In Theory

A little while ago I played Small World for what had to be the fiftieth time. I’ve enjoyed Days of Wonder’s best game since it came out almost five years ago, across a handful of expansions, all sorts of player counts, and a completely alternate version of the game. After you play any game for that long you begin to notice all of its little peculiarities. I began noticing these in Small World a while ago. For one thing, it seems strange that the victory points are totally trackable, since one of the elements that arises in the game is convincing people that they should attack someone else. That shouldn’t even be an ambiguity, because what people score each turn is open information. I also noticed that turn order becomes kind of important, especially in the late game. The people going first have to do a little bit of defense so that the later players aren’t able to just cherry-pick everything, since the last player doesn’t need to worry at all about positioning in the final turn.