I got Civ4: Beyond the Sword, an expansion pack for Civilizations 4. It's really neat. It comes with a bunch of new game concepts - such as Espionage, Random world events, Corporations and an early diplomatic system with the Apostolic Palace.

As has been mentioned in other reports on the game, the corporations addition is practically useless. It's so hard to get the right circumstances to make one - you need a great person, the right resources, etc. And then sometimes when you make a corporation - you can't seem to make executives for the corporation. This makes corporations the least interesting part of the expansion pack.

Espionage, on the other hand, is really fun. You can use your spies to put a city in to revolt when your troops are next door - then attack and the city has no cultural defences (in otherwords, you don't need to catapult them down to 0%). In one game I took three enemy cities in one turn doing this.

The random events make the game particularly fun and more game like - such as catching parrots in a nearby forest gives you more gold - or gases in a mine explode, destroying the mine and killing people. All kinds of interesting things happen. The random missions are cool too - such as archeologists digging up an old destroy city, or your researchers needing more libraries - or your religion people seeking a holy mountain. Very fun.

Now for the thing that just ruined two of my games - I was playing along just fine and happy, strongest civ in the game , wiping out my enemies - voting in the apostolic palace for this that and the other thing.. and I started losing the vote constantly. I had no idea why. Two games it took me - TWO GAMES, lost. Aarrgh. two games to realize that if I change to "Free Religion" then I now have no say in the Apostolic Palace, which means I can't win the vote (not enough followers of the member religion) and when I knock out the second last civ - two civs surviving means a forced diplomatic vote - I don't have enough votes - the AI wins. Arrrgh.

So, two games down the drain before I figured that one out. I won't fall for that one again. Do not switch to Free Religion until the United Nations is built if there is only one other civilization around (and may be even not then, you don't want them voting themselves the victors if there are >2 players playing still).

All in all, an excellent addition to the game.