Pairs well with: A fair-well shot every time someone you love kills your brethren.

Brutus scale: 9/10 daggers in the back. It’s like the Ides of March out there.

Smallworld is played on a mythical map where different and diverse races work towards annihilating one another. This seems morbidly like our own sad world (bar the absence of victory points) but actually it’s rather cheery. During the game a number of races are randomly selected through the art of shuffling, with random characteristic pairings. Each player will start off with selecting a race: it is your job to pick the best combination of race and characteristic, both of which supply you with some kind of delicious special abilities (more points here, easier stuff to do there, deathless and invasive ghouls… you know the drill). This means you shouldn’t pick Dwarves and then blame the game for having weak racial balance (you know who you are, gamers!) as it very much depends on the race/characteristic combination. Each race then sweeps onto the board starting at the edges, and generally takes over territories, killing anything in its path.

Although this game appears to have a massively high Brutus Scale rating bestowed for the ability and even encouragement it gives the players to try to ruin each other’s games, strategies, and lives, it is in fact still great fun. Super-awesome slaughter-themed fun. In fact, there is not really any easy way to play the game without cheerily stabbing your closest friends in the back on your campaign to achieve more victory points than everyone else. Once each player has a race on the board it is nigh-on impossible to sit in a little corner and avoid any conflict. Furthermore, the drive to kill is even exacerbated by some races and some characteristics. For instance, Skeletons gain another unit each round for every unit that they have killed. Remember what we said about picking the best combo? Skeletons paired with the characteristic ‘berserk’ or something similar (more berserk = more death to the enemies) means that your race can more or less act as the apocalypse.

During a turn you place your race units (sometimes called tokens) over regions you wish to hold – the more regions you hold at the end of your turn the more victory points you generate. This balance fluctuates depending how many units are killed, where you move, and how many races you are currently controlling. A player may only have one ‘active’ race. What does that even mean you ask? You’re allowed one extremely fit race which darts around the board like a sleek and well-oiled warrior, and one obese one, which stays where you left it like a sad sack of low-scoring potatoes. In times of peril you may sacrifice the obese guys because they’re slower and delicious.

Wouldn’t that be interesting? But no, sorry, we were lying. Your ‘active’ race actually means one that is currently in the height of its reign! Moving, conquering, presumably producing great works of art and literature. (None of this is featured in the game, we’ll just assume they all have hobbies and jobs as well. A turn is an entire year, you know!)

Like a few others that we’ve reviewed recently, Small World is a great ‘gateway’ game, and it played such a role for Lizzy and Briony many years ago. One of the main things that really stands out to a new board gamer is the complete and utter lack of loyalty that you have to your own damn races. There you are, learning the rules and picturing the scenes that will unfold: you picture yourself welcoming a race of optimistic and bright-eyed creatures into your embrace and send them off on their journey, to occupy lands and build a legacy that will truly stand the test of time. Their victories will be your victories, their losses will be your losses, and together you will see the game through to the end.

Nope!

As soon as your race looks like it’s peaked, has spread itself as far as you’re willing or able to take it, or even that it’s just occupied enough land that you don’t want to have to worry about it anymore, then you effectively abandon it and move on. You put the race into ‘decline’. If you decline your race then in your next turn you can pick a new race and characteristic combination (for god’s sake pick the best one. No, put the Elves down. Try again). Your declined race stays on the board for now, which means they still generate victory points at the end of your turn, but aren’t able to defend themselves or move any more, which essentially makes them Skeleton fodder.

At first, sending your own race into decline is a pretty difficult thing to bring yourself to do. Not just because you have a soft spot for those adorable Flying Tritons, but because it feels like you’re royally screwing yourself over, points-wise. Going into decline is the only thing you can do on that turn, which means you may not end up with many territories to get points from since you’re not able to grab anywhere new. Even worse, most of the special characteristics that your race is paired with will tend to go away as soon as that race goes into decline, including any delicious bonus points that you were getting.

As such, a lot of the game becomes a lesson in investing in your own future. Sacrificing points now in favour of more points in the future? Madness! It’s also, as above, about picking some really good race / trait combinations to match your goals. But, possibly the most important of all, the game is about trickery and deceit. Another aspect of the game that really stands out to the newbie is the fact that after victory points are given out they all immediately become secret. This is really important in a game of Small World not just to create a bit of suspense at the end but for tactics during the entire game. You need to make a really big deal about how few points you’re getting, how bad your turns have been, and how really, really, important it is that everyone joins together to attack the person who you say is winning. Because you don’t just want to be gaining victory points, you want to be taking them from whoever’s doing the best. And you don’t just want to be spreading across the map, you want to be doing so while still tricking everyone into thinking that you’re no competition and should be left alone. This is what is termed in Smallworld and other games as ‘the Lizzy manoeuvre.’ Briony’s tactics on the other hand tend to be ‘take the thing with the most units, use all of the units, get a lot of points, repeat’. For this manoeuvre the Amazons are excellent, but still scantily-clad.

