Small World

Hello blog viewers! As promised, I will introduce a new board game on my blog every week. This week, we take a look at a game about a fantasy world with a multitude of fictional races and monsters at your command. The only problem is that this made-up world isn't big enough for all of them. It's up to you and your tribe to fight off the other players by beating them as much as you can for the most points and dominate the world. This is Small World.

Small World is a RISK type of game (RISK, as in the board game). It is a multi-player board game (2-5 players) published by Days of Wonder. The objective is to control an army and try to conquer and occupy as much land as you can.

Global domination? oooooooooooh snap!

After the game has been set up the players pick a race with a special power at the beginning of their turns, and they, for example, may become the:

Flying Orcs
Diplomatic Skeletons
or Pillaging Elves
in other words (adjective) and (noun)

Each Race and Power has added benefits to help you beat your opponent

Added benefits, added benefits, benefits, added, beat people with added benefits... :)

The benefits themselves are pretty well tailored to the race their given to, Orcs for example get extra points for killing things because everybody knows that's what Orcs do, while Dwarves get extra points for mines because everybody knows Dwarves love mines. The special powers are what makes your race more interesting. Randomly, each race is given a power. So you have the chance you having Berserker Ratmen attacking Dragon Master Giants.

Powers to the left. Races are to the right. 

In case you were wondering there are a total of 14 races and 20 powers to randomly generate and choose from.

The races

The powers

Once players have picked their race and have been given their troops they may begin their conquest on one of the 4 different world layouts ( this game has 2 different boards, each double-sided. Awesome right?). The board selected will depend on how many players are playing, smaller boards for less players, and bigger boards for more players.

This is what the average board looks like

Each region/territory is divided by white borders. Players on their turn place their armies on different territory until they run out of troops or don't have enough to take any more territories. Players get a set amount of army tokens to place based on the number shown on their race and power pieces.

Each of these races get 10 tokens 

These tokens are all the player gets unless they manage to roll a number on the redeployment dice. The dice is used if they don't have enough tokens to take a certain territory. The user rolls a 6 sided dice with only 1/2 chance to redeploy because only 3 of the sides have numbers, and the other 3 are blank. If the roll is successful, the player may receive up to 3 extra units.

Like a D6

Once the player cant take more 'turf', the player ends their conquest, rearranges their army in their newly acquired property, ends their turn, and collects points. The player may rearrange however they like as long as there is at least one token one each region. Players may take up as many tokens as they want and place them in their hand to use in their next conquest, or place them defensively if they fear they may be invaded by other players.

Later in the game the players will have stretched their race thin across the board and may need to decline their race and start a new one. The declined race cannot be controlled by the player, but they remain on the board until they are eliminated.

Sweet dreams, my Diplomatic Trolls....

At the end of each turn the player is rewarded with points based on how many regions they occupy, and based on their racial benefits or special powers. The player with the most points after a set amount of turns is the ruler of Small World and the winner of the game.

My Play Through

I have made it my goal in this blog to try and sit down and play the games I'm over viewing at least once with some friends. This week, I played with my beautiful girlfriend, sassy Sister-in-law (brother's wife), genius brother, and awesome sister. Since there's 5 of us we play with the big, bad, 5 player board. None of us have previously played before and the only advantage I had over them is:

1) I read the rules.

The player with the pointiest ears plays first ( no joke), naturally that's me which works out since I take my turn explaining the rules to them. I take a race that i thought interesting from the group of five ( Spirit Ghouls) even though I knew there was better choices. I didn't want to pick a race that would completely dominate the game since it's their first time playing... even though it screws me over in the end.We take a lot of time asking questions and looking up rules but the over all game play was still fun. We all start picking our races and getting settled in on the board.

My beautiful girlfriend sits to the left of me so she plays next and picks the Dragon Master Haflings, why? Because dragons (duh).

Her pet dragon burning everything alive.

So she takes her Hobbits/Halfings places them around the board and uses her dragon to kill my ghouls... Thanks babe. After that she basically hunkers down in the ground and plays super defensively.

Next is my sassy Sister-in-law, she picks the Forest Giants. She takes them up into the hills where she gets an advantage and holds that hill for most of the game and a couple of forests to generate extra points. She doesn't expand much but manages to hold her ground when the invaders came knocking

Go away, stupid ghouls. 

Everything is good until my genius brother starts his turn... I see my brother eyeing the Flying Sorcerers I was looking at earlier...

My reaction

I don't know if he just got lucky or he actually read his player card and picked the best race combo available. on his first turn, he flew around the board taking up land from everyone and unoccupied spaces on the board easily giving him about 9 or 10 points at the end of the turn. He continues to bash almost everyone on the board.

My "I'm screwed" sudden realization. 

Last is my awesome sister, and she picks the Tritons (fish people) and invades from the shores of the sea and lake. Her play is pretty basic but manages to acquire a good amount of points on all her turns mostly because she left everyone alone and just focused on occupying open lands and only attacking my Genius brother ( because he was pretty much attacking everyone else).

