Game System Analysis 2 – SmallWorld: Underground

So, one week had passed and and it’s time for another board game analysis. This time, we’re taking a look at a RISK like game called Smallworld, our rather a sequel of it called “underground”.

What is Smallworld Underground, and how does it work?

Smallworld Underground is actually rather similar to the last game, DUST. Your main objective is to conquer regions, and get score accordingly.

You begin by choosing a race; Spiderines, Mummies, Lizardmen, Gnomes etc. Then, you also choose a special combo to accompany this; Thieving, Stone, Vampire, Muddy etc. There is a good variety of these allowing for a lot of different combinations. For example, you could have Thieving Lizardmen, or Muddy Spiderines or Vampire Gnomes. All of these combinations yield hugely varying benefits and weaknesses and so allow for a great deal of different play styles!

At the side of the game board, there is a timeline of sorts, with eight positions on it. This is how the progress of the game at whole is measured. Eight positions, eight total rounds in a game. This forces rather short games. It allows players to replay several times in the same time that another game might take for only one game!

The person who has last been in either a cave our a cellar gates to start, and then the turns follow in a clockwise order, an indication of the games quirkiness.

Similar too DUST, every game turn is made up from a few phases. Contrary to DUST however, the first of these is three attack phase, followed by redeployment (movement) and finally a coin collecting phase.

Attack phase

Attacks can only be done to adjacent regions. Too conquer an empty region you need at least two units, for occupied regions each enemy unit placed on it needs another one of yours. There are also special areas with so called “Black Mountains” placed on them which also gives one defence and such requires another unit to be conquered. As such, to conquer a region with five enemy units and a Black Mountain requires eight units.

Once you’ve conquered a region, you can keep attacking any region adjacent to that one too get even more land. However, you must leave all units used when conquering, so in our example, to keep attacking you must attack with more than eight units. These troops are tired from attacking and must rest. This restrictions is only per turn though so the next turn, when your troops have rested, you are completely allowed to keep attacking with full force.

The redeployment phase

Once you are happy with the amount of land you’ve conquered, or you’ve expired all your troops, you can move your troops however you want between all your regions. Contrary to DUST, where you could move and THAN attack, this forces you to plan ahead for what other players might do, to protect your boarders and prepare for future attacks.

The coin collection phase

Lastly, at the end of a player’s turn, it’s time to collect your reward. Every region you occupy gains you one so called “victory coin”. These make up the score that determines the winner at the end of the game. Depending on your chosen race and special combo, certain areas give you additional victory coins. For example a Muddy Spiderine would get two coins for every region of the type “mud pool”.

In Decline

One of the games more interesting points is that you can switch race+combo mid-game. This allows you to strategically plan what you want to play as, and in extension which playstyle you wish to use, in different stages of the game. For example, one strategy could be to start with a race which gives you a lot of units, to allow you to spread out and conquer cheap, unoccupied regions early on in the game, and then later switch to one that is better at defending to maintain those regions you’ve already conquered.

To switch race, you first have to put your existing one “in decline”. This means that you turn all of your unit tokens upside down, making them inactive. This means that you still technically own those regions, and still collect victory coins at the end of your turns, but you are not able to move or attack with them. They are just there to indicate that you currently own those regions.

Choosing a new race

On the side of the game board, there is a column of six races matched with different combos. These are the ones you have to choose from, both when switching races and in the beginning when choosing your first race. If you are fine with the first one in the column, you can just grab this and get on with your turn. However, if you’d rather have one further down the column, you must PAY one of your victory coins for every match that you skip. So if you want the fourth one from the top, you must pay three victory coins. Since the coins are equal to your position in the game, this is an investment you need to consider if you want a specific race.

The core system

Given that the game doesn’t have that many stages or steps, I see the entire game as one major, core game system. The incorporation between whatever race + combo you’ve chosen and the core actions you perform per turn is what makes up the entire game, really. You could argue that that the core actions that every player does, taking the races out of the equation, is the core since this doesn’t change between players. However, since the races change the additional actions a player can perform, I think it would be wrong not to consider these part of the core.

