Board Game Analysis I – Small World

Small World is a board game where 2-5 players try to conquer and control as much territory of a map as they can, in order to gain the biggest amount of victory coins and win the game.

The Best and Worst Sides Of the Game
What is good with Small World is the randomized combinations of fantasy races and special powers. They make every time you play the game unique, and they also give variety to every turn played in the game. Even if you’re not one of the leading players in the beginning, it’s easy to catch up as you can decline a race and pick a new combination at any time. Every race and special power has their own individual benefits, and if you’re lucky you get a combination that works well together.

However, as the combinations are randomized it sometimes happens that one combination gets over powered. Sometimes, several players have picked very good combos and if they happen to target each other they might even each other out, but the weaker combos are still easily defeated. Winning the game is often more luck-based than strategy-based.

The Game
The goal in Small World is to conquest as many regions as possible using your self-picked combination of race and special power. The more regions you control or conquest, the more victory coins you will gain, and the player with the most victory coins in the end of the game is the winner.

The game can be played by 2-5 players. There are different maps for every amount of players, which differentiate in both size of the map and number of game turns. When the game has been set up, every player is given 5 victory coins. The players each pick a race and special power from the 6 visible race banners and special power badge combinations. If the player wants to choose another combo than the one at the top of the column, the player must drop one victory coin for each combo that she passes when going down in the column. If another player picks the combo with victory coins on it, she will gain the additional victory coins together with the race and special power that she picked. When a combination is picked and removed from the column, a new combination is revealed and added to the six combos available to choose from.

The sum of the numbers given on the race banner and special power badge are the amount of race tokens you are allowed to use. All races have different racial traits or skills, for example the human race’s trait is to collect one bonus coin for each farmland region they occupy, while the triton can conquer all regions bordering a sea or lake for one less triton token. The same goes for the special powers, the swamp special power lets the player collect one bonus coin for each swamp region that she’s occupying, while commando lets you conquer any region using one less token than usual. Some races and special powers have benefits that include different game tokens such as for example troll lairs, fortresses or a dragon. Each region on the map has a different terrain type and sometimes special map symbols. The terrain type and map symbols are sometimes efficient for some races or special powers.

When conquering a region the player deploys two race tokens on the region. If the region is already occupied by other tokens, which could either be mountain tokens, lost tribes or other player’s tokens, the player must deploy one additional race token for every token present in the region. The tokens that the player deploys cannot be moved until the end of the player’s turn when she is allowed to reorganize the troops depending on which regions she wishes to defend the most. One race token must be left on a region for it to still be occupied.  The mountain tokens and lost tribes tokens are placed before the game starts, and the mountain tokens are never removed from the map. When a region that you occupy is conquered by another player, one race token is permanently discarded and the others are given back to you to redeploy to the remaining troops you have placed on the map. When conquering a region occupied by a lost tribe token, the token is removed from the map. If a player wants to conquer one last region on her turn but has too few race tokens, she can try rolling the reinforcement die.  If the player is lucky, she will get a high enough sum to conquer the region. At the end of the player’s turn, she will gain victory coins for every region she occupies, as well as extra victory coins depending on her race’s or special power’s benefits.

For each turn the player can either choose to conquer more regions, or else she can decide to go in decline. When going in decline, the race banner and special power badge is flipped, showing that they are no longer active. Only one race token is left on each of their occupied regions on the map, and the tokens are also flipped to show that the race is in decline. The player cannot conquer any new regions on the same turn as their going in decline, she is only allowed to make the choice of going in decline and then collect the victory points for the now declined race’s occupied regions. On her next turn she picks a new race and special power combo from the six visible combinations. At the end of the player’s turn she now collects victory points for the regions occupied by her active race as well as the regions occupied by her declined race.  A player can only have one active race and one race in decline at a time. When she chooses to go in decline again, the earlier declined race’s banner and special power badge are put in the non-visible stacks of races and special powers, and if there are any of this race’s tokens left on the map they are removed.

When there are no game turns left, the players count their victory coins and the player with the most coins is the winner.

The Most Interesting System
What I find to be the most interesting system of Small World is the picking a race and special power combination. The race banners and special power badges are shuffled before the game starts, making the combinations very randomized. This enables the game to be very different every time you play, as there are a lot of different combinations available with the 14 races and 20 special powers.

Not only do you choose a combination in the beginning of the game, but you are also able to go in decline with your earlier picked race to then choose a new combination any time during the game. This makes the game more unpredictable and even if a player has picked a losing combination earlier she is still able to change the game’s situation completely by picking a new race and special power combo.

Choosing a new combination of race and special power is also the only way to lose victory coins, as you have to drop a coin on every race you pass in the column to get to the combo you want to pick. This way, players can also gain victory coins when picking a new race and special power combination, as the coins left on a combo are given to the player who picks that combination.

The combinations of race and special power can sometimes be very effective, and in many varying ways. Some examples of how the combos can be especially effective are benefits that give you a lot of extra victory coins, some combos give you advantages on conquests (using less tokens to conquer specific regions for example), some combinations give you a big amount of race tokens and others have benefits when going in decline. This makes the game very diverse, as there are different strategies to win the game. Luckily, there are also a game sheets for every player included in the game box, so that the players do not have to remember every benefit of every race or special power by themselves.

Target Group
On the box, it says that the game is recommended from the age 8 and up. I would say that if an eight to eleven year old was to play this game and enjoy it, they would have to be joined by a parent or at least someone older, because there is many things to keep track on and there is also a lot of reading involved when having to check what every race and special power does in every different situation.

When my group first played the game, we had a hard time understanding how the game was played and we had to look up a video tutorial to help us set up the game and understand how it work (however none of us have much experience in board games). Sometimes we had misunderstood some of the benefits of races or special powers’ details which we discovered the second or third time playing the game, making us realize that we had not played it correctly the last time we played.

I would recommend Small World for the age 13 and up. The game’s situation can often take a sudden turn, and the players should be able to easily adapt and change strategy when needed.

Summary
The combinations of race and special powers result in both the best and the worst sides of the game. It gives variation to the game, and it’s easy to catch up with the leading players, so even if you’re not lucky the first turns of the game you still have a chance win in the end. Still, sometimes the combos are too over powered, which makes the game less fun for the players facing against this dominating combination. The combination system is also the core game system, as it’s by knowing what race and special power combination to pick as well as knowing when to decline a race that will most likely lead you to victory.

I found the game to be very enjoyable and I would gladly play it multiple times just to try out different combinations and strategies. Even if I did not win the game, I was still pleased by the times when I had a good combo and got to scare my fellow players for a couple of turns. I also like how they’ve tried to make the races and special powers as easy to check as possible, giving each player a game sheet and also having symbols on all races’ banners and special powers’ badges to remind the player what the race or special power does.