How to play 7 Wonders

7 Wonders is a civilization-building card game where every player simultaneously constructs an ancient city across three historical ages. The twist is that you never wait for a turn — all players pick and play cards at the same time, keeping even a seven-player game running in about thirty minutes.

Your city grows along multiple tracks: raw materials and manufactured goods fund your construction; military strength protects you from your neighbors; science generates exponential points; grand civic structures and guild halls pile on victory points. Threading all of it together is the Wonder board unique to each player, offering powerful staged bonuses that can anchor any strategy.

Never drafted cards before? The loop is this: you hold a hand of seven cards, keep exactly one, and pass the rest to your neighbor — who is passing their leftovers to you at the same moment. Six picks later the hands are gone and the Age ends. Every hand you receive is one a rival already picked over, so drafting is two decisions in one: what helps your city most, and what you refuse to hand to the player beside you.

What's in the box, and what each piece does at the table:

• 7 Wonder boards (double-sided) — your personal city mat. The top-left corner shows a resource your city produces every turn for free, and the two to four stages across the board are built with drafted cards for escalating bonuses. Side A is the simpler face; side B is for veterans.
• 7 Wonder cards — shuffled and dealt at setup to randomly assign each player a board, and which side of it to play.
• 49 Age I cards — the first draft: cheap resource production plus the earliest military, science, civic, and trade buildings. Many cost nothing at all.
• 49 Age II cards — stronger versions of everything, with costs that now demand a real production base or good trading relationships.
• 50 Age III cards (including the 10 purple Guilds) — no resources anymore: big point cards, heavy military, and the Guilds, which score off what you and your two neighbors have built.
• 42 Conflict tokens — the military score: Defeat tokens worth −1, and Victory tokens worth +1, +3, or +5 depending on the Age in which they're won.
• 50 coins (30 of value 1, 20 of value 3) — pay coin costs and buy missing resources from your neighbors at 2 coins apiece; every 3 leftover coins are worth 1 point at the end.
• 1 score booklet — a column-per-category pad for final scoring, which touches seven different sources.
• 2 "2-player" cards (Border and Free City) — used only in the expert two-player variant, in which both players also take turns running a shared neutral city.

Each Age is six turns of simultaneous drafting, and every turn has the same shape:

1. Pick a card. Everyone examines their hand privately and places one card face-down in front of them.
2. Reveal and resolve, all at once. Do exactly one thing with your card: build the structure (pay its cost — see below; you may never build a structure you already own); build a Wonder stage (tuck the card face-down under your board, pay the stage's cost printed on the board, and take that stage's bonus — stages go strictly left to right, each buildable once per game); or discard it for 3 coins from the bank.
3. Pass the hand. Give the remaining cards to a neighbor — left in Ages I and III, right in Age II. On the sixth turn you receive two cards: play one, and the leftover is discarded with no coins for anyone.
4. End of the Age: war. Compare your total shields against each neighbor separately. More shields — take that Age's Victory token (+1 in Age I, +3 in Age II, +5 in Age III). Fewer — take a −1 Defeat token. Ties award nothing.

Paying costs is where new players stumble, so three rules matter. First, resources are never spent: your city's production simply has to cover the cost, and it refreshes every turn. Second, some cards chain — if you own the building named in the corner, the new card is free. Third, resources you lack can be bought from either neighbor's brown/gray cards at 2 coins each (certain yellow cards drop it to 1); neighbors can never refuse, selling doesn't stop them using the resource themselves, and coins earned this turn can't be spent until the next one.

The card colors carve up the strategy space. Brown and gray cards produce raw and manufactured goods. Blue cards award flat victory points. Red cards add military shields. Green cards collect science symbols that score on an escalating scale. Yellow cards mint coins and cheapen trade. Purple Guilds (Age III only) score off your neighbors' cities.

One Age I turn, all at once. Ana reveals the Baths and pays its cost — 1 stone — with the stone her Wonder board produces. Beto reveals the Guard Tower (1 clay) but produces no clay, so he pays Carla 2 coins for the clay her Clay Pool makes; Carla keeps using that clay herself, since selling never blocks the owner. Carla tucks her own card face-down under her Wonder and pays the first stage's cost from her production. Diego discards a military card he'd rather nobody had and takes 3 coins. Then every hand slides one seat to the left and the next pick begins.

The game ends after the sixth turn — and the final war — of Age III. Then total your points across seven columns:

• Military — the sum of your Conflict tokens, which can be negative.
• Treasury — 1 point per full set of 3 coins.
• Wonder — the points printed on your completed stages.
• Blue civic cards — flat printed points.
• Green science — square the count of each symbol (1/4/9/16 points for 1–4 copies), then add 7 points for every complete set of three different symbols.
• Yellow commercial cards — a handful of Age III yellows score points.
• Purple Guilds — score off what you and your two neighbors built.

The most points wins; ties go to whoever holds the most coins, and a tie on coins is simply shared.

Scoring is deliberately multi-dimensional so that no single strategy dominates. Pure science can explode — the squares-plus-sets math rewards committing hard — but a military-and-coin neighbor can bleed you through trade and cheap shields. Most winning cities combine two or three complementary tracks, anchored by their Wonder's bonuses and a guild or two sniped in the final Age.