Designed by: Philippe Keyaerts
In Small World, players compete to gather the most victory points by managing various fantasy-type races such as Dwarves, Orcs and so on. The game is a continuous battle and more combative than its appearance might suggest!
The board shows the lands the players will fight over, and it’s broken up into different regions such as seas, mountains, forests, et cetera. At the start of the game each player will choose a race to represent; and these give the game its appeal. For as well as race cards (there are many different kinds) there are also special powers that combine with them, and these are randomly dealt in combinations at the start of the game. As well as the special ability, each pairing gives a combined numeric value that denotes how many actions you can take on your turn.
Having chosen a race, you now take the actions it allows, and this is basically distributing your tribe across the board, knocking out the native tribes – and other players’ pieces too. At the end of your turn you get victory points for each region you control, plus any bonus points your race/type combo gets you. But as in life, an empire will eventually fall, and one the key decisions you make in Small World is when you put your race into decline – this means flipping all your tokens denoting ownership of a region over, and offering no resistance when other players attack. But in the meantime, you can get another race, and start the process over again!
After ten rounds, points are added up and the winner is declared.
The whole game is a battle.
Low. There are decisions to make, but nothing to make you rub your chin raw.
Low to moderate. Some combat games have a bunch of factors to consider, but Small World bypasses that cognitive juggling act in favour of something more simple - where to expand, where to consolidate.
The fourteen races and twenty special abilities provide a wide variety of combos.
2-5
Players
8+
Years
60-90
Mins
Sam says
What makes Small World interesting is the race/special ability combos. After that it feels a bit like multi-player pugilism, with the decline rule adding a slender vein of strategy. It's not a game that really excites me, but for the right group (a family, who don't mind a bit of feistiness) I can see it being a hit.