Review of Small World

Small World is a snazzy lil’ board game where you try to dominate the world by conquering regions of land with a variety of fantasy races. The idea is vaguely enough like Risk that anyone familiar with that game should feel at home, but that’s not to say they’re the same game. While conquering and holding territory is the overall winning strategy in Small World, the winner is the one who has the most gold at the end of the game… and that’s not necessarily the guy with the most land when the dust clears.

To start their first turn, players begin with a smattering of gold coins. Each may then, on their turn, choose a race from an assortment of available species, represented by six random badges of thick cardboard punch-outs laid alongside the board in a line. (There are six races available at any given time, though there are about twice that all-in-all in the whole game.) If you don’t want to choose the race positioned at the top of the badge line, you may choose one further down the line, but you must pay a gold piece onto the badge of each race that you skip over.

What that means is that someone choosing a race that had previously been passed over by other players will not only get that race, but also whatever gold has accumulated on the race badge from your opponents’ coffers. In essence, it’s sometimes profitable to take a race nobody else wants, even if that race doesn’t seem very bad-ass (=cough elves cough=) . When you pick your race, you take the race badge from the series of six to put in front of you, plus you get the race chips that you’ll use to mark your territory on the board. Normally there are about ten chips, but this varies depending on the power of the race.

Every time a player chooses a race from the badge line-up, a new race is grabbed from the draw pile and placed into the sixth slot of the list, thus introducing a new race into the game.

Races include giants, tritons, humans, dwarves, amazons, halflings, several undead, and two types of spellcasters, among other things. Each race is drawn in a silly cartoonish fashion, which sets up the mood of the game. Each race has a Racial Ability, sometimes related to the terrain of the game board regions, sometimes to the profitability of the race, and sometimes offering a change to the standard rules. Orcs, for an example, gain an extra gold coin for every region they conquer each turn. Since you’re trying to rack up the moolah to win, that’s a valuable ability up front. Trolls set up cave lairs in every region they inhabit, making it harder for enemies to invade your troll-held territory. Since you earn gold for every region you control each turn, having a race that can dig in and defend your holdings will earn you money in the long run.

Each race will also have a Special Power, which is not the same as their racial ability. In a nice twist, these special powers are not keyed to specific races. The special powers are all on separate badges, and these badges are also randomly laid down alongside the races in the selection pool at the start of the game. For example, one of the abilities is “Underworld”, which allows the associated race to travel between any regions on the map that have the Underworld cavern symbol, and conquering other regions with cave emblems on them costs less. While this may sound like a stereotypical dwarf ability, because the ability cards are randomly dealt out to the races each game, Underworld walking could actually come up with any race at all. In the game we played, my giants had the ability, but in the next game we play, maybe the ratmen will have it.

After getting a handle on your troops, you’re ready to vie for control of the Small World. In another nice touch, there are actually several heavy-duty playing boards included in the core set, so smaller maps are used when there are fewer players. Each game has a pre-determined number of rounds, also based on player count, so you’re playing on a time limit. This count down has a small effect on your strategy, as you’ll see in a bit.

You launch your conquest for the turn by choosing a region. You can invade any regions adjacent to your current position(s) simply by moving the required number of race chips into the targeted area; no dice rolling or nothin’. You need a minimum of two available race chips to conquer a territory, but if there are terrain modifiers such as mountains or fortifications, you’ll need an extra chip to overcome each one of those. Lastly, if you’re invading a region currently held by an opponent, you need one chip per enemy that’s already stationed there to defeat the defenders.

So, to invade an unoccupied farmland region next to my army of swamp hobbits, I just need two available halfling tokens to move into the farmland region. Ta da, I just conquered it. However, if those same hobbits wanted to conquer a mountain region protected by a troll lair and three trolls, I’d need a whopping seven halflings to get the job done. (Two for the region, plus one for mountains, one for the lair, and three for the trolls.)

You can keep conquering until you run out of available tokens. Afterwards, you can redeploy your remaining tokens to fortify your positions against your wily opponents’ coming turns. Lastly, and most importantly, you receive gold for every region you occupy at the end of your turn; so it pays, literally, to be land-greedy and conquer-y.

If one of your lands is conquered, you discard one of your erstwhile occupying race chips from the region, but any remainder that may have been on the land get redeployed to your other territories, sort of simulating a fighting retreat. So your troops do die from combat, but not all of them at once.

Ah, but each race has a very finite number of chips, my little conquistador. Through defeats and rapid expansion, it will only be three or four turns before you’re stretched to the limits of your population resources, and your race can no longer effectively conquer even a Girl Scout troop. Like all good empires, so too shall yours end. When that happens, you can voluntarily declare that your race is In Decline. You keep one race token on each of your regions, but remove the rest (if any extras even remain). At the start of your next turn, you may choose a brand new race badge from the available series of six to begin a new campaign of conquest and looting! Woo hoo! It’s like beginning the game all over again, fresh and rested, with a new set of special abilities and powers to play with. Now, the downside is that it basically costs you a turn to go into Decline, so there’s no pillaging and raiding new regions for that turn, and your lands, having only one paltry race token left on them, are easy pickins for your foes until your new race gets onto the field of battle, but that’s the price you pay for running an expansionistic imperial regime. You can always elect to go into Decline before you’re forced to - say, early in the game, if it serves your strategic ends (maybe you just want to pick a new race that recently came out of the draw pile with a cool Special Power combo), but it’s inevitable that you’ll be retiring at least one force during the course of the game no matter what.

When the predetermined number of game turns is up, the player who’s stashed the most gold coins is the winner. It’s that damn simple.

My game group really enjoyed Small World. The trickiest part is learning the wild and multitudinous combinations of Racial Abilities and Special Powers. Luckily, Days of Wonder includes several very large, double-sided reference sheets, which list all the races, special powers, and an outline of a game turn, so everything you need to keep your armies straight is right at your fingertips at a glance.

Once you’re familiar with the power combos and turn mechanics, by, like, the second game, you can concentrate on conquest and having fun. The box says the game takes 40-80 minutes. Our game lasted much longer, but again, it was our first time playing, and some of us had never read the rules or seen the materials until we sat down to play. Once you master the ability badges and common tactics of game play, the game should really fly by in a festive blur of looting and rampaging.

I can’t say enough about the quality of material in the box. Everything is very sturdy, from the playing boards to the thick game pieces, and every piece of the game is printed in full glorious color, even the rules manual and reference sheets. There is a storage tray for keeping every one of the little game pieces in order once they’re punched out of their frames and put back into the box, which is nice. (The only negative thing I’ll mention about the game is that our race token tray was very clearly the wrong tray for this game. It was most definitely not the same tray pictured in the manual, and the tokens didn’t fit into all the spaces indicated on the diagram properly. Even when the race chips did fit into the tray slots, fully half of the slots were molded with a weird sloped or rounded bottom, so that the game pieces were tilted at odd angles, spilling over easily, and not setting evenly with the tray lid without some delicate fiddling. It was just odd. Did the storage tray to some other game get inserted into our Small World?)

Small World has a few expansions out now, and I’ve heard good things about them, so if you like the game, there’s more silly goodness to add to it. In fact, this is the second Days of Wonder game this kobold has enjoyed this spring, the previous one being Memoir ’44. I may have to keep a grog-bleary eye on Wonder’s stuff; seems like they know how to make a good game.

So what more needs be said, my little horde monger? Get out there and ransack some hill tribes! I’ll be waiting here, declining in my hammock…