Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 1.5 hours
The Components
World without End comes in a square box with a variety of components, pretty typical for a Eurogame:
Game Board: A four-panel linen textured gameboard depicting the 14th century town of Kingsbridge. Much like its predecessor, The Pillars of the Earth, the game board in World without End is a beautiful painted image of the village and surrounding lands, with locations in that village being used for various purposes in the game, such as holding resource markers (field, quarry, forest) and offering different opportunities for expansion or victory-point collection.
The board provides a nice focus for the game, though I find it somewhat annoying that there are many resources (e.g., wool and cloth) which don't have board positions. I've also seen new players have some problems distinguishing which icons refer to which elements on the board, mainly because there are so many of them. Fortunately, World without End is very consistent with its use of icons, which helps clarify things.
Building Project Tiles: A set of seven large linen-textured tiles which depict things to be built or rebuilt in the town. They're actually placed on the board when they come into play, which gives the board a bit of nice depth.
Player Screens: Four screens, one in each color, made out of linen-textured cardboard. These screens are made of three parts which slot together, and I don't find that as sturdy as more traditional player screens which fold. However, they serve their purpose of keeping which resources a player has secret.
Other Card Board Bits: A few of the resources in the game are marked by cardboard: piety markers, medical knowledge markers, and loyalty markers. In addition, there are plague markers and gold markers, each player gets two donation seals in his color, there are five covering tiles for marking temporary changes to the board, and there's a start-player figure. All of these elements are printed on the same high-quality linen-textured cardboard and all of them feature attractive artwork.
Wood Bits: There are a variety of colored wood bits in the game, including scoring tokens and houses for each of the players, plus wooden cubes to represent stone, wood, and metal. Three of the wood bits are a bit more creative: grain, wool, and cloth pieces that are each cut to look like a stored pack of the material in question.
Cards: There are about 100 cards in the game, all printed on glossy medium-weight cardstock. Each player gets a deck of 12 action cards; good use has been made of icons to make it clear what these cards do. Each player also gets a summary card which helpfully reminds him of certain penalties that he can incur if he doesn't meet his responsibility over the course course of the game. There are further 44 event cards, which cleverly show income and list out a special event for the turn, plus 4 chapter cards, which remind you of a list of things to do at the end of each section of the game (which I find very helpful).
Die: A wooden die; pretty standard.
Rules: The rules are split up between an 8-page rulebook and a rule sheet. They're both printed full color with lots of pictures and examples. I find it a little annoying that I have to remember to grab the rule sheet to see setup instructions, but other than that the rules are top rate.
Overall, World without End has very high-quality components, printed on good stock and beautifully illustrated with great artwork. Other than the busyness of the board occasionally appearing confusing to new players, good effort has been made to make everything usable. My niggles in this section are just that. As a result, World without End earns a full "5" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The object of World without End is to earn the most victory points--primarily by aiding building projects and helping the victims of the plague--while simultaneously meeting one's obligations to the church and the throne.
Setup: Players collect all their own bits: houses, donation seals, a scoring token, a player screen, and a deck of action cards. The game board is laid out, and the first construction project is placed on it: the bridge. A dizzying array of resources are placed on and around the board. From them, each player takes 1 wool and 2 gold. A deck of 24 event cards is made from the 44 total; they're divided into 6 cards for each of 4 "chapters".
Finally, the favor marker is placed on the favor track and the cloth space in the wool market is covered, to note that you can't sell wool at the start of the game.
Order of Play: The game is played out over four chapters, each of which contains six game rounds. A game round contains the following phases:
- Resolve the Event
- Orient the Event
- Take Personal Income
- Take Favor
- Play an Action Card
Resolve the Event: A round begin with the active player taking an event card and reading its effects. This can offer temporary bonuses or penalties to the players. It can also introduce new building projects to the board. Finally, in the latter two chapters of the game, it can add plague victims to the board.
Orient the Event: Now the active player decides how to orient the event card among four possibilities. This does two things--both based on the clever design of the card. First, it denotes a small income for each player, like 1 stone, 1 wheat, 1 victory point, or 2 coins. (Basically, income appears on all four corners of the square card, and so each player gets what's pointing to him.) Second, it determines how many spaces the favor marker will advance on the favor track, from 0-3.
Take Personal Income: Now each player takes a small, distinct income based on the orientation of the event card.
Take Favor: If the favor marker was advanced at least 1 space on the favor track, the active player gets some small additional income, or earns a few victory points if he meets a certain condition, or in a few cases can lose a coin.
(It isn't immediately obvious from this description, but steps #2-4 here form one of the very interesting, original, and tactical elements of the game. As noted, the event card determines both which incomes each person gets and how much favor is earned this turn. However, those two things are constantly fighting against each other, and everything's very constrained by how things are printed on the card. Thus the active player has to balance one thing against another--his own income against other players' income against the favor he could receive--to figure out how he wants to place the card. It can require a pretty tough decision to determine what's best.)
Play an Action Card: This is the heart of the game, in which the players take actions using their deck of action cards. Each player, starting with the active player, gets to play one of their 12 action cards and get the resultant reward. However, there's a catch: they must simultaneously discard one of their action cards. In this way, players must strategically manage their actions over the course of the six rounds that make up a chapter, removing two cards from future usage each time. The result can require quite a bit of planning.