The best parts

Given the impact the different race and combo cards have on the way each players plans and performs actions, and how much this in turn spices up the game play, these really must be the best part of the game. They are all really well balanced, and interact well together. Some time into the first round, one of us read about the combos and races and went, “Woah, this race is so OP (Over powered)”, indicating that it would be too powerful and as such unbalanced. Later, the same thing happened again, but this time for another race. I don’t know if the people reading about them and crying these things realized this, but they kept doing this for a lot of the different races and combos. This clearly indicated that they were in fact NOT unbalanced or OP at all, but rather the other way around, and just giving the illusion that they were ALL more powerful than the others. Now, we didn’t try out all possible matches between race and combo, so I can’t say for sure that every one of them is exactly as good as the next, but given the ones that we did try were as good as they were, it could be assumed that they are.

The worst parts

In most situations, this is the topic that is the easiest to write about, and write a LOT about, but really I found most parts of the game well designed and planned. This pushes kind of minor aspects to the top of the stack of “bad” things, an on the very top we in this case find the amount of game turns. The fact that the end of the game steadily and rapidly approaches, plus the fact that players are allowed to, and tend to, hide the amount of victory coins he/she has, makes the game a bit uncertain as you can’t tell who is actually in the lead. The first time we played, I thought I had quite a lot of coins and thought I was in a good position. However, once we reached the eighth and last turn, and counted/revealed the amount of coins we all had, it actually turned out that I had the LEAST amount of coins of all players, putting me in last place. This was both surprising and disappointing and I’m split whether this is a good thing or not, as the opposite effect probably happened for the winning player(s).

The most interesting system

Given that I really only see one system, at least that is worth mentioning, this is also the most interesting one. However, if we break it down further, the subsystem which makes it interesting, is that of the racecombos. Knowing the various benefits and disadvantages of them, and how you best combine them to fit your strategy and/or playstyle, makes sure that the game doesn’t become stale.

Every game is slightly different. In our second round for example, I started with the combo “Thieving Lizardmen”, this allowed me to swim and pass through the river however I wanted without combat, even if it was occupied by another player. The combo also gave me one more victory coin for every active (as such not races that were in decline) race that I bordered. We were five players this time, so the maximum amount of extra coins I could get, was four. Now, this could definitely put the game in my favor if I would be very close in coins to another player. But at the start of the game, this didn’t help me much since there weren’t many players around me, and the one that was, rapidly wiped me out. I was able to move my few, remaining troops to a place where I was slightly safer, and than put that race into decline. This round was not going favorably for me, and I was now very low on coins. We were about halfway in the game at this point.

The next race I chose was “Mummies”. They are very high in number, which would allow me to conquer areas quickly to gain me a better position. They were also matched with the “Vampire” combo. Awesome in game and, in this situation, awesome in the game as well. This allowed me to use any of my dead (unused) unit tokens and replace one of the other player’s unit tokens adjacent to me. I was not only allowed to do this during my turn, but once during EVERYONE’S turn. I could as such take over a lot of regions over the course of one round.

Now I didn’t win this time around either, but it took me from what was surely the last place, to third place out of five. A serious improvement, given the few turns I had to do this. So, the conclusion to draw from this; every race and combo is really good… given the situation and stage of the game. So the most interesting system is knowing what racecombo to use, when and where, and then doing so!

Target audience

The target audience given on the box, is anyone over the age of 8. Quite frankly, it’s not a terribly difficult game in itself, the most important factor is who are playing, what skill your opponents possess. However, there are a lot of races and combos to keep track of and quite a lot of text for each one. I often found myself re-reading things I’d already read about a race, just to be sure. So I would say that you would have to be literate to some degree. I could definitely see some eight year olds playing this, but only on a very basic level. I would recommend it at a higher age, for anyone who likes strategy with different playstyles to adapt to (although given the “lightness” of the system, others could play it as well just for fun), at an age of about 12!