Never Boredgames – Small World

I recently splashed out and picked up a trio of new boardgames. I had never been a big player of boardgames, although I always enjoyed the ones I did play, until our friend Jonas got Karin and I into playing Agricola. This led to Karin giving me my own copy as birthday gift and regular Agricola gaming nights followed. Since just browsing sites such as boardgamegeek.com informs as to the many hundreds of games out there I thought I should expand my horizons.

After a couple of trips to the game store near my office and much deliberating I picked up Small World, Cadwallon: City of Thieves and Condottiere.

Small World is probably the best known of the three. It was released in 2009 and has won many awards since then. It is best described as a fast and fun Risk-ish game.

The general premise is that there are too many gods to rule in the “small world” of the game and they (the players) battle it out for supremacy. At the start of the game players each choose a race (Human, Elf, Dwarf, Amazon…)  that has been randomly paired with a perk (Flying, Beserk…) that bestows some ability onto the race. Because each race has it’s own stats and abilities which are then modified by a randomly chosen perk each game is always different. Once a player has conquered (or lost) as much as he/she can with their current race/perk combo they can then choose to put their race into decline and pick another race/perk combo. Players can only have one race in decline at a time (with one exception provided by a perk) and a race in decline cannot be controlled and holds only a token force on it’s conquered areas. Play continues until a set number of turns has been reached and the winner is the player with control of the most areas of the map (counted as areas that you have control of with your current race, or with your race in decline).

The game is very fast paced, not at all like the sometimes ponderous pace of Agricola, and it makes a good choice when people are in the mood for gaming but maybe not too much thinking! Although I don’t really regard Agricola as an inaccessible game it can be a bit daunting to the first time player. Small World on the other hand, which is also not without it’s large collection of counters and markers, feels much more accessible. Small World is definitely a family friendly game – almost any age can have fun playing and the variation in the race/perk combinations means that you rarely play two games that are similar.

At the end of the day I can certainly recommend Small World to both experienced gamers and newcomers alike.