Small World
2-5
8+
40+
Small World is a zany, light-hearted civilization game in which 2-5 players vie for conquest and control of a board that is simply too small to accommodate them all! Picking the right combination of fantasy races and unique special powers, players must rush to expand their empires - often at the expense of weaker neighbors. Yet they must also know when to push their own over-extended civilization into decline and ride a new one to victory.
image © Days of Wonder
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A new land awaits, ripe for colonization. It has everything a people looking for a new land could possibly want; prime farmland, rolling hills, lush forests, mountains that touch the sky, even a native population to eradicate.
Yes, a great new land to explore and exploit. So great, others have found it and want a piece for themselves as well. Sadly, it’s a Small World, and there just isn’t enough for everyone…
Welcome to Small World, a game for 2-5 players. The ultimate goal of the game is to be the player with the most victory coins at the end of the game. To accomplish this, you will lead your chosen race to take as much territory as possible in the Small World, and hold it as long as you can. That is, at least, until your chosen people just are not making you rich enough, so you abandon them for a new people to lead.
To begin, lets take a look at what you get for your money.
2 game boards, double sided
35 cardboard game pieces
14 cardboard race banners, double sided
20 cardboard power badges, double sided
109 cardboard victory coins
1 cardboard game turn marker
1 custom six sided die
168 cardboard race tokens
18 cardboard lost tribe tokens
1 rule book
6 player reference sheets
Everything seems made well enough, as in my house the components have all stood up to many plays with minimal wear. I am not a fan of the plastic cartridge that the game comes with. It is sturdy enough, and keeps all those race tokens in place, but it is a pain to get the suckers out. Some small Ziplocks or coin envelopes would possibly be a better fit. I remove the plastic mold that holds the rest of the bits and put them in Ziplocks to get things in and out easier.
OK, so, as outlined above, there is a bunch of stuff in the box. What are we going to do with all of it? The first thing to do is determine how many players you have. One of the great things about this game is that there is a different board for 2, 3, 4 & 5 players, guaranteeing that carnage will commence during the course of the game. Pull out the proper board and turn to the proper side, and begin by giving 5 victory coins, all ones, to each player. Mix up the race banners and lay out six of them on the side of the board, and determine which one will be first. Then mix up the power badges and put one with each race banner. These will be your starting race/power combinations.
Each race has its own unique ability. Humans, for instance get extra victory coins for each piece of farmland under their control. Tritons need less troops to take territory adjacent to a lake or sea. Trolls get a lair placed in every territory they take, making it harder for other players to take that territory away.
The power badges grant similar boons. Some add victory coins either right away or each turn based upon certain conditions, some make it easier to take territory, some make it harder to let others take it away. Every game you will have different race/power combinations available, so every game will be different.
Put the Lost Tribe tokens on the board where marked, and mountain tokens on the mountains (if you want) and put the game turn marker on one. Determine who goes first (the game recommends whoever has the pointiest ears, but whatever)and get ready to play!
The first player is going to look over the available race/power combinations and decide which they want. If they want the first one, they just take it. If the want the second, they need to put a victory coin on the first and take the second. If they want the third, put a coin on the first and second… I think you get the idea. Move down the rest of the combinations to fill in the hole and put a new combination in the sixth slot.
The first player then takes the appropriate number of race tokens, determined by the number on the race card added to the number on the special power badge. These will be the available units you control while using this race. There are a couple of races who can add to the number as you play, but, for the most part, this is what you get.
Unless you are flying, you choose a spot on the edge of the map or shoreline and take over that spot. Essentially, the way it works is a completely empty piece of territory will take two units to conquer. Mountains take three. If there is anything or anyone occupying a territory, it takes one more unit than two for each thing occupying it. If the territory is occupied by a lost tribe, it takes three. If there are two units belonging to another player in a territory, it will take four. Two Amazons and a fortification? That will be 5. You continue conquering land until you do not have enough units to continue. Should you have one left in hand, you can roll the reinforcement die. There are four different symbols on this die, none (or lack of symbol I guess) 1, 2 & 3. If the roll shows enough pips, added to the units in hand, to take a territory, you get to take it. If not, then those units are just used as reinforcements. Now, you count up how much territory you own, and claim one victory coin for each piece. Then you add any bonuses.
