This week, Game Night takes a look at a recently released game from Days of Wonder. The game is called, Small World, and allows you to control a fantasy race through it’s rise and decline, and then move on to a new one. For the details, watch the video after the break.
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Small World is a fantasy game with a light sense of humor presented in its character art. Basically, you play a series of races attempting to control the most territory that you can with the race until it is nearing extinction or spread too thin to continue. At that point, you swap out for a new race, and continue on.
The game employs a simplistic combat system, and attempts to shift the focus of the game to the strategy element of determining when to push it and when to fold. Â It’s gameplay is easy to learn, but the strategy can be difficult to fully see. Enjoy the video, then check out the written review if you are still interested in the game.
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Gameplay
Gameplay in Small World is rather simple. A series of 6 race banners, and special power pieces will be combined to give you a unique type of race. Each race will have an ability and that will combine with the special power to give you two unique things that you will be able to do as you use the combo. As you go through the game, you will be drafting these combos in such a way that if you don’t want to take the first choice, you “buy” your way up the ladder until you find a combo you do like. With each combo you skip, you give up one of your victory points to that combo.
Eventually, when a combo is skipped enough, it will begin to look a lot more attractive. On down the road, you might be willing to take a less attractive race/power combo in order to gain victory points equal to the number of players that previously chose to skip over it.Â
Once you make your selection, you will pick out the tokens from the box that match your race. You will combine the number on the power token with the number on the race banner, and that will give you the total number of troops you receive. This mechanic is mostly a balancing factor. Some powers or races may be really attractive, but the number of troops you get will balance things out a bit.
Once you have your troops, you will enter the “world” by conquering an area that is either adjacent to the edge of the board, or adjacent to a water area that is adjacent to the edge. From here out, you expand out from that space, taking as many adjacent areas as you have the troops to take. Once you spread yourself so far that you can’t spread any further, or take too much battle damage, you will want to place your race in decline and pick another race.
Let’s discuss combat damage first. This is the area where the game becomes a bit predictable. To move into an area and take it over, you must use two of your troops, plus one extra for each piece of cardboard already in the area. That cardboard can be an enemy token, Â a neutral token that the game starts with, a mountain, or any other piece in the game that you would place in an area. If you meet the required number, you take the area over.Â
When you take over an area, all of an enemy’s tokens are temporarily removed from the board. The first piece removed goes back to the box and usually can’t be brought back out. Anything above that first piece goes back to it’s player, who may re-deploy them once your turn concludes. In this sense, the game is very much a game of attrition. Each battle a player losses is one less token they have to play with. So you want to keep your areas defended. However, by doing that, you can’t spread to new areas, which ensures that you will get less victory points at the end of each of your rounds.
Ultimately, players can take just about any area they want. In doing so, they won’t risk any of their troops. However, if you spend 6 of your troops to take an enemy stronghold, that is that much less power you can spread taking other areas. Not only that, but when you take an area with multiple enemy tokens present, they only permanently lose one of those. When you take a weakly defended area of your enemies, then it takes a lot less of your troops, and they still lose that one troop. As a result, a lot of the simplicity of the combat is offset by the strategy of knowing the best ways to use your troops.
But one additional layer of strategy comes into play as you start looking at your turns and seeing that your troops are running out of potential for expansion. You get one victory point for each piece of land you control at the end of your turn. So, if you lose the ability to take that land on your turns, you lose the ability to continue progressing toward victory.
This is where entering into decline comes into play. Once you realise that your race is starting to feel inadequate, you will need to consider decline. When you go into decline, you flip all of your tokens over to their greyed out sides, and lose most (if not all) of your powers. If you had any races in decline before this, you take them off the board, then tally your points for the round. Declined races still generate victory points, but can’t do anything else. In addition, when you go into decline, that is all you can do on your turn.
On the your turn after you go into decline, you get to pick a new race to bring into play. At that point, you are generating victory points based on both your active race and your decline race. This sometimes leads you to ditching a race that you were just beginning to enjoy. However, it often makes good strategic sense.
