International Red Cross



Cost: 3/3/3/3/3 food

Other player may also work on this wonder. Unlike you, they are limited to 1 stage per turn.

For each stage, the player who build it immediately scores 6 culture.

When completed, you score 1 culture for each colony in play.

Red Cross in History
The Red Cross wonder represents humanitarian organisations as such. We picked the Red Cross because it is the most iconic of them, existing for over a hundred and fifty years. The organization’s main purpose upon inception was to provide relief to those affected by war conflicts, and to reduce wartime barbarity and war crimes. Today, the Red Cross, and many other organizations with a similar agenda, provide humanitarian help for countless masses of people around the world.

The Red Cross represents a movement that is removed from political squabbles, and focuses on the humanitarian problems at hand.

Designer's Note
The special building rules represent both the internationality of the wonder and the fact that you need rather basic resources and a lot of good will to create something like this. The culture points mostly come from the pure fact it was even possible. Some extra points come from the number of colonies – these represent poor countries that need help the most.

I toyed with an idea that some wonders may be built by something else than resources for a long time, but it had a big impact on the game balance. In the end, we made just this one, as an interesting exception.

It may be weird why we picked two completely unique elements (food cost, and shared building) for one wonder, but it has some good reasons. Imagine more players are building up their agriculture, prepared to build the Red Cross wonder. When it appears, only one of them is able to grab it. The other ones now have lots of surplus food –they can spend at least some of it by helping to build the Red Cross.

Well, while the theme is cooperative, in the game, Red Cross represents a new type of competition. There are lots of points for building this wonder, and you usually do not want others to take credit for your wonder. In a two-player game, the competition is smaller – but there is usually also less colonies, so the reward for the builder is smaller than with higher amounts of players.