After so many rounds* the game ends, and the person with the most victory points wins. Simple, honest fun, without the honesty. It’s fast paced, full of dramatic changes, and gets you riled up over a fantasy world. To keep the game ever more interesting Days of Wonder have brought out 734 expansions for the original game** as well as the Smallworld2 app which smoothly transports the game to phone and tablet and passes many a boring train or bus journey whether solo or with friends. One of the good things about the expansions is they’re not utter bollocks, which is a trap a lot of great games fall into. In fact, a lot of the expansions are generated by fan-based designs and ideas for new races and characteristics, meaning that the board game geeks get a say in what the game should include.

Days of Wonder never responded to our suggestions however. Probably because it was a giant llama with laser eyes that became angry at the sight of tangerines instead of an attractive breasty ice-witch. WE LIKE WHAT WE LIKE DAMMIT.

*It varies depending on the number of players.

**In reality it’s about 6. But boy does it feel like 734 when you have so many race tiles and not enough room to store them.

Brutus rating: 7/10

Pairs well with: Sacrificial human blood, but failing that a Bloody Mary.

The first thing Briony, or indeed anyone, learns about the game T’zolkin is that they don’t know how to pronounce it. T-olkin? Solkin? That Mayan game? So let’s go ahead and confirm that the correct pronunciation is in fact Z-olkin or tsol-kin. Oh the English language, you and your silent t’s are so amusing and whimsical. Furthermore we should probably confirm that the significance of the name lies in the fact that it represents a particular Mayan calendar and literally means ‘to divide days’.

The game board itself is made up of a series of connected cogs that are all linked to a big-ass central cog. At the end of each turn the central cog is turned once, and thus pulls each connected smaller cog around once also. The central cog represents a calendar year, with each linked cog representing a place or building – these feature a series of resources and/or actions a player may select. Your first few run-throughs of the game will almost certainly begin in the same ‘holy-fuck-the-cogs-look-epic, that-is-some-beautiful-engineering-right-there, I’ve-never-seen-a-board-game-do-this, it’s-so-well-themed (wipe away tear), why-did-I-never-have-an-appreciation-for-Mayan-cogs-before?’ way.*

Then, fairly swiftly, the wonder is followed by: Oh mother of god I can’t use these fucking things. Why did I never had an appreciation for forward planning before?

But don’t worry kids, you’ll get the hang of it. In fact the game has been designed in a way that suggests that they knew that people would often inadvertently try to ruin their own game. This means that there is very little negative scoring, and the cogs have some extra spaces at the end of their cycle which allows players to have a little more time to try and salvage their strategy. Similarly there is always an empty place to put a worker (yes, it’s a classic worker placement game) thanks to the four player limit. We noticed that compared to other resource collection games it really makes you feel like you have options, which sure is nice when someone else has just done what you had been planning for the past 7 turns.

Despite this it gets a fairly high Brutus rating as often someone selects the free cog position you really wanted, making you go somewhere else instead and naturally giving them the ol’ squinty evil-eyes. You also tend you lose track of when you need to take your workers off cogs and in what specific order, making your poor planning frustrating.

Pro tip about the game: So you probably saw the middle 15minutes of a documentary once, talking about the Mayans and corn, or swords, or the Spanish or something. You seem to remember something about sacrifice? Fortunately, the game doesn’t require actual historical knowledge **. In fact the game is one of those rare grey non-judgemental areas where players can say the stupidest assumptions ‘because they heard it somewhere once’. This will inevitably lead to consulting the interweb machine, and your merry band of gamers will be all the wiser for it.

‘I saw somewhere that the Mayans invented the recorder to help herd llamas, as they dislike the slightly hollow sound’

‘Oh really, Andy. I call bullshit. To the Google!’

Carrying on, in a player’s turn they have the option to either place workers on the board, or to remove them. You can place or remove as many as you like in your turn. The workers are placed on grooves on a cog of your choice at the lowest possible space (usually the beginning tooth), and the idea is to slowly let your little Mayan chaps rotate around the cog until they reach the action or resource of your choice. This means that the game is hugely reliant on your ability to know how many turns it will be until you can take your worker off to achieve the action you want, and to extend that to all of your workers across the board on different cogs. We imagine this is loosely what it’s like to have a fleet of children and being expected to know where they are, what dietary requirements they have, and what they’re doing at all times. Respect to you parents out there, we find it difficult enough to simply identify which wooden piece is our own on a medium sized board of wooden pieces.

