Game review : Small World

Reviewed game: 

Game Announcement

Small World

Submitted by W. Eric Martin on Sun, 2010-05-16 21:04

Game name: 

Small World

Designer: 

Philippe Keyaerts

Publisher: Days of Wonder — April 2009

Players: 

2-5

Ages: 

8+

Playing time: 

40-80 minutes

Price: 

$50

Language: 

English

Language: 

French

Language: 

German

Version played: Comped review copy
Time played: 16 – twice with four players, 5 times with three & 9 times with two

Days of Wonder's most recent big-box game was Colosseum, the 2007 release from Wolfgang Kramer and Markus Lübke that felt like an alternate world version of The Princes of Florence, which Kramer co-designed with Richard Ulrich. In both games, players compete in auctions to collect objects that allow them to complete large projects. Colosseum has its own quirks – a player's score being only her most valuable event; tokens on the board that players manipulate to boost an event's score – yet the game can be seen as an evolution of its ancestor from 2000.

Philippe Keyaerts' Small World, Days of Wonder's 2009 big-box game, has followed the same evolutionary path as Colosseum as it's a revised version of Keyaerts' own Vinci, orginally released in 1999 from French publisher Descartes. In both games players take control of civilizations and spread their influence across a landscape of mixed terrains, wiping out opponents when needed or desired, but whereas Vinci was set in Europe with players controlling realistic civilizations, Small World exists only in a fantasy world. Players can become sorcerors, orcs or halfings and fly across the world or live on long after their civilization passes. The plain symbolic artwork of the earlier game has been replaced by painted, bigfoot-style cartoons, and Europe has been surplanted by a generic continental cross-section that shows ocean regions in opposite corners of the board and a lake in the center of each gameboard with different types of terrain distributed evenly across the maps. (Four gameboards are included to ensure that world stays small no matter how many are playing.)

Five-player game board – lots of tiny spaces...

The overall presentation of Small World is far more visually appealing than its ancestor. One young player in my group, familiar only with Small World, looked at the gameboard and plain civilization chits used in Vinci and declared, "This looks like trash." As I said, he's young...

Applying the Beatdown

In Small World, players – perhaps in the role of gods or wealthy patrons – take control of different races, each with a built-in power in addition to a separate special power that has been randomly paired with that race. With 14 races and 20 special powers, the number of possible combinations is large, but after a half-dozen games you start to get a sense for which race/power combinations might fare best in a particular situation.

Dragons and wizards? A natural combo!

Small World lasts 8-10 turns depending on the number of players. If you have no race at the start of a turn, you choose a new race from among the six available, take a number of tokens equal to the sum of the numbers shown (10 in the case above), then start attacking the board to claim ground. Combat is largely deterministic: An empty area requires two units to claim it; a non-empty area requires one additional unit for each item in the area, whether opponent, mountain or ancient tribe member. Attack an area with a troll's lair and three trolls, for example, and you'll need to place six units in the area to claim it and kick out the trolls. When an opponent's area is defeated in combat, one unit is discarded and the rest will be redeployed among his remaining areas at the end of the current turn. Thus, you can whittle away a player's forces only a bit at a time.

If you control a race at the start of your turn, you either pick up as many units as you desire from the areas you control – perhaps even going so far as to relinquish control of an area – and try to conquer new ground, or you put your race in decline by removing all but one unit from each area you control, turning those remaining units face-down to indicate their status as a fading power, along with the more important notion that they can no longer attack in future turns. If you decline on a turn and already have a previous race in decline, that the units of the first race are removed from the board. (The one real flaw with the game's graphic design is that declined race tokens, which are grayed-out versions of the active sides, blend together on the board and make it difficult to know which race is which.)

Each turn, you score one point for each area controlled by your active race and your declined race. Certain race powers grant additional bonuses – Dwarves score one extra point for each mine they occupy, Orcs score extra for killing units – while special powers can do the same: Wealthy creatures earn a one-time bonus of seven points, while Hill creatures earn one extra point for each hill they occupy. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.