You can now reinforce your territory. You can put as many tokens as you like on each piece of land, just so long as you leave at least one on each one. If you have a piece of territory that gives you a bonus, you would want to move more units there if it is in jeopardy of being attacked by another player. This will now end your turn.
The next player looks at the available race/power combinations and once again chooses which to take, paying for ones beyond the first in line just as the first player did. Play continues as it did for the first player. The second player could either take a different side of the map, or jump right in slaughtering the first player. The choice is theirs.
If a player successfully attacks another player, then the attacked player will permanently lose one unit. If there were units beyond the one they lose in the territory, they may hold on to those units until the reinforcement phase and put them where they like in territory they still hold.
As the game progresses, and players begin to engage one another in battle, the number of units you have available will begin to dwindle. There comes a point where you are losing territory with no way to reclaim it. What do you do? Abandon those useless creatures you once found favor with! At the beginning of your turn, you may declare that you are going into decline.
When going into decline, you turn over your race banner and power badge. Most races loose all of their powers, abilities and/or bonuses when in decline. You will take all but one unit from each territory you still control, and turn over the remaining unit in each to show the race is in decline. You will still get victory coins for each piece of territory your race in decline holds, but they cannot take any more (well, unless they are ghouls)
On your next turn, you will choose a new race/power combination as you did on your first turn. Then you enter the land as your predecessors did and claim as much as you can.
Each time the first player begins their turn, they move the game turn marker to the next turn number. Once turn 10 is complete, the game is over, and whomever has the most victory coins wins.
So, that is Small World in a nutshell. With the race/power combinations changing every game, every game is going to play out very differently. I really like that the game uses a different board for each possible number of players, so if people want to play the game, you never have to say that the game isn’t really good with x amount of players.
There are some bogus race/power combos, like Merchant Dwarves (they get a whole 5 units) but there are always enough combinations available that something should be useful to anyone. Strategy comes into play when presented with a combo that may get additional victory coins for holding certain types of territory. You will have to look at the map and see how hard it would be to get a hold of the most of that type. Some races/powers get bonuses for every territory they took that had something in it to kill. How tough a nut is your opponent to crack right now? Do they have a race in decline just waiting to be annihilated, or does every territory they hold have 3 units in it? There is enough thought that goes into the game that I do not get bored, but not so much that if the folks I am playing with have had a bit to drink, they don’t stand a chance. Added to this, this is my wife’s favorite game, so I get a good bit of use out of it.
All in all, while it may indeed be a Small World, there is room in it for me, and if you like what you see, there is room in it for you too.
Basic Idea: You control a series of fantasy inspired races with special powers as you quickly gain power, spread yourself too thin, go into decline and take up a new race. It’s “Risk-Lite” with a supernatural twist that keeps the game fun and lighthearted.
Game Play: Powers are randomly matched with races at the beginning of the game. Players take turn making their first choices for the species they plan on sponsoring first. Races include all the fantasy favorites, such as elves, dwarfs, rat men, wizards, amazons and plain ol’ humans. Meanwhile some of the powers you might get include flying, seafaring, berserk and dragon tamers. Each player gets a handy cheat sheet that explains each race and power as well as the turn set up and types of land available. The sheet is a little too large to sit in front of you, but very in depth. On a players first turn, they’ll choose their race/power combo, get the amount of race tokens according to that combo and start placing them on the game board, with the goal of getting at much land as possible. In order to take over a piece of land, you need at least two tokens, plus one for every mountain, race token, lost tribe or “piece of cardboard” already on that spot. When you run out of tokens, your turn is over and it’s the next player’s turn. You collect a victory point for each piece of land you occupy plus bonuses for your race and power. When your turn comes around again you can pick up all your pieces but one for each piece of land and start expanding again. You can keep doing this for as long as you want, but when you run low on tokens or get bored with your race, you can go into “decline”. Your race looses its power and you can’t expand, but you get a whole new race to play with. Sometimes you can even go into decline 3-4 times in a game. The amount of rounds changes based on the number of players, but once you reach the last round, the game is over and players count up their victory points. The one with the most points wins!