The sheer availability of strategies and combinations in this game is another reason that the team enjoyed it so much. Each cog, as well as representing a building/area, also has themed resources. This means that if the cog for the collection of corn and wood is mostly full you can turn to different cog for the same resources. In addition to the cogs there are also favour tracks, much in the same design as Caylus or Agricola. By moving up these you can get bonuses in different fields. These include taking extra corn on the corn/wood cog, getting extra resources from the resource cog, getting building bonuses if you build anything, going up temple tracks, and obtaining crystal skulls.

Crystal skulls are the no-fuss-victory-points option of the game. Only there is actually a lot of fuss in obtaining them. They’re a resource that is fairly difficult to get hold of seen as there is only one cog position that offers it aside from gaining them on the favours track. Despite that, there is an entire cog dedicated to the use of them. You can only use this cog if you have an elusive skull, and the longer you leave your Mayan chap on there, the more victory points and extra resources he can get you. When you take him off he has to leave a skull on his place on the cog. This means that eventually the cog fills up with skulls and no-one can use it to get more points.

Several gaming buddies have so far pointed out that this is like that Indiana Jones film, you know, the fourth one that was all about the skulls. To them we loudly and clearly say, with our fingers in our ears, ‘La la la la la, you must be crazy, there are only three Indiana Jones films.’

Moving swiftly on there is also a temple track to gain favour with the gods. Briony is currently very aware that she complained about the sheer number of components in Terra Mystica and is now very much praising T’zolkin despite it seemingly having a similar number of components. She still believes that T’zolkin offers a smoother interaction between all of its mechanisms, and therefore a better ability to combine various activities which still isn’t the case in Terra Mystica. She’s willing to admit that maybe she was a little hard on the game, but maintains that T’zolkin is still better. Maybe she just really likes taking part in the over-farming and human sacrificial culture of the Mayan’s, who knows.

Finally, there are four marked teeth on the central cog. Each time these come along two things happen: Firstly each player must feed their workers two corn each in order to keep them alive, and secondly you obtain victory points and/or resources depending on how far up the temple tracks you are. This is pretty neat because it makes the presence of the temple tracks something more than a mechanism that only serves to boost your points right at the end of the game, and makes it worthwhile to use throughout. The only qualm we have with it is that the resource icon for gold looks suspiciously like a chicken nugget. We’re onto your cultural heritage Mayans, feeding a civilization with 24-piece boxes of chicken nuggets and then blaming the corn when everyone died. Very sneaky of you.

This also makes the building prices rather amusing: ‘4 chicken nuggets and some stone to build this yellow building… hmmm’

In conclusion we enjoy this game rather a lot. Great theme, great mechanics, an awful lot of corn. The uniqueness of the cogs really adds to the game, and the layout and versatility of the different parts mean that there are infinite and transferable strategies available at any one time. Briony strongly believes in maxing out all of the corn, and then using the yellow cog to build everything out of corn and corn alone while everyone else fights over some overrated shiny skulls.

*Of course, we have seen similar cogs before. Or, to be more precise, similar wheels. Hello there, Glass Road!

** Bob, Briony and Lizzy pride themselves on knowing the colour of Edward Longshank’s socks on the 14^th of August, 1247 – the point is we are history nerds. Well, nerds in general.

Brutus rating: 5/10
Pairs well with: A refreshing rum cocktail such as a Dark ‘n Stormy or a Mojito.

Puerto Rico is an excellent job selection  game (with some elements of worker placement) in which you play the part of a rich colonial governor on the island of Puerto Rico. Picture the scene: Dappled Caribbean light, the distant sounds of a bustling harbour, you sit in the mid-morning heat on the veranda wondering how best to get the ‘locals’ working twice as hard today, which silken suit and wig to wear tomorrow. Your job is to manage the island, its plantations, workers, buildings and trading of goods to far off places. Top notch mercantilism.

Unfortunately there are other players in the game each taking on the same role, and as a result each player has a personal board which depicts the island. It is there that you each do your managing, building, planting and harvesting, competing with everyone else’s versions of the island. However, the docks are shared by all, meaning that one must compete to ship goods and reap victory points. Usually this means taking it in turn to place goods on ships, or to block other players by taking a job first: in the misery farm lounge this can even include pinning your friend down so they physically can’t move their goods.*

A turn will consist of the player with the first person puck (in Puerto Rico’s case it’s the governor’s flags) selecting a job to perform during their turn. These are pretty self-explanatory, for instance the builder allows you to build (although this does get quite competitive later on in the game as there are only a finite number of a certain type of building). Once the player who picked the job has taken the action, each subsequent player will have a chance to use it as well. The player who chose it first will have a bonus that comes with the job which the other players may not use/receive, for instance picking the builder first will enable the first user to build at the cost of one less doubloon. Once everyone has happily built some things, it moves on to the next person to pick a job.

