A Science victory is done by achieving 3 things: you must first launch a satellite, then land a human on the Moon, then establish a Martian colony. A religious victory comes when more than 50% of the world follows your religion. A Domination victory happens when you capture the capital of every other civilization. To attain a Culture victory, players have to attract tourists by generating high amounts of culture and tourism. Culture, Domination, Religious, Science, and Time/Score victories are all possible win conditions.
The point of the game is taking as many resources as you can get your hands on, and then building your cities to amplify those gains so that you can achieve victory, which can be done in one of 5 ways. While you're building your cities, you are also simultaneously researching different technologies which allow you to build new buildings or improve different resources. Amenities represent how happy your citizens are with your rule. Luxury resources provide "amenities" to your cities, which also helps to make them grow. Strategic resources like horses, iron, or oil, allow you to create different units and buildings that would otherwise be unavailable to you. There are also strategic and luxury resources. Production allows you to produce units and buildings faster, which can be another way to instigate your city's growth. Gold allows you to buy various units (like workers and settlers) or even buildings (which will provide even more food, gold, and production). Getting yourself more food allows you to grow your city faster because you are able to work more tiles, and it just keeps getting bigger from there. Players can devote turns to training a worker from their city in order to "work" these tiles, letting you reap whatever benefits they may bestow. There are several different types of resources on the map, and they usually yield food, gold, or production. While it can be a little daunting because there's so much to do and learn, a few minutes of reading through the suggestions of your in-game advisers (which are AIs) and experimenting with the user interface will cut that feeling of dread out and replace it with fun. In order to do this, each player starts with a settler to create their capitol city with, and the game progresses from that point on.
The gameplay stays true to the Civilization series Civilization VI is a turn-based game where players will vie over resources and land.