Thoughts: When I first started Small World, I loved it. I was definitely my gateway game. I loved the fantasy theme and the different boards for the number of players. And the expansions were great as well. But over time it’s definitely lost its luster. If other people want to play, I definitely will, but I won’t go out of my way and won’t request to play it. It’s a wonderful gateway game though and I would really recommend it for new gamers or people who thought Risk was too long and didn’t have enough rat-people.
One of the best things about SW is that it comes with 4 different boards. There is a board for 2 players, for 3, for 4, and for 5. This is what makes the game fun for any of those combinations of players. The board never feels too big with few players, or too crowded with 5. Don’t get me wrong though, it does get crowded, but the right type of crowded.
In SW, there are a collection of “Adjective” or “Power” cards that get randomly grouped each game with the different armies. This makes every game unique! Some games you might have an army of Beserk Skeletons that grow in size very quickly, and the next SeaFaring Skeletons that really stay out of the way.
A simple version of the gameplay goes as follows. A player selects the army they want to use. They conquer regions on the map using their armies until they can’t conquer anymore. They get victory points for each region they now have. They move their troops around until they are happy with their positions in the regions they now occupy, and then they end their turn. A turn typically takes around 30seconds to a minute. There is no rolling dice (with a few small exceptions) to determine who wins in combat. The game just flows.
If at any point you feel your army are no longer useful to you, or have reached their prime, you can put them into decline. You essentialy lose control of the army, but still score points off them. At the start of your next turn, you can then select a new army and carry on conquering lands.
Certain armies and powers can help you gain victory points in different ways. Each player is provided with a reference page that details each army and each power. This really helps the flow of the game as players don’t need to disturb others to figure out what their armies can do. I’ve found that even 8 year olds learn this game within a single turn due to the simple nature of it and the wonderful aide the reference sheets provide.
Don’t be fooled by the simple mechanics, though, as SW is full of strategy. Deciding exactly when to go into decline as well as to which armies to choose can have huge consequences. SW rewards skill over luck every time, and I’ve found the same few people win this game every single time because of great strategy.
SW is the perfect mix of light-hearted war-gaming on a board that is easy to learn and deceivingly complicated at the same time.
I recommend SW to any family looking for a fun relaxing board game as well as any gamers out there looking for a game to get your non-gaming friends into board gaming. Pick this one up, you won’t be disappointed!
Two to five players, well-balanced for all.
About an hour-and-a-half to play, depending on the number of people (more people, more time).
I’m always looking around for good strategy games. I love to play them, but I’m terrible at them, so I’m trying to find one that I don’t always lose. I also play most of my games with only a single other person, whether my wife or a friend over for the evening. Strategy games almost always need a third player to hold the game’s triangular shape, which makes it complicated. Risk, for example, places neutral pieces on the board if you’re playing with two.
Small World fills my constraints wonderfully. There are multiple boards for rebalancing from two to five players. There’s a huge amount of replay value in the mix of races and classes you can choose for your armies. There’s an automatic neutral army mechanic that allows two players to play an interesting game. There’s an ingenious catch-up mechanic based on dwindling resources that makes for interesting decisions throughout the game, as well. I’m slightly ahead of myself, though.
The game plays like Risk, with several major differences.
First, attacking is a simple comparison, with at most one die roll. As in Diplomacy, whoever has the most units wins, but Small World also allows you to roll a die to add a random number of units to your attack. (EDIT: Most of the time, you can only roll this die on your last attack, and then only if you don’t have enough units to succeed without it.) This means that each turn moves fast, as most of the time is spent deciding where to send your units, and not resolving a dozen die rolls over a single attack.
