I grew up with Civilization, and the first one really was educational! Especially because the copy protection was “answer this question about what it says about this technology on this page of your manual in order to play.” We owned the game, but we had either lost the manual or it was too much trouble to fish it out of the box. I had the text of the technology tree memorized, knew what all the ancient wonders were (although not their history), and got pretty good at tactics/strategy. It’s a shame, really, that the later Civ games did not have the same level of educational value baked in.