Small World, from Days of Wonder, is a fantasy conquest board game with an interesting twist. The world is too small for everyone to fit. The object of the game is to expand at the expense of your neighbours.
There are plenty of fantasy races to choose from as you expand your empire. Halflings, Humans, Elves, Orcs and more. Each race has its own innate ability to help them through the game. Halflings build their little holes in the ground, Orcs love to pillage, and so on. In addition, each race is randomly assigned a second ability.
Abilities range from gaining more gold from a particular terrain type to more esoteric abilities such as flying! This changes game to game and provides a huge variety in play, as races rarely play the same way twice.
The objective of Small World is to push your opponents out of the way and grab as many provinces on the map as you can. More provinces equals more money, and the player with the most money at the end of the game is the winner.
One twist in play is that each race loses the ability to conquer as turns go by. Eventually they are of no more use to you, and here you can push them into decline and take a new race. A race in decline can hold provinces until pushed out, but has no special abilities. Your new race can conquer provinces around the old one, or even take over another area of the board entirely. One trick of a successful game of Small
World is knowing just when to push your current race into decline and choose a new one.
Small World is a game for 2-5 players and scales nicely with the number of players in your game. Two double-sided boards are provided, with a different board for a 2,3,4 or 5 player game. Each race has a number of tokens to represent its current military might and both tokens and board are very well illustrated and add to the bright fantasy feel of the game.
Small World takes only one game to master and can be played in around one hour. The game is available in the LXG club library.
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