Second, your army has a race and a class, which you get to choose. Races (like Elves or Humans) are paired with classes (which they call “special powers,” like Heroic, or Seafaring) randomly each game, and shuffled when you run out. Some combinations are downright broken (Commando Amazons? Good night!), but they come up so infrequently as to not be a problem, and can only last a few rounds before dying out anyway. The queue of upcoming pairs is visible on the side of the board, in order. You can choose the next pair in the queue for free, but must pay one VP for each pair you choose to skip. This balances the more powerful pairs, and also provides compensation (you get all coins paid for skipping your pair) for the person who eventually chooses the underpowered pair.
The most important difference is that you don’t get reinforcements. When you get your army initially, you have a limited number of units to use for attacking. You need at least one unit occupying an area to control it, and you get VPs based on the number of areas you control, which creates a difficult decision. See, at any time you can choose to put your existing army “in decline,” which allows you to choose a new army. However, once an army has gone into decline, they only maintain a single unit in each area, you can no longer attack with them, and you lose your next turn. This means that the choice as to when you go into decline has a huge effect on the game.
If you go into decline too early, you lose out on VPs you could have gotten by expanding farther, because any extra units you’re using for defense go away. If you go into decline too late, you might miss a great race/class pair that just appeared in the queue. Too early, and the ratio of active turns (where you’re gaining territory) and inactive turns (where you can’t attack) starts to get low. Too late, and the amount of territory you can gain each turn diminishes to uselessness: since you don’t gain any more units to attack, there comes a point where you cannot gain more territory — diminishing returns.
The final major difference is two-fold: semi-hidden victory points and a turn limit. Recent versions of Risk have a turn limit, but the “victory points” are purely determined by the number of countries controlled, which is public information. Small World’s victory points are semi-hidden, by which I mean that you have a stack of them on the table, so people can generally tell whether you’re doing amazing or not with a glance. However, you’re allowed to hide the exact number of VPs you have, and are not required to answer any questions about how many are in front of you. This means that quite a few games end with loads of tension while people count (Dominion does this very well).
If you’re looking for a quick, lighter strategy game, Small World definitely fits the bill. I’ve never had a game last more than two hours (even when teaching it), and most are much faster than that. You can play it quick-and-dirty, just attacking where you feel, but the choice of when to drop into decline makes skill and thought a major factor in victory. Expansions provide new race/class pairs to shuffle into your set, but the base game provides enough variety to keep it interesting for a long time.
Small World is a military strategy game in its core, but outside of that grizzled interior contains a whimsical fantasy gooey shell which will have you falling in love with races like Flying Trolls, Swamp Dwarves, Dragon Master Halflings, or Seafaring Skeletons, only to abandon them halfway through the game for a completely new race. Small World doesn’t constrict you to one race like in Risk, so if you find yourself being stepped on or have stretched your troops thin, you can always put your current race into decline and start all over again! It is completely up to you as to how you play this game, just make sure that after 9 rounds you have the most Victory points!
To earn Victory points all you have to do is conquer and hold territories. When you initially choose your starting race you will be given character tokens according to the corresponding numbers on your special ability and race cards. With these tokens you will then begin your conquest. It will cost you two tokens to conquer an empty region. For every other unit on top of a region, whether it be a mountain, Lost Tribesman, or another player, it will cost you one extra token per unit. At the end of your turn you get 1 Victory point for every piece of land you own. On top of this, if your race has a special ability such as “Forest”, you get an extra Victory point for every forest you occupy. From here on out it is a mad dash to conquer as much as you can and rake in the points.
Eventually players will begin to bash heads and will inevitably start to attack each other. When you take over someone’s region they get all their tokens back except for one, which gets placed back in the game tray. This makes it so players will start to lose more and more units, thus making it harder to conquer new regions. Lose too many units and your ability to hold your regions will grow harder as well. Don’t get too attached to your races though, because I guarantee that you will go through 2-4 races per game. When you think your race has over-exhausted itself you can put it into decline. What this does is flips over all your tokens leaving one token in every region you control. You still earn points for holding these regions and on your next turn you get to start out with a whole new race and begin your bloody conquest all over again.