Here's what the 12 cards do:
Building Material, Grain, Piety. These cards give you resources: wood or stone; grain; and piety respectively. The wood and stone are good for building projects, houses, and VPs, while the other two are required at the end of each chapter.
House Building, House Rent. The first card lets you build a house on "Leper Island" for 1 stone or wood and 1 gold. Each of those houses has an associated resource, such as a stone, a piety, 3 gold, etc. The second card lets you collect this "rent" from up to two of your houses.
Cloth Production, Wool & Cloth Sales. The first card lets you turn wool (which primarily appears as part of personal income) into cloth. The second card lets you sell wool for 2 gold and cloth for 4 gold.
Building Project. Each building project requires some amount of stone and/or wood to finish, as shown on the building project piece. This card lets you place up to two of the appropriate resource(s) on a project, receiving 3 VPs each.
Donation. You can spend 1 gold to make a monetary donation to a building project. When (if) it finishes, you'll then earn 1VP and some other bonus (depending on the project).
Medicine. After the black plague has appeared (halfway through the game), this card lets you heal 1 or more victims if you have sufficient medical knowledge. You earn 2 VPs and a bonus.
Favor. This lets you move the favor marker up one space and take the appropriate favor result.
Privilege. This lets you take the action from the last action card you played again.
Ending a Round: After a round is over, the first player marker goes clockwise.
Ending a Chapter: After six rounds, a chapter ends. When this occurs, the building projects are all automatically advanced a little and certain events get cleared away. More importantly, however, each player must meet certain requirements by turning in 2 grain, 2 piety, and 2-5 gold.
If a player feels to meet his requirements, he loses victory points and takes another penalty (losing a random card, a personal income, and/or an action for the next chapter)--though the additional penalty may be avoided by paying yet another resource--loyalty.
As already noted, after the end of the second chapter, plague victims start appearing in town.
Ending the Game: After the end of the fourth chapter each player should already have earned lots of points from building, from curing plague victims, from making donations, and from avoiding penalties. A few final points are awarded: 1 VP for each stone or wood and .5 VP for each money. The player with the most points at the end wins.
Relationships to Other Games
World without End definitely has a relationship with previous game, The Pillars of the Earth. I think I'd call it a thematic sequel. They're both based on books by Ken Follett, both set in the same town (if a few hundred years apart), and both are by the same designers. They also both have beautifully painted boards which are used in part for the short-term storage of certain resources.
Looking at the mechanics, they're both broadly resource-management games, where the ultimate goal is to turn those resources into victory points. They also both have notable elements of chance (drawing pawns in Pillars of the Earth, drawing and placing cards here). Returning to that beautiful board, in both games it's actually kind of abstract, mainly providing a centralized place to show a bunch of different kind of separate things you can do.
Broadly, I think both games will appeal to about the same types of players, though I think there's more opportunity for strategy in Pillars of the Earth, whereas in World Without End, there's more luck (as I'll discuss momentarily).
The Game Design
World without End has a lot of game design elements to like, and they're put together in a generally interesting way. The things that I find most unique and interesting are the ways that you deal with cards.
First, you have those Event cards that you draw every turn. The designers overloaded just enough decisions onto that one card placement and constrained it just enough to make it a sometimes difficult choice, which is always delightful.
Second, you have your own Action cards. The idea of playing and discarding one each turn is terrific. It means that you don't have to quite plan out your whole turn at the start--and in fact you'll often do better if you let your strategy evolve organically based on what resources you get during personal income--but you do have to, turn by turn, constrain your possible future choices. Again, the decisions can be quite tough.
I think the payments that you have to make at the end of each chapter also deserve some notice. This broadly falls into the "shortage" style of play which has cropped up in recent years in games like In the Year of the Dragon, Agricola, and Notre Dame. It's still quite fresh and it usually requires touch decisions. In World without End you can typically get on top of your production for your payments by the second chapter, but still it continues to be an occasional niggling problem that you must think about.
There are some resource-management and resource-usage mechanics which are pretty mundane, but which work well with all the other elements of the game. I don't see much reason to talk about them more. However, the other element that I do find quite interesting in World without End is the way that luck plays a factor.
There is certainly a lot of randomness in the game. Your personal income can either make or break your plans, and 67%-75% of the time, it's in the hands of your opponents. Similarly, which events come up can punish or benefit various strategies. However, I never feel in World without End like luck makes or breaks the game. Instead I feel like the object of the game is to try and manage this constantly changing luck. It's like riding a bucking bronco. You plan for hopeful results, then you scramble when things don't turn out as good as you might have dreamed. This allows for nice risk-reward play as well as tactical management.
My only real concern with World without End is that it does have a certain repetitive feel to it. There's depth, no doubt, but I'm not 100% certain how far it goes. Nonetheless, I managed to play and enjoy the game twice in the span of a week, and still haven't moved beyond the basic set of Event cards suggested for a first game.
Overall, I give World without End a solid "4" out of "5" for Substance: It's a good new release.
Conclusion
World without End is a beautifully produced new game of managing resources and also managing the whim of fate. Though not quite up to the depth of predecessor, The Pillars of the Earth, it nonetheless allows for solid, strategic, and fun gameplay in a somewhat similar style.