Combat, while essential for claiming ground and earning points, must be planned for carefully as you can spread out only in waves. Your first strike on the board will require you to place at least two units in each area. On your second turn, you can leave one unit in each area, pick up the extras, then spread into a few more areas. One change from Vinci is the addition of a die roll that gives you a chance to conquer an area even though you don't have enough units to take it outright. This change typically allows players to spread out faster, thus earning more points, while also spreading them thinner and leaving themselves vulnerable to counter-attack. In a game that lasts only 8-10 turns, this change is a positive one as you want to ability to take risks.

Another plus is that the game is more fun with that aspect of luck in the game. Vinci was all about calculating how to best deploy your troops and not waste a unit that could be put to use in some manner. With the die roll in Small World, players who choose to do so can spend less time calculating and push for gains that would otherwise be impossible. Given the multi-player chaos that ensues in a game with hundreds of decision points large and small, the impact of a few dozen die rolls is minimal on the overall results.

At some point in your expansion, you will spread yourself to the point where no more ground can be claimed without ceding what you already hold. This limitation makes decline an inevitable and appealing option as you can frequently earn more points with one active race and the remains of a dying one than you can with one widespread active race. (Think of how teenagers date in high school, moving on to a new partner while still stoking the embers of a dying relationship for its last bit of heat.)

Practicing Race Relations

Why choose one race over another? Any number of reasons, starting with one power/race combination being much cooler than all the others. In terms of game play, not all races and powers are created equal, and neither should they be. When a player chooses a new race, whether at the start of the game or after going into decline, she chooses one race/power pair from among six on display. The first pair can be "purchased" for free; the second costs one point; the third two points; and so on, with one point being placed on each of the pairs that is skipped in the line-up. If a player later takes one of these bypassed races, she claims all the coins placed on it by previous players.

Vinci worked the same way, with players spending two points for each race skipped, and this aspect of the game is a feature, not a bug. If all race/power pairs were equal, a player would have little reason to skip over any to choose one later in the line-up, which means that much of the angst and timing and strategy of the game would be missing. With pairs of differing strengths, a player has to decide how much she's willing to pay, which race will serve her well on the current gameboard, and which pairs she's willing to leave to an opponent and risk facing later.

Some races are obviously, almost intentionally, bad; Dwarves give you only three units, for example, so even with the special power you have only 5-8 units total, which won't let you conquer a lot of ground. Once players skip over the Dwarves a half-dozen times, however, those six points waiting on the card make the race far more attractive – or do they? The proper value of a race always depends on the current situation on the gameboard as well as the number of opponents you face. Sorcerors, for instance, can convert a single adjacent token from each opponent into another Sorceror, which is far more valuable with more opponents. Halflings, along with the race that has the Heroic special power, get to declare two spaces off-limits from attack, which makes blocking an opponent relatively easy in the confined two-player game board.

In your first games, you'll undoubtedly be surprised to find that a race/power pair works better or worse than you expected. How valuable is the discount Giants have when they attack from a mountain? Or the Elven ability to not lose people in an attack, thereby maintaining your full strength each turn? How much does the Flying ability to attack any area, and not only adjacent ones, matter? In practice, your group will probably fear certain races or combinations, then see those evaluations shift over time as you learn how to counter an opponent's attack or position. Skeletons, which gain an extra troop for each two non-empty regions they conquer, pasted people in their first few appearances, which has led people to pound on them when they first appear, rather than holding back and allowing them to build momentum.

Even so, you'll likely still have favorites, a fact that can play to your advantage when facing the same opponents in multiple games. I'm a fan of Ghouls, for example, which can still attack after going into decline. Most of two and three player games have been with the same opponents, and sometimes they'll take Ghouls, possibly paying points to do so, when I really have my eye on a different race.

Holding Your Ground

The established finish line in Vinci led players to pound on anyone who approached it, thereby leading to endgames that never seemed to end; Small World avoids this problem due to its fixed number of turns, but as with all combat games that have more than two players, it challenges players to engage in diplomacy in addition to the board play. The points are now hidden rather than visible, which adds to the impetus to claim that someone else – anyone else! – other than you is winning, whether due to points already acquired or the board situation. Some players oppose hidden points, claiming that the practice leads players to attack the "wrong" people, but I enjoy playing by feel rather than calculation, so the change has been a positive one for me. (One player did counter-attack me when I was clearly in fourth place, but he did so to teach me a lesson about not attacking him, not because he thought I was leading. The lesson I learned: Hit him harder so he can't retaliate.)