The best part about Small World is that every time you play it, the game changes. The races and special powers are completely random so one game you can play as the Hill Elves, then in the next game you can play as the Fortified Elves. This is the reason I keep coming back to Small World. Every time I’ve played I’ve been a different race with a different power. I’ve looked at the board in brand new ways every time I’ve played because my strategy changes with each new round. With 14 races and 20 special powers the combinations are limitless. Currently there are 4 expansions for Small World, including a stand-alone game titled, Small World: Underground, which takes the action below the surface with Gnomes, Cultists, Drow, Mummies, and many more.
Small World comes with two reversible game boards that change depending on the number of players. The two player board is half the size of the five player board to ensure that you will be at each other’s throats no matter how many players you have. Small World should take you between 40-80 minutes, is perfect for 2-5 players, and is rated Ages 8+. It has won awards such as the Meeples’ Choice Award, Games Magazine’s ”Game of the Year”, and the Golden Ace. If you are looking for a fun, strategic game to play with your friends, I can’t recommend Small World highly enough. Never has murdering Elves and Giants felt so good. Game on!
Bottom line up front: You owe it to yourself to check out a game so immensely popular and highly recommended. I thought this would be perfect for my family when I discovered it. There is great theme, it’s easy to learn, and few flaws I can identify. I think I should love this game, but so far I only think it is “pretty good” and a little bit overrated. Please don’t put too much into my rating “number” but look at my observations and see if you can get past the issues I had.
I understand it contains a lot of similarities with the designer’s previous effort, Vinci. I have not played Vinci so I unfortunately can’t help with comparisons there.
COMPONENTS: Very nice art throughout. Creatures are nicely stylized so they can be appreciated by older players and not too heavy for younger players. There are plenty of pictures and inventory lists on or linked to this site, so I’ll just give a few impressions. The best thing about this game is that the designers give you 2 double-sided gameboards. We get an optimized board for each interval of 2 through 5 players. That’s great. The head scratcher of the package is the inclusion of 2-D mountain tokens. You place those on the areas already clearly depicted as mountains on the gameboard artwork. They are to remind you that they are mountains (game implications for defensive value). They are easy to set up because the appropriate areas already look like mountains. There are no tokens to remind you that water areas are water as that would be unnecessary. No negative bearing on the game, however. You could leave them in the box. I actually appreciate the though experiment and the “just in case you wanted this, too” type of inclusion.
I believe there have been multiple designs for the packaging and insert. I think I have the newer version. I can tell you that after you remove all cards, tokens, and chits from the sheet stocks; the included insert and removable army token organizer will provide an absolutely brilliant and elegant storage solution for 93% of the games contents. You are entirely on your own to figure out what to do with the remaining 7% (and any expansions).
GAMEPLAY NOTES: “It’s like Risk, except… well, yeah, it’s like Risk.” That is how I explained this previously, admittedly tongue in cheek. The truth is that there is a lot less luck involved than risk. Attack results are often predictable. The attack value/army number needed to win a battle apparent prior to the attack and only the last attack of a player’s turn involves the rolling of custom die to what “reinforcements” are available (additional attack value). That custom die has three faces blank so 50% of the time you “are what you are”, there is also a possibility to role for an additional 1, 2 or 3 reinforcements to boost your attack value. This is nice. A little luck can be available, but not at all required. You will be rewarded for managing your armies well.
Randomizing creature race and class gives many options (280??) which add to replayability. The trade off (completely acceptable here) is that you never get excited about a particular group and personally connect with them. You go through “wealthy trolls” and “flying giants” and then “mounted ghouls” using each for your purposes and discarding them in a few turns to move on to the next random race-power combo. That’s the fun here. But if your kid just watched “The Hobbit” and wants to be the dwarves, that is not really how this game works.
