Smallworld Board Game

[saundby]

I picked up Smallworld by Days of Wonder today and played it with the family. It's quick to learn, fun, and has the right balance of simplicity and complexity for a "my brain's fried from work" evening. It's sort of a cross between Cosmic Encounter and Wizard's Quest. Mixed powers of races and points for land dominance.

This one will be joining Cataan on our light gaming evening list. Others we play include Quirks, Cosmic Encounter (both by Eon), Fleets, and Munchkin. And occasionally Ogre.

For more baseline on what we like, more involved evenings of board gaming include Risk, Stellar Conquest, and Triplanetary.

 

[dean]

Sounds fun! We'll have to check it out.

We play a lot of the Euros; my spouse particularly likes the card game Lost Cities, and we enjoy San Juan also.

Train games are perennial favorites as well: Ticket to Ride, Railroad Tycoon, Eurorails, and a couple others.

Board games like Agricola, Puerto Rico, Lord of the Rings (co-op), Pandemic (co-op), and Tikal are also often played.

 

[saundby]

For the casual gaming the euro games are nice. They're complex enough to be engaging, but simple enough to play after work. My old Microgames used to fill this niche, but they usually have a single success strategy and demand direct conflict between players. Most of the euros have multiple success strategies and allow different degrees of conflict, so they're easier for my wife and daughters to enjoy.

We played a five-way game of Smallworld tonight. My oldest brought her boyfriend over for the evening. It was a lot of fun. We had flying trolls and merchant orcs and other such bits of silliness from the race/power mixes we drew. My daughter's boyfriend won, in part because she wasn't attacking him (she tends to bring sentiment to the gaming table, at least once per player. After that, though...)

We're still loving this game.