As you earn victory points throughout the game, you keep them hidden. Once everyone has had a set number of turns, the points are tallied, and the game is over. For me, I often felt that the games were too short when we played them. The idea of switching out races was the draw to the game, and the bit of strategy that I enjoyed most. But it turns out that it was something that you only got to do 3-4 times in a game. I would have enjoyed that a lot more, had the game continued on.Â
Other than the issue with the length of the game, there isn’t much I have to complain about for gameplay. Yes, combat is predictable. However, between splitting your forces to face multiple enemies, figuring out the prime time to go into decline, and figuring out the best ways to both benefit you and hurt your enemies, I thought there was more than enough to keep the planners busy.Â
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Components
Days of Wonder has some of the best component standards in the industry. All of their art is well done, even if the style in the particular case can be off-putting to some. Still, they theme their games very well, and it shines on the pieces themselves.Â
I love a company that puts a lot of thought into how to store your game components, and that’s what Days of Wonder does in every game I’ve purchased from them. In this case, there is a place for everything, and a chart to show you where those places are.
However, things aren’t perfect on this front. While everything has it’s place, that doesn’t mean that it works out great. The pieces slide around in the tray, get stuck in annoying ways, and otherwise disrupt my OCD like crazy. The victory tokens have a generic side, and then a side display one of four different values. In principle, this is nice. In actuality, its a pain in the butt. Getting them in and out of the box is annoying enough. But when you add in the fact that you have to take the time to flip each coin to its value side at the end of the game in order to determine which stack of coins goes to which slot…it gets to be too much really fast. This is of course assuming that you are particular about organizing your games. A smarter and less picky person would probably just toss them in any way they could. After all, each slot in the box isn’t specially sized to fit the stacks of tokens.Â
Ultimately, the biggest component issue that actually effects gameplay is the decline side of race tokens. Playing the game is great with these tokens. You have the flavorful art and gorgeous colors on display, and all is good. But the moment you go into decline, things become annoying. Because all of the tokens are greyed out on the decline side, it becomes a chore to sort out which decline tokens are yours, and which ones aren’t. When you play with multiple people, its a real effort to not mis-count decline tokens or look over tokens you assume aren’t yours. The pictures of the races are all there, but without the colors, it makes it extremely difficult to make out the differences. I would have personally preferred the decline side to have kept the art exactly the same, but added a big red “X” over the picture instead. You know they are in decline, but you can still make out pictures easier.
Rules
The game has a hefty amount of rules, but it isn’t too bad. As mentioned before, combat is pretty simple. However, that isn’t to say that there aren’t a couple things that new players could get hung up on. There are a couple different situations where you need to re-deploy troops (Beginning of turn, end of turn, and after being removed via combat). There are different rules for the different situations. All of them are pretty easy. But because of their similarities, new players may have an issue or two keeping the differences straight.
The majority of the issues will come from the race/power combo rules. Each player will have a reference sheet to explain the rules of each token. This is a nice touch, but often trims some of the rules to the point that you will need to look them up in the full manual. A slightly smaller font would have allowed all of the rules to make it onto the massive reference sheet, and not left any room for questions.Â
The other problem with the race/power combos comes from the fact that each one has it’s own separate rules. This isn’t a problem if you play the game a lot and remember which race does what. However, new players will have to look up each and every power in order to make their choices. The 6 race/power combos on the board, that means you need to look up 12 separate rules before you are comfortable making a choice. That can really slow the first few games a player plays down.Â
Overall
The game is a light and yet deceptively deep game. The strategy lies in areas you generally don’t see in games. Its essentially a combat game with very light focus on the combat. This means that a lot of people will get the intricacies of the system, and some people will be disappointed at what it is not.Â
Overall, the game is a great addition to my collection. It doesn’t quite convey an addiction to my group that other games have, but I have no doubt that it is still a great game in it’s own way. Even based on a ten year old game in Vinci, the game still has a unique mechanic that I haven’t seen before in the way you treat your races.Â
Not everyone is going to love the game, but I think a lot of people will have a strong sense of enjoyment from it. Knowing what it is going into it will help to maximize your potential for enjoyment.Â
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Pros and Cons
+/- Simple and Predictable combat system
+ Easy rules
– A ton of tokens that don’t always like to get along with its travel compartments
+ Lots of colorful art
– Cheesy fantasy theme
+ Multiple levels of strategy
– Mind boggling decisions on “in decline” artwork and the reference sheets
You can purchase this game at Thoughthammer:
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Credits:
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Randy – Editor, Show host, & Written Review
Russell – Show Host
Ray – Recoding Studio, Lights, Sound, & Camera
Also, thanks to Thoughthammer for making this possible, and to Beatnik Turtle for the intro music “Beat People Up (Remix)“!
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