Harvard College



Cost: 3/3/5

+1 culture, +3 science

Once per turn, you may play an action card you took during that turn.

Harvard in History
Established in 1636, Harvard College is the oldest higher education institution in the United States and also one of the most prestigious universities in the world. It was originally called New College and started out with 9 students and one master. Now it has 10 faculties, more than 370 thousand alumni from more than 202 countries, and the biggest academic library in the world. Among the school graduates, there are 49 Nobel Prize winners, 32 heads of state, and 48 Pulitzer Prize winners. That is quite impressive!

One of the school's best-known landmarks is the John Harvard statue, which is also called The Statue of Three Lies. The inscription states that it is the statue of the founder John Harvard and that the school was founded in 1638. But the statue is not of John Harvard! The model for the statue was a student named Sherman Hoar, John Harvard was the school's first beneficiary and not a founder, and as we already know, it was founded in 1636. Quite weird for a college whose school motto "Veritas" means "truth" in Latin, right?

And we have one more quirky fact for you. Did you know that Harvard rarely appears on TV and in movies? The school banned all commercial filming on campus in 1970 because they regularly received more than 5 filming requests a week!

Designer's Note
Harvard University was put to the game as a symbol of science and education in Age II. Its statistics and abilities are a blend of two different wonders from the little expansions to the original game. The stats are decent, and the chance to play an action card on the turn you take it may be very important, especially in the final rounds of the game. Unless you forget to use it – players learn to think a certain way during the game, and it is not easy to break those patterns just because of one card.

I was realizing it might be a controversial card for those who like to argue which university is better etc. Like “Why not Oxford, a university with much longer tradition”? However, that long tradition was the problem. Oxford would belong to Age I. And in Age I, we already have Universitas Carolina from the base game. And why is that university considered a wonder, despite not being the oldest or biggest or most renowned? Well, you know, patriotism. When creating the base game, I wanted to have something Czech there. I was considering a Czech leader - King Charles IV, the most renowned and appreciated Czech ruler, who also recently won all-nation voting for the greatest Czech of all times. (Well, even more votes went for an enlightened guy named Jára Cimrman, but he was disqualified by the jury for a puny little problem of being fictional. Czech people sometimes do not take things very seriously. Anyway, this leaves the official title of the greatest Czech of the history to Charles IV, who was in fact more Luxembourgish than Czech, but at least actually lived.)

Um, where I was? Oh, right, the universities. In the end, I chose the Charles University (founded by the ruler mentioned above) as the Czech track in the game. In the expansion, I topped that by Jan Žižka, one of the most badass… Hey, am I talking about Czech history again? Have I told you I am a bit patriotic? :) Long story short, this is why Oxford can’t be in the game.

So, those who like Harvard may be pleased by having it in the game. And those who don’t may be pleased by the fact I spent most of this text talking about fictional and historical Czech personalities instead of Harvard.