Small World

I have just had three game sessions 3 days in a row so there is a bit of catching up to do. This review is based around Small World. Last week there were seven of us sat round the table to play games so we split into a 3 and a 4, the group of 4 chose Kingsburg whilst Joe, Wendy and I played Small World. I do not know how Kingsburg went other than everyone enjoyed the game and thus onto Small World.



Small World Box Lid



Small World is produced by Days of Wonder, designed by Phillippe Keyaerts, it is for 2-5 players aged 8 or over and plays in 40-80 minutes. The box on opening is nicely laid out with holes for everything, and a lift out counter tray. There are 2 two-sided map boards, crib sheets, 36 Board and Game Markers, 14 Race and 20 Special Power Badges, 109 Victory point chits (coins), a reinforcement die and Rules Booklet.



The Rules Booklet



Victory Point Chits, Mountains, Races and Skills Tokens

 Small World is a derivative of Vinci by the same designer which was published by Eurogames; it has been upgraded with a Fantasy Theme, had some minor but telling alterations to the rules and is now supplied with a small variety of maps depending on the number of players. These map boards show various coloured regions depicting different land types with some containing special symbols defining a power or resource base. So how does it play?

Stout Wizards (a la Pratchett?) and Diplomatic Humans (Damn Politicians!)

To start with 6 race badges are randomly picked and laid out, together with a randomly picked Special Power, the two tokens mesh together and you get a number of troops as shown in large red discs on the tokens. These troops start from a board edge and attack a chosen land space. To attack an area you place 2 troops for the land and an extra troop for each defending unit, an additional troop is also needed for attacking Mountains. Any troops in hand can go on to attack another adjacent land area in the same way. You keep going until you run out of troops. With your last attack you need not have all required troops, in such a case you can roll the die which will provide from 0-3 extra troops for that battle only. After all attacks, you count up the number of land areas you own and take that many victory points. Then the next player takes a turn. On your next turn you can choose to either take spare units back into hand and continue to expand or you can go into decline. In decline you just leave one upside down counter (they are double sided for this purpose) in each area you own and score as before. On your next turn you can choose a new pairing of Race and Special Power and attack with this new combination, you will then be scoring points with both your active empire and your empire in decline, however you may only have one declining empire.

Ratmen Counters

Counter tray

Special Tokens

The extra twists in the game are given by the race and special power badges, these may give you bonus points for owning particular land types, or bonuses in attacking, some even allow you to break some of the rules such as attacking non-adjacent areas or having more than one empire in decline. Most, but not all, powers do not work in decline. There is a fine balance in the races and special powers and it is choosing the right combination at the right time which will win you the game.

Diplomatic --- Tritons

For those who want to know about the differences with Vinci, other than the map board which for Vinci is of Europe and the Small World maps appear to be purpose built for the player numbers, they boil down to three things. The first is that in Vinci a players’ new empire may not lay adjacent to their declining empire, this rule does not exist nor is it needed in Small World. Vinci does not have a random die for the last battle, so cool calculations are required to get the best from your empire; the last is that victory points are secret and therefore there is no long winded calculations going on in the last couple of turns. These changes take it away from the “wargame” feel of Vinci into the fun family game realm and knocks about 20 minutes off the playing time.

5 Player Board

So how did our game go? Sadly for me not very well, Joe had a good game and had picked Heroic Sorcerers which he kept from start to finish, he also played an aggressive game, so I played a defensive game leaving barriers across most of the board, Wendy did not have as good a time as me, at one point she had a null turn where she could not attack or defend and so went into decline, as this was the penultimate turn she had no chance to recover either. Saying that, it was an enjoyable and fairly close game. The game was spoiled by one thing and that is the crib sheets which accompany the game. First of all they are large so take up too much table space and secondly we used them to explain our powers, but they are horribly incomplete; an example being that they state the Sorcerer can change a solitary unit of every other player in the game once per turn and misses out the all important word “Active”. In the end we ditched the crib sheets and just used the rule book.



Unuseful Crib Sheets

This game played slightly differently when I played it 2 player when I visited peter in June. Our game also played well with two different strategies going on Peter was the more aggressive attacking my active empire whenever he could and when he didn’t have the troops for this he went into decline, I on the other hand was concentrating on easy targets – empty areas or his declining empire and trying to get the most points out of an empire before declining. I won in the end. As a note Vinci does not play well as a 2 player game.

2 Player Board

The final verdict is a nicely balanced game no matter the number of players, I would say careful choosing of race and powers is very important, more so than in Vinci, it also scores over its predecessor by having a shorter playing time.