The moral of the story is that there is a great deal to be gained from picking a job first. It’s almost worth trying to stare-out the other players in an attempt to make them question the consequences of picking the job you realllllly wanted. Maybe even slyly announce general threats ‘Gee I sure hope no-one picks the Captain because I’ve been polishing my buckles for days, if I didn’t’ get to wear them for some reason I’m not sure what I would do’ (pause for dramatic effect while gazing off into the distance). For jobs like the craftsman, which allows you to produce the goods you are farming in order to be shipped at a later stage, picking it first allows you to produce extra of any one of your goods. This means more victory points if you manage to ship it.

However the general rule of ‘more goods is always better than fewer’ is often not the case in this game. This is due to two factors, the first is because there are only 3 ships in the docks that may ship only one type of good on each. When the Captain job is picked this means that going by turn order each player can place only one type of good of any quantity (there are five in total) onto a ship. Once a ship has that type, then only the same type can be added to it. Once a ship is full then you cannot add any more goods, which often leaves you with a big pile of resources. This is where the second factor comes in – at the end of a job phase you can only keep two items of goods. Everything else is thrown in the sea, probably as some sort of bribe to Poseidon to keep the trade network running efficiently. As a result even if you’re producing lots of goods, running well-maintained plantations and well-populated island, grabbing the Captain job first is really where it’s at.

There are a fair few number of strategies for the game that avoid a heavily shipping-based approach though, which is nice for those of us who don’t want to continuously grab the same damn card throughout an entire game. The Trader job is a nice option that involves selling your goods instead of shipping them, meaning doubloons instead of victory points. Doubloons can then be thrown at some buildings which are worth victory points, or have special abilities. The trader post however will only allow the sale of one type of each good, so be vigilant. Again, some good scare tactics come into the ring here as other players may have the same type of good as you want to trade and get there first, leaving you, your lonely barrel of sugar and some misery**. You may also wish to attempt to sneakily trade something that hasn’t been traded yet.

‘Briony do you want to trade anything?’

‘Well, you’ve just traded the sugar, and I’ve only got sugar left to trade with, so fuck you.’

‘True.’

‘Is there a free space for Pete’s phone? How much money would I get on the market for that? I bet it’s more than a barrel of coffee.’

‘Well the rules do say that you can’t trade the same type of good… what am I saying, that’s my phone, we can’t open the doors to creating new resources from whatever is lying around. The living room floor would become a fucking treasure trove.’

‘Good point. It’d re-write history. The British Empire was actually funded by several sweet wrappers, some empty beer bottles and a TV remote.’

Trader may be handy for getting rid of left-over goods that would otherwise go in the sea but The Prospector job gives you money in a more direct way if it’s straight-up cash you want. If you do want a heavily shipping-based approach it’s much easier to grow diverse goods so there is a greater chance of shipping most of them. Another viable trick with this is to Captain first, put the good that no one else has on the biggest ship, and then watch everyone be angry. You’ve effectively taken up a whole fucking ship for one barrel of coffee, guaranteeing you victory points and barring anyone else from shipping their large stockpiles of goods. How very British of you.

Your first run through of the game is going to be a steep but fun learning curve. Subsequent play-throughs will actually get more fun as you experiment with new strategies, and work out how those interact with other player’s strategies. Honestly, you could play this game 100 times honing one single strategy and it would feel like a new game each time because of how much the other player’s interactions affect your game***. That actually sounds kind of terrifying to Briony as someone who deeply enjoys being left the fuck alone in her own little corner of the game, but it’s great fun, simple to learn, fast paced, and nicely-themed throughout.**** A game of Puerto Rico is always reliably good, like a fine spiced rum. Enjoy it, and keep enjoying it for many years to come.

*We probably don’t recommend this method because it can often lead to no one wanting to play with you anymore. The Misery Farm get away with it because we have no choice but to continue playing with one another.

** This might be someone’s idea of a good evening in all fairness.

*** In fact, three of our friends actually played this twice a night for 6 weeks. They still love it. Now that is the mark of a good board game.

**** Sometimes, in fact, it is a little uncomfortably on-theme. The workers in this game are little brown cubes which arrive by boat. Yes really.