´s I joined a Game Club in Valencia known as Club Dreagnought www.clubdreadnought.org (stil belong to it) besides playing AH games wich we enjoyed much the people talked about history and other afears, Our president was Gerardo Rodas Cordon, we where about 20 and in the weekends we used to join about 8 to 10 people to play social games, Civ was one of our best but from time to time some people had to be left of the game because we where to many, so Gerardo decided to expand the game based on adding Spain. Why not, we are spanish and live in the shore of the mediterranean sea.
The expansion was wellcomed cause it allowed 2 more friends to play.
After that we found the problem in the game still existed and adding two more players made that trading cards where reduced for all, so we just adedd a second group of cards, and some other disasters to the deck and other civ cards.I remember playing some sundays as much as 9 or 10 people in the club shouting during the trading phase (lots of lauths).
After that came the expansion of the near east and India and a bit of playtesting.
I also remember a going to a game convention in Barcelona so we could present the people of spain our design (we made a nice map better than the one we used to play wich was a bit degraded of playing in it the night before the departure to Barcelona. We spend all night long with color pecils so the map was really nice). in the convention we meet some nice people including the director of the Alea magazine wich was impresed about our ideas and made a copy for himself and to showing to the people of AH, wich it looks like they liked because after that they made the expansion of spain and added much of the ideas we had developed, but the expansion to India was discarded by them and published in the Alea magazine.
I may find some of the old maps (in the old AH Civ style), cards, or rules we made back in the 80´s to prove this if I can find them, and if I have time post other ideas we had. Cheers

Hi Pedro

Great story. I'm interested in looking at first idea's and how it worked out.

Is there any connection between your group and this project? Or did those expansions just develop differently?

there is no conection betwin this proyect and the development we did, think that back in the 80´s there weren´t computers we did from scratch it is posible that other people were working on a similar ideaw in USA or other places, even maybe the idea reached AH and began his own expansion, who knows.