Small World 2

Why play board games with people when you can play against an AI?

Overview

Small World is a medium-light area-control board game. At the start, you pick a race and conquer part of the world, Risk-style. Each race offers a unique ability to help conquer more, score points, or defend against the other players. It offers interesting decisions and good replayability. 

The strongest feature of Small World is how well it balances the excitement of attacking other players with the inherent unfairness of direct conflict. In essence, the game scores like a peaceful non-competitive game with little interaction, but feels like you are a mighty conqueror devastating the other players.

Computer Adaptation

Overall, this adaptation gets a B+. The screen, graphics, sound, UI.. just about everything gets a solid A. They did a great job bringing the game to the computer. The only flaw would be the AI, which is still pretty good. Still, even if I give the AI a B, that is so important to me it brings the whole game down to a B+. For a game of this type, the AI is more than sufficient. If you have never played Small World before the AI will certainly beat you for the first few games and be challenging for a dozen more.

Recommendation

I'm not sure who I would recommend this game to. I received a free copy as a gift and it was a pleasant diversion. I think the board game benefits from the social aspect of playing with humans and the computer version suffers for it. I suppose I would recommend this game for anybody who is a fan of the board game but wants more options for playing... like you only have two people but want a 4-player game.

(I am reviewing the Steam version for PC. I have also played the iPad version of Small World 1 and have similar thoughts.)