One oddness in the design of Small World is that the game seems to present the first player with a clear advantage in two different places within the game. First, the player has first crack at the six races on display. If a killer combo is available, no one can stop him from taking it. Second, in the final turn he scores before anyone else, which means that he can steal points away from others without having them steal points from him in return. What's more, the last player seems to be in the worst position for the final turn since everyone can pick apart her position without risk of retaliation.

Despite the impression given by an abstract consideration of the design, I've yet to notice the first player winning more than one would expect. In a pair of three-player games, the same player won both games, once going first and once going third. In my two four-player games, both with the same start player, the first player (a player who has played ten times, mind you) won one game and the third player won the other. Initially, as players are learning the game, the start player might indeed have an advantage, if only because players might not recognize these aspects of the design until too late, but experienced players will take steps to box in or hobble the first player to keep his growth small.

The challenge, of course, is making it to the "experienced player" plateau without condemning the game for this "design flaw," a term I place in quotes because it's not clear whether the flaw is necessarily with the game design or with the players. In any game, even those that gamers mistakenly dub as multi-player solitaire, players going later in the turn order should expect to account for the actions of earlier players in determining their first actions. If a player takes Sorcerors, don't take a race that will allow the Sorceror player to easily convert your tokens. If someone takes Giants, use the Halflings to block their paths down the mountain. Small World demands conflict, after all, so don't think you can play in your corner of the board and come out on top. You need to check others at the same time that you expand your own holdings, and thanks to the multiple races and powers, you almost always have options that will allow you to do this.

As you become more familiar with the game, you also learn how to judge the timing of when to decline so as to get the maximum value for your efforts. At the same time, you pay more attention to hurting an opponent's active race rather than his more-easily-conquered declined one for if you drive his active race into such a pitiful state that he'll have no option but to decline, his already declined race will disappear as well, giving you more bang for your bash.

Tangling with Two

The two-player game of Small World is a different beast than that with three or more players as every point you take away from an opponent is effectively a point earned. Since you face only one active race at a time – barring the undying Ghouls – you can sometimes make devastating plays that wouldn't work against multiple opponents. In one game, for example, my opponent paid three coins to lead off with diplomatic Tritons. He used the Triton ability, a discount for areas next to water, to carve a path through the center of the board from ocean to ocean, then declared through his diplomat that I couldn't attack him since he didn't attack my (non-existent) active race.

I immediately saw the writing on the wall – he would expand into empty areas each turn and deny me any attacks for the rest of the game – but I rumbled ahead anyway, relying as always on intuition rather than calculation. Alchemist Elves let me claim six areas over two turns, with the alchemist power granting an additional two points a turn. I switched to fortified Sorcerors, claiming the only two areas that I could and building up the fortifications turn by turn, with each of them granting an additional point. He was earning a steady 11 points each turn, but by game's end I had nipped him by three points, the very points he spent at the start of the game to take the Tritons. (I later realized that more than one fortification can't be built in an area, but don't tell him that. It'll spoil the story!)

In one sense, diplomatic Tritons are broken in a two-player game as the first player can take the race and end the game after one turn. Does that make Small World itself broken? Perhaps for some people, but my response would be to nix that race/power combination whenever it appears with two players and play on. I'm a fan of special power games – that is, those games which grant unique abilities to particular cards or forces within a larger, predictable framework – and Small World offers much to explore in this regard. In another two-player game I was able to take seafaring Trolls (letting me place units in the water that couldn't be conquered), followed by spirit Ghouls (which don't count as a declined race when you decline, in addition to being able to attack) and mounted Humans (which have a discount when attacking the lands that give them bonus points). Everything meshed perfectly, with me earning twenty points in my final turn, the largest total I've seen to date. In that game I chose, if you will, the perfect answers to the puzzle that my opponent presented. As for the next game to come, who knows?