SMALLWORLD:Underground

" ...When in a hole, keep digging!"

• Designer: Philippe keyaerts

• Players: 2-5

• Age: 8+

• Game time: 30-90 minutes

Objective of the Game: "Collect coins on your turn by taking over different regions on the map."

Board Game Contains:

• 2 Double- Sided board games, one for each player configuration

• 15 New Fantasy Races with matching banner and tokens

• 9 popular places and 6 Righteous Relics

• 9 Black Mountains and 1 Volcano

• 8 Mushrroms Armor, 7 Silver Hammer, 4 Vengeance Markers, 1 Bag-o-Many-things and 1 Game Turn Maker

• 1 Balrog, 1 Ghost, 1 Great Ancient & 1 Queen

• 106 Victory coins

• 5 player and 1 game turn summary sheets

• 1 Reinforcement die

• 1 Rules booklet

Game Summary

Small World Underground is a sequel to Smallworld. In Small World players cycle through races attempting to score the most points by building empires with them, then throwing into a timely decline and using another (active) race to build a new empire. Race and special abilities add variation and strategy to in-game choices and game play is very simple, yet surprisingly strategic and interesting. The limited turns make the choices of when to decline and change races more interesting, it acts as a countdown, forcing you to try and make the absolute best of your pieces.

Game Review

Overall, Smallworld Underworld is a very fun strategic based game that is different every time. Small world is fun to play but it takes up so much time explaining all the basic components to first time players. Howver, once you've understood the game, it's actually super interesting!

Small World Underground is the sequel to Small World. It is completely independent of the original game, but can also be combined or mixed together with it to add more races and options to your game. The first thing that I have to mention is the included storage system that comes in the box.  This is honestly a saving grace to any players who value their board games. So many games and publishers give no consideration to how their game will be stored, to facilitate game play and setup time for their game.  Most simply include a few Ziplock bags, if that.  Game storage and setup is part of the gaming experience, and can really make a difference in playing a certain game.  The premise of Small World Underground is that this time, you are now competing for land, I mean the unerworld. Thus the races included in the game reflect this.  The Liches, the Mudmen, the Flames, the Shrooms, are all examples of the races included. My favourite are the Mudmen, they're too strong!

Small World Underground has Monster tokens and there are Righteous Relics and Powerful Places, which are both new to the game. Which I find very amusing to play with. The game is compatible with Small World, so that they can be mixed and matched to play together.   

The game is a hoot.  I really enjoyed it! If it's your first time playing it, the game does take a while to play. After a while, it goes fairly quickly. The art work of this game phenomenal! There are some questions that pop up when dealing with specifics of different abilities, and we had to guess, so that was a pain. For example,"what do sets of coastal regions mean?" or "what do they mean by pairs?" But overall I highly recommend Small World Underground.