The game never goes too long. There is a round counter and when you are out of innings, the game’s over. Usually 40-60 minutes. I often play with kids and reduce rounds rather than go long to give them the time they need to manage their turns. You always know how many rounds are left.
You earn VPs each round for occupying territory and applying modifiers based on race and class being used. These get tallied at the end to determine winner. The totals are hidden so you have an idea of how each player is doing, but there is no official score until the end. In 3 or 4 player games, prepare for the attempts to convince you to attack the other player. Everyone likes to let you know they are not doing well. Actually, for a number of reasons I think Small World works best as a two player game. I appreciate how this takes out that negotiating/coalition building aspect (good qualities in other games, but not always in Small World).
Personal Observation: I do wish it was more satisfying to conquer an area on the map. This is personal and hard to express, but I think the lack of either of two things makes it a less significant event. First, I’ll admit I like miniatures in my fantasy themed boardgames. If I attack your dwarves with my trolls, I’m not ashamed to say I like to see little painted creatures walking around (been painting a lot of boardgame pieces this year). Secondly, the terrain areas are very anonymous. With Risk, I could feel satisfied that I just conquered the Australian west, for example. Zero impact on gameplay, but while the types of terrain may have gaming characteristics, there is no real theme carried over to the individual pieces within that type. This is very subtle nitpicking. I am really working hard to figure out why I “only like” the game.
SUMMARY: It’s very popular. Great theme and art. My family will play it. Game time hits the sweet spot. Good value. I should love this game. It seems on paper that it was made for me. Ultimately I think it’s good in itself but doesn’t live up to all of the hype. I wanted to love this (I bought the iOS/iPad version to learn rules waiting for it to arrive). Maybe it tries too hard for me. Like that perfectly nice and attractive person that was really interested in you but you didn’t reciprocate. Their only flaw was having that much interest in you (unforgivable, really).
It is good enough for me to play through once in a while. Maybe one day it will completely click for me, too.
Regards,
I was a bit hesitant if this was a good game or not before I tried it out the first time. Territorial conquest games are not really my cup of tea, but I was really surprised in a positive way. Not only is the game very simple, they also managed to more or less completely get rid of luck. You have a bunch of tokens, and you use them to grab areas on the map. Some areas cost more people to conquer because there are more enemies, the defenders cover in mountains or something similar. Different players will gain different amount of points for different areas depending on what race/special power they play at the moment (more on that later), so figuring out how to use your forces in the most efficient way is a big part of the game. Quite often the final score can be very even (partly because this is a game that invites bashing the leader) so you really want to maximize everything.
A couple of things make this game highly dynamic and interesting:
1) Races + Special powers
You play a race combined with a specail power. This creates many more or less bizarre combinations (flying hobbits, underworld amazons or diplomatic skeletons just to mention a few odd combos). The race gives you some property (like getting extra points for fields or being really good at attacking from mountains), and the special power gives you another ability. The two also contains a number of units and these numbers added together makes up your total number of trigger happy citizens.
2) Decline
Normally you don’t get any new tokens for your race, so after a few rounds your forces have probably been a bit decimated. At this stage you can decide to abandon your race and let them go in decline. Next turn you simply grab a fresh race (with a new special power). When counting points you add the points from your active race and your old declined race (which simply stay passive on the board as long as noone attacks them). This creates some interesting choices. First of all, the optimal situation is of course to have a vital active race and a decent declined race that adds some points, But at what point do you give up your current race? It’s not fun to let them in decline, but on the other hand you may just be scoring badly and delaying the inevitable anyway. Also, if your declined race is really not helping you out, is it a good idea to let your active race go in decline to get more points? These are hard choices, and each time you let a race go in decline you miss a turn where you could have grabbed some fresh land.
3) Buying new races
The stacks of races and powers are shuffled, and a que is formed with combinations. The first in line is free to grab, but for each step up the chain you must pay one gold (victory points). Anyone grabbing a race with gold on it gets the gold, so you must really think twice if it’s worth the 6 gold to grab a really neat combination higher up the chain. Of course, if you’ve played it a few times you learn what combinations are extra good, but it’s still hard to know the optimal purchase.
