Board game analysis 2

This week I and my group played the board game Small world underground. Small world underground is a turn based, fantasy themed civilization game about conquest and controlling areas to get an income.

You choose between many fantasy races to play as with different stats and abilities.  You get one race and one special ability. You then use your troops to conquer regions on the map and at the end of the turn you get money for what you own. The turn is built into three phases. Combat phase where you move your troops to attack. Redeployment phase where you move you troops between the tiles you own, and last you get your money for what you own.

The core game system is to conquer regions and hold them to get an income with the help of strategy. The components used in the game is, race cards, soldier tokens for all races, a dice, monster tokens, many different special tokens for various purposes and coins. You chose a race and special ability to get troops which you use to conquer regions, kill monsters and enemies. If you kill a region with monsters in them you get either a special item or a special building which help you if you have troops in that region. At the end of your turn you get money depending on what you own, regions, black mountains or if you have a special trait for your race or ability you can earn even more.

One of the best sides to the game is the game round and map system. You can play with between 2 and 5 players, depending on how many you are playing there is a different map designed for that many players. And each map has a different amount of rounds. So the map with 5 players is 8 rounds, the one with 4 players is 9 rounds. This is continued with another really good side to the game which is the score system. You get coins from owning region but you keep you coins upside down so the others don’t see how much money you have. So it’s much harder to know who is in the lead and therefore you don’t get to that point where everyone attacks the one in the lead, most of the times. How much money you have is revealed at the end of the game and you don’t them to see who has won with the most coins.

This added a more interesting way to play from most different games. A lot of games show clearly who is in the lead and by how much, here it was somewhat hidden the whole time so after each turn you might have a small idea of who is leading, but it’s exciting after the game to really see who has won. As the game isn’t based on it ending when someone hits a certain score this also adds to it being more exciting to see who wins at the end. For instance at the second time we played the one who won got exactly 100 coins and I got 99. We were in an alliance so I didn’t attack him at my last turn. If I had done it I would have still only got 99 points, but he region I would get him away from was worth 2 coins for him, so he would have ended on 98 and I would have won. Knowing the score I might have ended our alliance at the last turn to win, but because I did not know it I did not attack him and lost the game by one coin. So coins is the most important resource for the players, every turn is about getting as many more coins you can. And many games use a method where the players don’t get gold until the end of a round, like the game Dust, there you get points at the end of a turn so being first has it pros and cons. But in that game you decide each turn in which order you play so in that it’s not an issue. But in small world it would be because you always play a round the same way and the first player would always be at a disadvantage.

Another part of the game that was really good and most interesting about the game was the race system. Every race had good traits to them so there were no race that felt much more over powered than the next one. So you would have to build a strategy around what you had and not around what was best. Some races could for instant earn more money from a mushroom region. And when you chose race they had a random ability or trait to them. This made it so sometimes you see a race with an ability that don’t work so well together but then you see a combination that you can build a really nice strategy around.

The worst part of the game was something I don’t feel destroys the game or really is something bad, it has its pros and it has its cons. When you get a new race you start at a region on the edge of the map, which mean you can put a whole army into someone else’s armys back lines where they don’t have any defense. Or using this method you could attack at the first turn, say if the first player starts his turn and spread his army as thin as possible and started with a small army, the player after him then maybe had a much bigger army to start with and start on the same region and start attacking and taking out most of the other players army. This can cripple a player into changing race from the start. Changing race takes a whole turn. The pros are that you can’t close someone out or if someone is coming back into the game they can get a good foot into it by destroying a stronger players backlines.

A part of the game that was almost never used was the dice, while we played we almost never used it. To take a region you had to use 2 soldiers to take it and 1 for each black mountain or enemy that was in it, if you didn’t want to use the dice, because then you had a bigger army, you won by sheer numbers. But you could take a region with one soldier and take a 50/50 chance of taking it or your soldier dying and you lose him forever. We noticed that you almost never would risk this until the last turn where you just wanted to get as much money as possible and didn’t care if anyone died, unless you had a power which let you use a die roll without risking your soldiers. So for the most of the time the dice isn’t used, but it’s still an important part of the game because it decides something rules can’t and it adds a risk and reward system to it. But as I said, the last turn has no risk because you won’t use the soldiers again anyways so you don’t care if they die, unless you have a trait that I got once that said if you have 3 soldiers one tile you get an extra gold. So strategy is an important part of the game to conquer the game field and earn you coins.

One important thing I noticed about the game was that we had fun even when we played it the first time to learn how to play it properly, we got fast into the game and had fun every time we played. This is something you don’t always get with games and especially not with the game Dust where we had a nightmare playing the first two times because we were still confused about the rules and it was hard to play. But with small world you start to have fun from the start. Really from the start when you open it up and start setting it up you have fun watching all the amazing art on it with a lot of details where you find new things every time you look. This is something that is really good for a game, maybe not the many details point, but that it looks really good and well designed so it is really inviting. The first impression of a game is really important for if people will play it again or even buy it.

Target group interpretation

The game has a lot of small rules with the special traits and abilities with the races and items that can be hard to remember for all ages but the game have a cheat sheet for 5 all players so that isn’t a problem even for the younger age. The art is really well made and colorful, every type of region is different from the others so you don’t mix it up with another, so this is also really good for all ages. I think I would say 12+ because it has many rules and can be hard to remember them all and a younger audience might think this is tedious and hard to handle.

To sum it all up, the game is about conquering regions with strategy to earn the most coins and win at the end of the game. The most interesting system is the races and how they all are very well designed to have special traits that are not too strong so something is too over powerful and they mix it with a random special ability so it’s a small chance to get the same combination twice even if you replay the game several times. This adds replay value. The best thing about the game is how dynamic it is depending on how many players there is and the score system that you collect coins that you keep hidden from the others and you don’t know who win until after the game is done. The worst but not bad is that you can launch a new races army straight into a tile your opponents already own before starting on an empty region first. I think the game is suited for years 12 and up and the game is fun already from when you are setting up and play it the first time because it’s so well designed and has such beautiful art.

End of analysis.

My next blog post is gonna be about my 3D assignment and the viking ship im creating, this will be on sunday or sometime early next week as im going to Dreamhack stockholm to show my game crocodile chow-down togheter with the school and other student made projects. So i wont be home until sunday.