Players: 2-5
Playing Time: 60-90 minutes
The Components
As is typical with Days of Wonder games, this one is lavishly produced:
The Game Boards: Small World comes with two separate double-sided game boards (for a total of four). There's one for each player count, from 2 to 5. I've never seen anyone go to this amount of trouble to ensure that the game's always balanced, and my hat is entirely off to Days of Wonder as a result.
The game boards all are linen-textured cardboard, showing off a variety of regions, all hand-drawn but colored to show their type: mountain, hill, swamp, field, or water. The art is very attractive, but as I'll get to, it gets to be too much with all of the other attractive bits you can stack on it.
Cardboard Bits: The game is filled with cardboard bits. This includes 109 victory-point coins (in four different denominations and colors), a variety of bits which go on the board, 34 cultural identifiers, and 186 race tokens. The last three all deserve some additional discussion.
Board Bits. The pieces that go on the board include troll lairs, fortresses, encampments, and halfling holes. They are placed in regions and they make it easy to determine the defense of regions because you just count the cardboard bits. However, I've left out the fifth board bit: mountains. You put mountain cardboard bits on the board in the mountain regions, so that you always remember that mountains increase the defense of the space by one. It's a great usability option--except for the fact that the mountains are big enough that if they get knocked around, they obscure other facts on the board.
Other than that one problem, all of these bits look good and are good quality.
Cultural Identifiers. These determine the abilities of each race in the game. They're cleverly set up as 14 race "banners" and 20 special power "badges". You link a badge with a banner and you have the cultural identity of a race.
They work great any way you measure them. They're attractive. The iconography on them is both consistent and easy to use, to the point where someone who's read the rules should be able to make out 80-90% of the powers at first glance. Finally, they add great color to the game, as each special power lists an adjective and each race lists a noun, so you can have "Hill Elves", "Flying Ghouls", "Seafaring Giants", and "Heroic Ratmen".
Race Tokens. These are the pieces that the players move around the board. Each one depicts one unit of the race in question on a little square chit.
You know what race you (or anyone else) is controlling by looking at the race banner sitting in front of them. It's a little indirect, but simple to assess. However it connects up with that usability problem that all of the artwork on artwork generates, which I'll get back to shortly.
Die: You get one simple wooden die.
Box: The box deserves special note for two reasons.
First, it includes a little plastic container for all your race tokens. The container even has a snap-on top that will keep all your tokens in place once you've closed it up.
Second, the rules contain some instructions for how to set up your box so that all the other bits (coins, board bits, racial banners, and special power tokens) don't go all over when you put your box on its side. This is something else that I haven't seen other publishers do. The rules offer advice that I've seen suggested by fans in board game forums. They say that after you punch out all the cardboard bits, you should take the remaining frames and place them under the plastic tray that lines your box. Then, it says you can put the box on its side without problem.
So, I took them at their word. I arranged everything as indicated, put a super rubber band around my box to keep it shut, jammed it in my back pack and biked 5 miles. When I got to my favorite local game store, every single piece was still in place. Same deal on the way home. Though I find the idea of storing all the cardboard frames ultimately inelegant, I have to give Days of Wonder serious kudos for both considering this issue and coming up with an answer that works.
OK, now let me step back to my meta-issue with the components. As I said earlier, stacking the attractive and colorful race tokens on top of the attractive and colorful board causes problems. Everything starts to get muddier than it should and harder to make out. The worst problem comes about when you try and count your victory points, which requires counting all of your tokens. You have to be really careful, and it's easy to miss some if you had a power that let you spread out like "Flying" or "Underground".
I'd seen some complaints about this issue on other forums, and I'd thought at first that it was just people not liking the fact that you have to work to make out which bits belong to which players, but it goes beyond that; the game is genuinely slowed down by the muddiness of all this combined artwork.
A relatively easy solution to the worst of the problem is to get 20-25 colored tokens for each player and mark all their bits. It's inelegant, but it works.
Overall, the game is still entirely playable despite the several usability problems caused by the clashing artwork, the lack of player markers, and the overly large mountains. However, they're notable enough that I'd probably drop the Style from "5" to "4" because of them. That is, I would if this release didn't also include some really innovative things that are in advance of the rest of the industry, like the multiple boards and the careful attention to keeping your bits from going all over.
Thus I've let Small World eke in a "5" out of "5" for Style. It's surely beautiful and well-produced with some great innovations.
The Game Design
The object of Small World is to earn the most victory points through the control of territories over the course of the game. The catch is that you won't be able to do so with just one race. Instead, you'll need to play 2-5 different races over the course of the game to optimize your points.
Setup: Lay out the game board and place a mountain on each mountain space. Place "Lost Tribe" markers on the board as indicated. (These are starting pieces that make it harder to initially take over some territories.)
Near the board the six possible races are revealed by putting 6 special power badges together with 6 racial banners. These combinations are placed in order, so that there's a "first" race and a "last" race.
Each player takes 5 coins.
