Another board game adaptation, Small World is a fun, short game that can be played in about 30 minutes. It’s a very simple game, but it has depth to it that makes it difficult to master.
As in Risk, the premise of Small World is capturing territories. Unlike Risk, Small World involves less chance and more strategy. To overtake a territory you just need enough tokens. You spend these tokens overtaking each territory, and you only roll the dice if you have a couple of tokens left over, and not enough to take the territory you want.
To protect your territories you redistribute your tokens after you’ve captured lands. If there are more tokens on a position, it costs your opponents more tokens to take over that land. At the start of your next turn, you take all your spare tokens back, leaving one on each territory. You can then use these left over tokens to take more territories.
At the end of each turn you will earn coins for each territory you own. When the game ends the player with the most coins wins the game.
Eventually your forces will be spread too thin, and you won’t have enough tokens to keep capturing territories. To counter this, you can send your current race into decline and choose a new one. You keep all the territories you had with one token on each, but lose any special abilities in exchange for new abilities.
The Race/Power combos are what make the game interesting. When you start the game you can choose one combo. These are random combinations of a race and a power. Each gives you a unique ability that can help you earn more coins. Abilities can do things like giving you bonus coins for owning a certain type of territory, give you a dragon that can always capture a territory, or allow you to capture water-based territories.
The strategy in the game boils down to picking the right combos, and choosing the right turn to decline your race and choose a new combo. Too early and you may not have as strong a position as your opponent. Too late and your opponent may decline first and pick a combo that you were relying on to win.
An extra layer of strategy comes in learning how to use specific combos effectively, as well as countering combos your opponent chooses. This creates a game that is simple, easy to learn, yet full of depth that needs mastering.
The expansions add more races/powers that can be used in combos. This brings more variety to the game’s mechanics, meaning you need to learn new strategies to get better at the game.
Unfortunately it seems like the servers for this game were switched off a long time ago, so online play isn’t possible. However, it can still be played locally or over LAN with friends, and can be a good tool to practice if you have the physical board game. It’s also not full of monetisation like other board game adaptations, which is a major plus in my book.
Personally, I’d still recommend buying the physical board game over the Steam version, but the digital release can fill the gap if you’re a wandering nomad.