"We come in peace"

the game goes on for about 3 hours ( we took a break in the middle of the game). I end up coming in 5th place (lol) and my genius brother ends up winning because he actually played very well. Small World was an experience enjoyed by all, although a little on the long side, it's still shorter and more fun than Monopoly.

Yay jail! so much fun. 

The Settlers of Catan

In this entry I’m going to be talking about one of the more renowned titles. Created in Germany back in 1995, The Settlers of Catan is a multi-player game (3-4 players) where the players assume settlers of a new island called Catan. The objective of the game is to harvest resources, build roads and settlements and trade resources with other players. I wish I could describe it as a middle age Monopoly but Monopoly isn't nearly as fun, but you could say they have a few similarities.

I chose to do The Settlers of Catan as my first entry because of the way it draws you in. It’s like the gateway drug of board games, once you try it, you got to have more Catan and more board games like Catan. Not only did it get me addicted to board games, but even my girlfriend likes it (considering she’s not a dork like me, that’s pretty impressive).

This is what the board game looks like

This is what makes up the board

If you haven’t figured it out yet, you essentially put the board together piece by piece when you set it up. The individual hexes have different terrain to farm different resources from:

Forest produces wood

Hills produce clay/brick

Mountains produce ore

Fields produce wheat

Pastures produce sheep (wool)

And one desert hex that doesn't produce anything

There is one way to assemble it for beginners. Other than that there’s no reason not to randomly put the pieces anyway you want for a more interesting game.

The turn starts with the player rolling the dice. If you or any other player has a city/settlement adjacent to a hex with the number on the dice, you produce that resource and store it to either build and advance yourself in the game or keep it for later and trade with another player if you didn’t generate the specific resource you wanted.

The action phase of your turn comes next and you can either trade or build at this time. Building requires you to spend resources to build roads, new settlements or cities, or purchase a development card (I’ll get into those later). You build roads to build new settlements at sites that yield resources you believe are needed for you to win the game. You build settlements to generate more resources to build more or build expensive things, and you build cities over your settlements to further improve the amount of resources you generate.  Consider the building placement of your entire colony because good placement gives you a slight advantage in the game.

Trading is more interesting compared to Monopoly. In Catan, you are given a choice to either trade with a player or with the bank. Since it takes 4 resources of the same kind to trade for only 1 resource of any kind, the game encourages you trade with other players instead. When trading with other players simply declare what resources you want and what you’re willing to trade it for. You can even monopolize individual resources if your colony is situated in a way that you’re the only player generating that specific resource, letting you charge extra when the other players come begging for it.

There are few things left that you need to know, otherwise I might as well turn this blog into a rule book. There are some mechanics like the robber which steals from other players and the development cards that I won’t go into detail. Development cards are usually bought when players have no more space to expand or if they want to take a gamble and receive a random benefit. The robber is pretty self-explanatory, he goes around the board and steals resources, nobody likes him.

This is the robber, he's not cool.

When you play settlers of Catan, you’re always gathering resources, building structures to expand your colony and trading with players to reach 10 victory points. You get victory points by building settlements, cities, the longest road or the largest army.

1 for a settlement or victory point development card

2 for a city, longest road, or largest army.

One game lasts from about 45 minutes to an hour on average. Once you start playing you might not have any good idea of how you would go about winning the game. After a few games you’ll notice what really worked for you and build your colony strategically, gaining advantages you have over your opponents. You can follow any strategy you want but the game will usually depend on the luck of the dice.

It might not sound as fun but it’s really great when you get a chance to play it. If you do, there’s also many expansions and variations for the game to twist things up a bit if things have gone stale after a couple of games.  

That basically sums up The Settlers of Catan for you. I’ll write about a new game every week and try to play with some friends to give you guys a more in-depth look into each one.

Thanks for reading J

Welcome to my blog!

I am to do a blog in one of my classes in an advertising program that I'm taking in college (to measure page views and stuff). For a long time I was pretty indecisive on what I wanted to write about. I even waited until the last minute to finally start posting in my blog. But after many stupid ideas and some careful planning, I have decided to write my blog on one of the many things I enjoy, board games.

Not these boardgames!

I’m not exactly talking about writing a review about Monopoly, or making an overview about Scrabble. Honestly, what’s there to say about either of them that hasn't been said or experienced already? Who even likes Monopoly anyway, its way too long for a game.

I wanted to create a blog that gives people insight on some “different” tabletop games, board games you won’t find at a Wal-Mart or other general merchandising stores. I'm talking the about the dark side of the table top. Games with so many pieces the instructions tell you how to neatly put everything away. Games are intricate and force you to think before you move. There’s no way to actually describe them since they don’t belong under a certain genre, or have a name. But I plan to take my few favourites and shine some light over them in my blog.

Anyway, thanks for reading and hope you enjoy my upcoming reviews on The Nerd Side of the Tabletop.