A Normal Turn: On a normal turn a player might take the following steps:
- Select a New Race
- Conquer!
- Redeploy
- Score Victory coins
Select a New Race: This only happens on the first turn of the game and on later turns after the player has placed his previous race in decline.
The active player can select the first race from the racial queue for free, or he can take a further one by placing a victory coin on each race he skips. If someone later takes a previously skipped race, he takes all the coins that were placed on it.
When a player selects a race, he takes a certain number of race tokens for the race. The exact number is determined by values shown on the special power badge and the race banner. (Generally, the better the abilities, the fewer tokens you get.)
Conquer!: You'll start each turn with a number of race tokens in your hand. For your first turn, that's all of the tokens you just got for the race. For later turns, you pick up pieces from the board, leaving just one in each space.
You can now use those tokens to attack a new region. On the first turn you're using any race, your first attack can be to any region adjacent to the edge of the board (or to an exterior sea), but later on you must attack adjacent to existing units.
There's very little randomness in Small World. You taken a region by paying 2 race tokens + 1 race token per mountain, opposing race token, or other defensive piece on the space. You place those tokens you spent in the space you're conquering, and your opponent is forced to take his pieces off the board. He loses one and gets to replace the rest at the end of your turn.
The Last Conquest. At the end of a series of conquests, you might not have enough pieces to attack another province. You can then declare one final attack, and roll the "reinforcement" die. If the number of chits shown on the die plus the number still in your hand is enough to take the region, you do!
Redeploy: At the end of your turn you can rearrange your race tokens as you see fit, as long as you leave at least one on each space.
Score Victory Coins: Now you score your victory points. You get 1 coin per space you control (plus, possibly, others due to special powers, which we'll return to momentarily).
After that, it's the next player's turn.
A Decline Turn: Instead of taking a normal turn and doing all the above, you can instead take a "decline" turn. This means that you flip over your race banner and special power badge, losing some or all of the powers for that race. You also decrease the number of your declining race's tokens in each region to 1, and flip over those remaining tokens to mark that you're in decline.
If you had any previous races still in decline, you discard those entirely.
Now you score your declined race as usual. You're going to get to keep scoring all of your declined markers for every turn they survive.
On the next turn, you get to select a new race at the start of your turn (and having two races around, your current race and your decline race, both of them scoring points, is why you want to go into decline in the first place).
The Special Powers: Each race typically has two special powers, one for their special power badge and one for their race banner. These do a variety of things, and are what really make the game work. Some give extra victory points for certain terrains, while others make certain terrains easier to conquer. Some give you various defensive markers to put on your terrains. Finally, some modify individual rules for that race. For example, the elves never lose their race tokens when they lose terrain, the ghouls don't discard extra race tokens when they go into decline, and the stout special power lets you go into decline at the end of a normal turn.
Ending the Game: The game ends after a set number of turns determined by the number of players. The player with the most victory coins wins.
Relationships to Other Games
The game system used in Small World was previously used in Vinci, a 1999 release by author Philippe Keyaerts. Though the system in its original release was clever, it had some sharp edges. The worst problem was that with open scores, there was considerable opportunity for king-making in the final rounds. Counting up the tokens required to conquer territories was more complex and there was considerable more opportunity for an overpowered race because anything could be linked with anything. I really liked Vinci but considered it flawed (mostly because of the kingmaking). Every problem I had with Vinci has been resolved with Small World, and I'd go further and say that every game mechanic change from Vinci to Small World was a good one.
I'm a bit more indifferent to the graphical changes. This version looks considerably nicer than Vinci, but it also introduces some usability muddiness which can slow gameplay down, as I discussed earlier.
(To date I'd played Vinci 8 times and Small World twice, and I'm pretty sure that I'm going to be getting rid of my copy of Vinci in the near future, despite the fact that I like its historical setting.)
Small World is one of just a few games that track the rise and fall of civilizations over the course of a war game. The most famous is probably History of the World, but unlike HoW, Small World can be played in a reasonably short amount of time: an hour or an hour and a half.
The Game Design
At its heart, Small World is a war game, but it's a pretty uniquely European design of a war game, which means that considerable more thought has gone into polishing the game system ... and I think it really shows.
The combat system is fast and simple and it's also luckless (other than the use of that reinforcements die, which was another new addition for this edition, and I think one that was intended to stop players from obsessively using their troops perfectly). That combines well with simple defensive rules of the game: essentially, every piece of cardboard on a space increases the cost to take it by one.
The rise-and-decline system that underlies everything is what really raises the game up to the next level. It very cleverly limits your expansion (because you need more units to take a territory than you need to hold), but does it in an organic way that you scarcely notice. Then it introduces a whole new decision point into the game: when you need to push out your old civilization and start a new one.
Overall, I think Small World is one of the best war games you're going to find in a 90-minute package, and it's only been improved in this latest release: I've given it a full "5" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
Small World is a great short war game with an innovative system of cycling through different civilizations and a nicely polished game system. Other than some art annoyances, this new edition is the best ever of the system.
