Board Game Analysis #1 – Small World

Introduction to the game

Small World is a turn-based board game, for 2-5 players, where players battle for control over a world which is too small for everybody to live peacefully.

The game box includes:
Several different boards that are used depending on how many players there are.

• 4 Maps of Small World.
• 6 Player summary cheat sheets- These explain the different abilities granted by the different races and special powers.
• 14 Races.
• 20 special powers.
• Tokens for every race.
• Plenty of victory coins.
• Several special pieces, like Fortresses, Mountains or Troll Lairs.
• A turn token, to keep track of the number of turns passed.
• A rule book.
• A reinforcement die.

The core system of the game is to gain as many victory coins as possible. The player with the most coins at the end of the game is the winner. The game map is built up of hexagonal tiles of different kinds; farmland, swamps, forest and mountains are a few of them. You gain coins by controlling and conquering tiles. You gain one point per held tile at the end of your turn (unless stated otherwise). You conquer and hold tiles either using the multiple creatures of your chosen race to occupy adjacent territories – possibly defeating weaker enemy races along the way – or you give up on your race letting it go ”into decline”. A race in decline is designated by flipping the creature-tiles over to their black-and-white side. Each player can only have one active race and one race in decline at any given time, unless specified otherwise.

The world is inhabited by several races such as sorcerers, ghouls, humans, skeletons, and orcs, among others. Every race have some benefit to it, like tritons who conquer At the beginning of the game you pick a race with a special power, which is randomized at the beginning of the game. These special powers change how you play the game, as it gives you advantages for conquering certain tiles in certain ways. You could, for an example, pick mounted humans. These humans can more easily attack Farmland and Hill-tiles, and gain additional coins for conquered Farmland.

Knowing when to go into decline, which race/power combinations to choose and which areas to conquer as well as when to do it is key to winning the game.

Setup

In the setup phase of the game, every player is given 5 victory coins and get to choose between 6 different race/power combinations. As there are over a dozen powers which can be paired with any race, there is a huge amount of replayability to this game; making every session stand out on it’s own. These races can then be selected from a queue, created from randomly pairing races with powers.

If you want the first race on the queue you can take it for free, but if you want any other race further up the queue you have to pay 1 victory coin per step; leaving the coin on the races you didn’t take. This makes even the less-appealing races an option, as you are given some victory coins for simply selecting the race. The less appealing race, the more coins will end up on the race. The game mechanic has one giant flaw though; it doesn’t work very well when some, or all, of the players are new to the game. This may instead bring the game out of balance, giving the more useful races an initial boost in victory coins as well as their more useful powers. How can you know what’s good or not when you have not played the game before? But, if the players have played the game at least once before, the game balances itself out pretty well.

Start of the game

The player with the pointiest ears (yes, that’s actually in the rules) starts out with selecting a combo, then proceeds clockwise from player to player. The ”selection rule” can seem like a fun idea to many but I assume that some people would not really enjoy being called out as ”having the pointiest ears” or, indeed, ”not having the most pointiest ears”. This may be a minor thing, but perhaps could be substituted for something else, like ”the player with the most blue socks”.

When everybody has selected a race everybody enters the battlefield, in the same order as before, from any border of the board.

Some people, even at early stages of the game, push their their races in decline. When placing a race into decline, you do no get to do anything else that turn. You essentially skip a turn for the ability to put a new race into play. This is an interesting mechanic, as it can create very fast changes in power. This is great if a player has been pretty much destroyed early on, giving him or her a second and/or a third chance.

Problems with wording and balancing

During one of the sessions I started out with selecting mounted sorcerers. Mounted means that you are able to conquer farmland and hill tiles with one less unit than you would have needed otherwise. But this was when we encountered our first real problem with the game; we couldn’t understand exactly how the Sorcerers ability worked. The explanation of the race is this: ” Once per turn per opponent, your Sorcerers can conquer a Region by substituting one of your opponent’s Active tokens with one of your own taken from the storage tray”. As sorcerers had not come into play before, the group interpreted it as ”Well, if we’re five players; that’s four opponents so you can do it four times on whoever you want”. This made sorcerers incredibly over-powered.

After the game was finished, we realized that the ability was only meant to be used once against each player, having the person playing the sorcerer rely heavily on positioning. Reading up on the wording issue, it seems several other players have also encountered the same problem. This problem is an easy fix, just change up the wording a little bit so that it’s obvious that it can only be used on once on every player each turn.

But this was far from the only case where we had to resort to reading in the rule book for clarification about the race/power in question. For an example, there was also a problem with the race giants. The explanation of the giant race is the following: ”Your Giants may conquer any Region adjacent to a Mountain Region they occupy at a cost of 1 less Giant token than normal. A minimum of 1 Giant token is still required.”. In one place of the map there are three mountains next to one tile. If one were to hold those mountains, would the tile in-between become three token cheaper? Or just one? The rules are a bit unclear on that subject.

In the end, ”house rules” is something that is OK in most games. But when it comes to balancing, especially when it’s pretty much game-changing, it is important that the rules are followed – if you want an experience where everybody has an equal shot at winning anyway.

Player Interaction

Something that is quite odd about Small World is that most race/power combinations require a fundamentally different approach as to how to play them. Some races benefit from the act of conquering tiles while with some others you don’t even really need to interact much with other players. An example of the latter is the race Dwarves and the power Fortified.

Dwarves gain one additional victory coin per turn per tile which has a mine on it. The Fortified power gives the player the ability to play fortresses on the map. These fortresses increase the defense of the tile by 1, essentially acting like another troop, as well as giving the player one extra victory coin per fortress on the map. What this creates is something that, in gaming, is referred to as turtling. If you enter the map on in the right areas of the map with your dwarves, you can just sit on top of three mines the entire game – Pulling in a lot of victory coins each turn, and giving you so much defensive capabilities that nobody will want to attack you; it’s just not worth the trouble. This is then balanced out with the relative few amounts of dwarves you will have at your disposal; 3 from fortified and 3 from the races itself, compared to the normal amount of between 10 and 11.

In comparison to this relatively peaceful race you could also end up choosing pillaging orcs, the exact opposite. Orcs gain one additional victory coin for each conquered tile per turn and the pillaging-power does the same, increasing the amount of victory coins to 2 per turn per conquered tile. This creates a play-style where you want to conquer as much as possible each turn and don’t really mind losing ground held the previous turn.

What’s great about the dynamic is that different players agendas may clash, creating interesting rivalries within the game.

Target Audience Interpretation

The art-style has a very friendly, ”cartoon-y” look and the cheat sheet given to each player makes it easy for everybody to know what each race and power does. On the box it states that this game is for ages 8 and above, but I would not recommend Small World to anybody below the age of twelve. Sure, you can enjoy it, you don’t need to play it the best way possible, but there is a lot of decision to be made and a lot of things to keep track of so a younger player may be frustrated and be at a loss about what to do at times.

Summary: the best and the worst of ”Small World”

The core of the game revolves around knowing when to go into decline, which race/power combinations to choose and which areas to conquer as well as when to do it.

The games greatest strength lies in it’s enormous amount of replay value due to the numerous races and powers as well as how they interact with each other. The ability to go into decline at pretty much any time can cause quick turn of events, which is great if a player is left behind early on. It’s hard to  predict who’s going to win just based on the first turns, and that’s something really good.

But not everything is balanced. Some combinations are flat out better than others, and but I’d not say that’s necessarily something bad; given that if someone picks one of the less appealing combinations, they are given a one-time sum of coins.

Overall; the game plays excellently, my group and I had a lot of fun playing it and it’s probably something I’ll purchase myself.