Considering how good Small World (US$4.99) is – the first big Euro board game of the iPad era – fans of these sorts of games are in for a really wonderful ride. While this app isn’t perfect, it’s well worth a look.

Maybe you’ve seen Apple pushing this game in the App Store, with the motley crew pictured above staring out at you from the flash screen. Without a familiarity with the physical board game though, it’s sort of hard to know what to make of it.

Underneath the pretty graphics, Small World is a clever area control game, an almost completely luck-free strategy game that gives players a lot of great in-game choices. Every time you take a turn, you have a small number of tokens representing one of about a dozen tribes (trolls, halflings, tritons, etc.) that all have a random bonus power (one of twenty) attached. You send these little minions out to take over some territory and score points based on where you are at the end of your turn. Spread yourself too thinnly and you won’t have much to do next turn. Stay too close together and you won’t score enough points to win. In short, the game is brilliant if you’re looking for something a little more strategic than Risk and don’t need a twitchy tapping experience to have fun.

The Game
Long-time gamers will recognize Small World’s mechanics from the 1999 board game Vinci. Vinci, a solid game which got the fantasy-theme upgrade in 2009 from Days of Wonder, the company that is also fully supporting the iPad app. The key to all versions of the game is understanding how the tribes work with their randomly assigned bonus powers. Be warned though, it does take a few plays to figure out how they can be maximized. Each of the tribes also has an inherent special power which can mesh wonderfully with the bonus power. Sometimes though, based on what’s happening on the board, a less-than-ideal combination is exactly the right one to choose and make a few strategic attacks on your opponent’s strongholds.

Each player gets a tribe at the beginning of their first turn and launches attacks with a set number of tokens. After a few turns, you’ll want to get get rid of your first tribe in favor of a new one. When you should do this (and it’s common to “go into decline,” as it’s called, twice per game) is just one of the delightful challenges of playing Small World well.

The standard rule is that it takes two tokens to conquer a territory. Each thing in that territory (e.g., an opposing token, a mountain, some sort of fortification) adds one to the number of tokens needed. Since most tribes only start out with around ten tokens and you can lose tokens in a fight, you can’t just march across the board wiping out enemies left and right. Instead, Small World is a game of clever expansion and knowing when to risk one more attack and when to go into decline. There’s too much strategy to get into here, but Board Game Geek has a lot of good discussion. You can also see the full rules here. We recommend getting the app and learning through playing. If you’re interested, don’t wait to pick up the app; the $5 price is likely to go up at some point.

The App
The first version of Small World on the iPad had a lot of flaws. There was no tutorial, games were not saved and not all of the tribes from the basic board game were present. Thankfully, because we waited to get the 3G iPad, DOW has had time to upgrade the app and these complaints have been addressed. Now – we reviewed version 0.92 which was released just a week ago – all of the tribes and special powers from the base game are all present and accounted for, except for the Diplomat tribe. We haven’t had time to test out all of the race-bonus power combination’s, but everything we’ve tested seems to have been programmed correctly.

The app features the same two-player map that’s in the cardboard box version of Small World. The graphics are gorgeous and replicate the physical board game almost perfectly. When you drag tokens from off the side of the board and onto a target area, your supply shows how many tokens it will take to win that space. The one random aspect of gameplay (aside from how the tribes and powers match up) is the reinforcement die, which dominates the screen when rolled. It also seemed to come up empty just when we needed it most. Given all of the record keeping the app does for you, playing a game on the iPad is much, much faster than the board game (think 10-15 minutes instead of 30).

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