Review: SmallWorld

I recently had the opportunity to play a board game called SmallWorld. The premise of SmallWorld is pretty simple: there are a lot of different fantastical creatures trying to live in a world that is much too small to accomodate them all. The object of the game is to open up lines of communication and start think-tanks in order to figure out how to best use this world’s scarce resources to best benefit society as a whole – all races living together peacefully as children of a common world.

KIDDING! They all try to kill each other.

Breakin’ Up

In SmallWorld, everybody starts off playing one of the aforementioned races of fantastical beings. The game board is divided up into regions that everybody fights over, much like Risk. That’s pretty much where the similarities end. In Risk, you try to multiply and take over the world. That would really be nice in SmallWorld, except most of the time you never get more units for your race. Instead, you do as best you can with your race, until it starts to become apparent that this just isn’t going to work much longer. Then you do the unthinkable:

You break up with them, and start going out with another race.

That’s right, you’re not stuck playing for one team in SmallWorld. You can ditch your current race (referred to in-game as “going into decline”), and pick a new one and start fresh. You may be wondering at this point how one wins a game of SmallWorld. Well, technically the only team you play for is yourself, and you get Victory Coins for the number of territories you currently control at the end of your turn (among other things). Like any good failed relationship, they stick around for awhile. Except, instead of driving you crazy and leaving psychotic notes on your car, they don’t do anything aside from sit there and you continue to get Victory Coins for the territories your ex-race still occupies. When you inevitably decide that your new civilization-fling is getting too emotionally needy, you can break up with this one too. Unlike real life, though, you can only have one ex at a time, and they don’t form a facebook group all about how you’re a heartless bastard who only wants one thing (even though you do – Victory Coins!).

Just as psychotic ex-girlfriends are all uniquely terrifying in their own way, each race in SmallWorld is different as well. For instance, the mythical race known as “Humans” gets +1 Victory Coin for every region of farmland you occupy at the end of the turn. Skeletons, on the other hand, get to increase their numbers by 1 for every 2 regions they take over. Ghouls are particularly terrifying, because even when they’re in decline, they can still go around and conquer stuff just like your active race.

If that wasn’t interesting enough for you, each race has a randomly determined superpower. These work just like the powers of each race, but now you wind up with different combinations every game, keeping everything fresh. Each race has a token detailing its power, and the add-on power fits on to the left side of it, so you wind up with things like “Commando Amazons” and “Flying Orcs”. In addition to making the game more fun, these combinations are immensely enjoyable to say out loud.

Heloise’s Hints For The Thrifty Commando Amazon

While the “declining civilizations” game mechanic is interesting by itself, the combinations of the races and power are really what make this game sing. It’s clear that game balance was a priority in the creation of SmallWorld, and the fact that some of these powers and races are better in many instances than others was taken into account. These imbalances were dealt with by marking each race and power with a number of tiles to give out when this combination is chosen, adding the two together to get the total number the player receives. For instance, Dwarves have a cool power and don’t get a terribly large amount of troops, but Ratmen (which do NOTHING aside from eating cheese and killing things, I guess) get over twice as many.

Adding even further to the strategy, players are not just randomly assigned a power and race. Initially, they are chosen (person with the pointiest ears goes first), but thereafter players must purchase new races with their Victory Coins. The mechanic is handled in such a way that race/power combinations nobody has chosen the last couple of times give the player who chooses this “undesirable” option a financial incentive for doing so, and picking a new and powerful combo that just appeared will make the player pay some VC’s to take the opportunity.

In truth, I didn’t much care for SmallWorld the first time I played. I was expecting Risk. Once I understood that picking smart race/power combos and knowing when to decline were much better strategies than running my poor Berserker Ghouls into the ground, I started to have a lot more fun. The only other complaint I have is that the art on the tiles is visually confusing to me. Each race has a different color, which is usually the only thing that saves me because the beautiful art for each race has been scaled down to the point where I have to squint at it to figure out what race it is. It’s worse when a race goes into decline, as everybody is a different shade of grey with a greyscale version of a hard-to-see icon. The Giants, in particular, look like a bunch of knees and some tree bark to me when shrunk to icon-size. Don’t get me wrong, though, these are really minor complaints and the game kicks butt.

Should You Spend Your Victory Coins?

In short, I wholeheartedly recommend picking up a copy of this and killing your whole family and all of your friends. Make sure you play the game with them first, though, because then you’ll probably have to run from the police from now until Gen Con to find someone to play with.