Small World
Game: Small World with Tales & Legends expansion and 5 players
Play: Choose a race/special ability combination from the visible cards, then use it to conquer regions on the map, which often involves defeating other players’ races (and what’s not fun about that?). At the end of your turn, you get coins (points) for every region you occupy, sometimes with additional bonuses because of the race or ability. The game ends after 8 rounds.
The Tales & Legends expansion is a pack of cards that add twists to each round. Some are helpful (Baby Boom gives each player an extra race token) and some may cause problems (Malediction forces each player to abandon an occupied region). There are 54 cards to choose from and 7 cards are used during a game.
Art: I love (most of) the art for Small World. The map is amazingly detailed, the races are hilariously and beautifully illustrated, and even the coins are different metallic colors for different numbers (which is unusual enough to be noteworthy).
I’m not fond of the ridiculous art on the Amazons, the sole race with a female depicted on their tiles. They are powerful, which is cool, but wearing only leaves and tattoos to battle is ridiculous; give the girl some armor! There is a mini-expansion which I haven’t used called “Grand Dames”, which adds three more races represented by (albeit also scantily-clad) females. It’s something, I guess.
The art on Tales & Legends was also well done, and very funny - for example on the Baby Boom card, there is a baby Sorcerer that has a goatee and funky eyebrows (think evil Spock) just like the adult Sorcerer.
Conclusion: Beautiful, fun, and works well for many or few players. I really enjoy playing it occasionally.
I would play again with the expansion too, although some of the wording on the cards is unclear (for example, whether a card takes effect at the beginning of a round or the beginning of each player’s turn) and I could imagine a group agreeing to leave out certain cards if their effects were too powerful (as we have done in other games).