The rules are very simple, but the combinations and the players choices makes the game very hard to figure out. I have no clue how the gameboard will look next turn.
I don’t think everyone will enjoy this game, but most people we’ve introduced it to have found it really fun. The artwork is great, different maps make the game scale very good for different numbers of players, and the combinations themselves always makes us laugh. I definetely think you should try it out!
Smallworld is a light hearted territory control game that uses simple mechanics spiced up with a variety of special powers and combos to keep things interesting.
The play of the game is pretty simple. On your first turn you pick a race and get some tokens to represent your troops (usually 9-10). Each race has its own power and an additional randomly assigned special power creating new combos each game. One game might have Berserk Orcs while in the next game they might be Diplomatic Orcs.
You then place tokens on board spaces to take over territory. To take over an area, you simply place two tokens + 1 additional token for every obstacle in the space (mountains, enemy troops, etc). At the end of the turn, you grab a victory point token for every space you control. On following turns, you pick up all troop tokens except for 1 on each space and continue to take over more territory.
The only additional consideration comes from going into decline. After your troops begin to get spread thin, you can choose to put them in decline. You skip a turn and no longer get to do anything with those troops but they still score points for you as long as they are on the board. On the next turn, you get to pick a new race and start taking over even more territory. You earn points for any space your active or in decline race controls.
Smallworld has several great aspects. It plays fairly quick for a territory control game and technically you can never be knocked out of the game. The race/power combos add a lot of variety to play and the fight mechanic is simple enough that my six year old loves playing this game. The first several games you play of Smallworld will prove to be a lot fun. The fun, however, doesn’t last forever.
The simple mechanics make the game easy to learn and play but also present an inescapable problem. Eventually, the races and powers begin to become overly familiar and even a bit stale. After this point, you’re left with a game that’s as complex and intricate as basic arithmetic. Smallworld plays fast for a territory control game but it still doesn’t play real fast for a game with such simple mechanics.
Smallworld is a great choice to introduce casual gamers and young family members to war gaming. It can even entertain a more seasoned gamer in short bursts. However, Smallworld doesn’t have the depth to keep a serious strategy gamer engaged for long. There are no deep strategies to discover and no advanced moves to master. Because the powers and available races are random each game, you can’t decide to try out any specific ability or combo. The play is fun, but it fades fast.
Components
Starting with the box alone the visual appeal of this game is evident from the beginning. The artwork on the box has a humorous and cartoon-esque appearance and is very well done, The overview of the game from the back of the box is sufficient to give a good sense of the game without spoiling too much before opening.
Opening the box presents you, firstly, with a couple of leaflets from the lovely Days of Wonder peeps showing some of their other products and then below these we get to the first of the main components, the instructions. They are the perfect length and well presented, only twelve pages, there is no overcomplicating of the rules which are not hard to grasp at all. There are race and power reference pages and even a diagram showing the best way to organise the plethora of tokens which lay below. Here also are five reference sheets which show turn order on one side and race/power effects on the other, my only gripe is that these are HUGE, they are almost the same width as the box itself and if all five players requested to have one, which is unlikely thankfully, then they take up more space than the board itself and my gaming table ain’t that big chaps and chapettes!
Skipping over the tokens, which are next and require popping from their frames, we find the boards. The two and three player double sided board is a single fold affair with fewer spaces for the two player side and the same for the double fold board for four and five player games. The art on them is really nice, colourful and the spaces are clearly different from each other with any icons or markers easily distinguished from one another. Both boards are of a high quality, much better than some I own but I have seen one or two better.
At the bottom of the box is a two part compartmentalised tray for token storage, one part of which is a removable tray which holds the players race tokens for easy access throughout the game without having to have the box at hand.
