So I bought Small World1, because it's terrific (hence the W.I.L.), and I also bought the various expansions because, as I've alluded to before, there is a hole in every gamer's heart that can only be filled by having every single possible bit for his chosen money sink2. Thankfully, this was all less traumatic to the pocketbook than it could have been, thanks to the good people of Meeplemart, their reasonable (and Canadian!) prices and their startlingly fast delivery. Meeplemart: For when you simply cannot function until you've spent $200 on completely unnecessary Arkham Horror figures3.
Anyway, now that we're done polishing Meeplemart's tackle, on to polishing Small World's. Small World is a game with a spectacular amount of cardboard. There are two boards (with different maps on each side, so you can play with anywhere from 2 to 5 players), there are mountains, there are a bunch of cardboard Race4 banners with Generic Fantasy's Greatest Hits on them (You know Orcs, Halflings, Elves and the rest, although the expansions mix it up a bit with such examples of European cultural sensitivity as Gypsies and Pygmies5); there are a bunch more power banners, which are marked with adjectives like Flying, Peace-Loving and Marauding, and which fit into a groove on the race banners; there are troll holes and fortresses and dragons, and there are a shedload of little cardboard armies to punch out. Fortunately, the game also gives you a fancy little storage tray for the armies in the main set, and one of the expansions has another for all the ones from the other expansions. We're talking serious cardboard here.
The reason for all this is also the strength of the game: the Basic Rule. To conquer a territory, you need 2 armies, plus one for every bit of cardboard on it, including other armies. That's it. Oh, there's more to it than that - every race has its own power, and the special powers which combine with those, but once you get the Basic Rule you have a good 90% of the game well in hand.
Gameplay consists of buying a race (six races are doled out and given random powers, and as each is bought, another is added), taking over whatever territory you can with it, and taking victory coins equal to your occupied territories, plus bonuses from your race and power. Then other races come along and mess with you. Eventually, your guys will be killed off (when you conquer using the Basic Rule, one of the conquered armies gets discarded, the others get spread around the conqueree's remaining territory) or be spread out too thin, or just get boring, and you can put them into decline so they can continue making sweet victory coins for you while you get a whole new set of assholes to wreck shit up. Whoever's richest at the end of the game wins, just like in real life.
You may have noticed that the Basic Rule has no randomness to it. It's a sheer accounting measure. That's intentional - SW is, as barely mentioned above, from The Europes, which makes it one of those sneaky bastard well-polished Eurogames posing as a brash randomness-besotted Ameritrash game. Except that if you don't have enough troops to take one last territory at the end of your turn, you can roll a die to get temporary reinforcements. And that there's a power that lets you roll it too. And that there's a lot of randomness in how random races are linked to random powers and then arranged in a random order of cost 6. The Usual Suspects squabble over what this means and whether and how to remove Demon Unpredictability from their perfect equations, making for another fine example of how Taking It Too Seriously mucks up the fun.
And the game is fun, and fast, and surprisingly complex for all that it uses an icky-poo die. The satisfaction of trouncing an enemy gives way to the misery of being trounced in turn and then to the deliberation as to whether to go for one more landgrab, or put your race into decline and pick a new one next turn. Some power/race combos are legendarily good(/broken), others kinda suck, but they're all different and novel and influence strategy in complex ways. It's a game of Civilization in an hour, and without those crazy-ass wonder videos. So it's a wash, really, but it's a damn fine wash.
Finally, a word on customization. The base game has a black race banner and a blank power banner so you can make up your own, like Illuminati cards. The expansions add some more (and the expansions are largely made up of player-submitted powers and races. As I've said before, every gamer is a game designer). And the game itself inspires ideas at a phenomenal pace - My first game at 7 AM, on Boxing Day with no sleep and a beer in my hand, I was already crawling with ideas. Even the crusty BGGeeks, when they weren't figuring out how to replace the game's only source of randomness with bonus extra-dry strategy, produced some nifty print-and-play expansions.
1 And in doing so managed to drunkenly break my vow not to buy any more games until I had a job like a real boy.
2 Well, not every single bit. I left out the Tales & Legends action deck as a paltry attempt to prove that my dissolution was incomplete, like a drunk intentionally leaving the last swallow of his beer in the glass because that proves he's not an alcoholic.
3 Seriously, the game comes with cardboard standees and bases which have never failed me. All these figures are going to do is make your monster chits look ridiculous running around all Flatland at the 3D-realized feet of your investigators. And then Fantasy Flight comes out with a line of monster figures and oh my God that's brilliant.
4 I'd do some bog-standard grumping about how race is incorrect and they should really be species banners, but you can't fight the moonlight or the tide of nerd inertia. Inerdtia. Gygax called 'em races, they're races.
5 Those actually are races, which just goes to show. Although there is always that book that White Wolf put out about Gypsies being a separate genetic lineage of magical tricksters. I think it was just after their book on playing the ghosts of Holocaust victims, and just before somebody asked them what in the living fuck they thought they were doing.
6 This sentence is more or less just me trying to break my roommate Matt (of Fiasco badass mail-order bride Natasha and homeless cuckolded murderous gay dude fame). For reasons unknown, duder has a broom up his ass about the use of "random", not merely in its use to refer to wacky-loopy-freak-the-mundanes shenanigans (which is, of course, despised by all people of character and spirit), but its use to refer to anything which is at all dependent on anything else. Which leaves us with, I guess, singularities and the Primal Chaos?
7 UNBEARABLY TWEE FINAL LINE EXPUNGED. WE APOLOGIZE. TRUST US, THOUGH, IT'S A PRETTY FUN GAME.
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