Another boardgame night Small World & Sentinels of the Mulitiverse

 

So, we pulled out Small World, a game that neither of has played in quite a few years (decade+?) I cannot understand why this game has not seen much action. We also played a couple of games of Sentinels of the Multiverse.

 

It is a brilliantly designed game with very nice components and multiple boards each of which is designed to handle from 2 to 5 players. Purpose designed boards allows for game play to work regardless of how many players are playing. 

The nation that a player controls is made up of two tiles. One tile gives a racial bonus, for instance Dwarfs gain bonus gold/victory points for each mine space they control and the other tile gives another bonus. The tiles are shuffled and dealt out in pairs. Any game will be different than any other game because of this random distribution of tile pairs. So in our game, the Dwarfs had underground (a nice combination) this allowed them to move across the board by emerging wherever there was a cave. 

The players can see what pairs exist. At the start of the game players take turn selecting a nation to play. They can select the top most pair for free, but if they want a different one it will cost them gold/VP to select a lower pair. That gold is paid out to each pair that they have bypassed. You deploy and conquer with your selected nation on your turn, coming onto the board from almost any edge space. The numbers in the yellow circle indicate how many armies you start with, for most that is the upper limit. You will typically play that nation for 2-3 turns before you retire it. Once you put  your nation into decline you must select a new nation. Also you must remove all armies in excess of 1 from each space your declined nation controlled. You still score points for this declined nation for each space it controls. At some point you will decline the new nation you just selected. You may only have 1 declined nation so any armies remaining from the previous declined nation are removed.

 Great aspects of this game

• Variable nations no two games will see the same nation
  
• Boards based on number of players
• Retirement of nations decision, when is it time or should you wait another turn
• Selection of nation, is it worth spending VP to get a nation other than the one on top
• Simple combat system, simple rules despite all the variable
• Clear well designed cheat sheets, one for each player
  
• Different VP based on nature of the nation

Overall a great fun game!

We also played two Sentinels games. Game one saw our four heroes vs one villain, Omnitron. The game was fun but we rarely felt all that concerned that we were going to lose.

Our second game was more challenging. Our four heroes were pitted against four villains. For awhile it really did not look promising, but while two heroes were incapacitated, we were able to defeat the villains.