The trays are a necessity with Smallworld as the token count is among the most impressive I have seen. I am among those sick people who enjoy popping tokens and counters from their frames and this game was guilty of feeding that habit! There are LOADS!!! (that’s right, three exclamation marks, count ‘em) the tokens easily account for more than half the weight of the game and they are gorgeous, the artwork is extremely well done with the same humorous theme held throughout the game and they have a reassuringly sturdy feel to them even down to the noise they emit when dropped on to the board, I know it’s sad but it really is a satisfying noise!
The components alone are begging for a perfect ten and I had to really struggle to find a point to mark it down. In the end I had to settle for one minor gripe in that I would have preferred the reinforcement die to be made of plastic as the wooden one feels a little cheap compared to the beautiful bits it finds itself surrounded by (it must feel a little depressed when it considers this fact!)
9/10
Gameplay
Simplicity thy name is Smallworld!
This game is so easy to learn that my entire gaming circle had it down by the end of turn one, even my eight year old son had it learned after a couple of turns and the boy can barely concentrate on staying upright half the time!
When played with four or five players this game shines in a class all of its own, It has all of the subtle tactics and vicious backstabbing that any gamer could ever want. The joy in seeing someone take a gamble and gain control of several regions only to have the next player ruthlessly annihilate them is a joy not seen in games of a similar nature. It also helps that the random combinations of race and power means that the backstabbing often leads to a revenge play happening sooner rather than later and you never know what combo will be next from the pile. This fact also helps with the replay value. Because the races and powers are drawn from randomised piles each game you will not see the same pair drawn very often and therefore, peoples choices will differ from game to game based on their preference and the choices of other players.
The gameplay is brilliant and I can’t wait to add some of the expansions to it if only for the new races!
9/10
I’ve been playing quite a few different card/dice games lately, and as I have been introducing my wife to the wonderful world of gaming, I decided to add a little bit more to her arsenal of games by playing Small World. To be honest, this was the first time I’ve played an area management game like this and I have to say that I have had such a wonderful time playing it.
First off, I want to preamble this by saying that the edition I am playing is the iPad edition, so this review won’t touch base on the actual packaging or components of the game in and of itself, and will talk about a couple of other different things. First off, the objective. The person who has the most victory points at the end of the game wins, so its relatively simple. You gain victory points by having your race control spots on the map, each spot giving you at least 1 victory point. At the begining of the game, a race/adjective(?) in which you would then put on the board. As the game goes on and you gain more territory, you will be running out of units because you must keep 1 unit on your territory at all times and through your opponents invading your territories, so you will be able to put your race on decline. When you do this, you get to choose another race and continue.
The gameplay is super easy to understand and explain, but with lots of depth that makes it interesting. Ever since getting the game, I’ve played about 11 games of it against the ai on the Ipad so that I can get a feel for the game, and I can win only about half the time or so. The reasoning for this is through bad placement on my part, but the randomness of race/adj. makes for good and horrible pairings. There is a bit of luck in this randomness, but it offers a lot of strategy. I find one of the reasons I’ve kept playing was to see what combinations would appear.
The art in the game (from the race design to the map design) is really good. Its has a light-hearted fantasy feel to it, with some bright and cartoony colors that would appeal to some people. I can see that the art stylings may not appeal to everybody, especially for a fantasy genre, but I found it to be quite terrific to my own tastes.
My verdict? I love the game more than I thought I would actually. My first few play throughs we are a bit difficult (I got my rear end handed to me my first game) playing through it shows that it has a real intuitive play style. Its definitely a keeper game, I think. Who would I recommend it to? People who enjoy the kind of area management/strategy games like Risk would definitely want to check this game out. Its quick and easy to pick up and doesn’t take a huge chunk of time like most games of Risk I have played. People who are new to the hobby would like to check it out because its not very intimidating in the least. I think people who want a serious game would want to avoid it, and perhaps the hard core gamer wouldn’t enjoy it. The randomness found in it could possibly make them dislike it simply by virtue of the fact that you can’t plan ahead so easily. Overall, being an avid gamer that I am, its definitely a keeper and one I would love to introduce to my friends and family down the line.