World Wonders is one of the best tile laying games out there. And for more reasons than just clever play.
I like snapping photos of the games we play just a little bit above the surface of the table. That angle makes the cardboard in the image pop off the screen. But, it’s even more striking when the game features miniatures on the table. The figures loom large in the picture, somehow multiples bigger in size than they really are.
We’ve been playing a lot of World Wonders this month, the new tile layer from designer Zé Mendes and published here in the States by Arcane Wonders. I played it at BGG.CON with Steph and the Board Boys and knew I had to pick up a copy. This is a box chock full of toys, ya’ll, and spilling out those miniature buildings for the first time on my game mat peeled back years from my memory.
Back when I was about ten, on yet another family summer road trip in the back of the camper, Dad took us up to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Lancaster is Amish country and home of shoo-fly pie. But more importantly for today’s blog post, Lancaster is a wonderland of sights for any young train enthusiast.
First stop for us, after practically begging my dad and showing him the address repeatedly from the guidebook, was the local toy train museum. I had always been fascinated by model trains, ever since reading about them in Boys Life. And here was the holy grail, affectionately known as The Choo Choo Barn — a barn sized building packed from wall to wall with a giant diorama of small town life, intersected by hundreds of train cars scurrying about on rail.
I cannot do this train museum justice in just a thousand words. And maybe there’s some exaggeration as my memory recalls that even from years back. But what I remember was glorious — there were miniature baseball parks with runners ready to tag up on a fly ball to deep center. There were entire little villages, bustling about with cars and tractors and trucks on the roads. For some reason, I even remember a little display of tiny little presidents — I mean like FDR and JFK. Were they singing? Was I dreaming? Who knows, but you can visit it for yourself and see if I’m wrong.
The very first time I earned the right to add Machu Picchu to my little village in World Wonders brought me right back to that train themed attraction. It’s weird how a memory I had not thought about for years could shoot up like an untethered hot air balloon just with the simple act of placing a wooden building on a flat piece of cardboard.
In World Wonders, up to four players use a clever economic system to draft colorful tiles to place on their city board. At first, the board is empty, just a square bare spreadsheet of green spaces, water, and natural resources. But soon, players will fill the board with tiles, each one of those giving us points to move up on tracks on our player board.
The goal is to collect points, marked as rings in the game, by moving up our three colored tracks by placing matching buildings on the board. Each of the tracks contains boosts on yet another track — yes, you could call this “track the track game” but you’d only be scratching the surface — called the population track. Move the population track all the way to the end and you not only score a ton of points, but you also fire up the end game.
This game is just clever. Like Cascadia before it, I cannot point to much about World Wonders that is brand spankin’ new. But honestly, I don’t look for that anymore. I’d much rather see a designer take familiar elements and put them together smoothly. Make me feel like this game has always existed, and I’m a happy gamer.
World Wonders does just that. You’d swear when you play it that you played this game as a child. Or as a teenager. Or even last week. The rules are simple. The game takes up to ten rounds, and ends either at the end of that round or the end of any round where any player reaches the end of the population track. During the round, players will do one of three things. First, they can take turns buying tiles. The tiles come in three varieties: irregular shaped tiles that give you those sweet boosts up the tracks I told you about earlier; or roads to help you build more buildings; or finally, towers which help you add more roads so you can buy and place more buildings.?The tiles / towers/ roads have various costs in gold, and each player only has seven (or nine) gold “points” on their gold track to spend each round.
The second option is to buy first player next round. It’s as simple as it sounds — pay the gold and you can move right to the front of the line, just like those bourgeois families we see using concierge services at the Magic Kingdom. Feels like kind of waste at first, but trust me, going last in a four player game of World Wonders is like falling into a ditch full of mosquitos. That’s because each round there is only one of each type of tile or wooden piece or first player marker. Wait too long to get that tile you want, or the tower you need to get out of the jam you created on the left side of your board, and it’s tough cookies for you, builder.
The final option is the cleverest of clever additions to the game, something I haven’t seen before. Remember I told you that you have seven (or nine, yes I’ll get to that shortly) gold points each round? There’s a push your luck element to spending your goal, which always juices me up, because each round also shows off three active monument cards.
The monuments are both the heart and the distraction in the game. The box comes with either thirty thousand or thirty monuments, tiny little painted versions of famous world wonders like the Pyramids at Giza, or the Great Wall, or the aforementioned Machu Picchu. OMG. The publishers could’ve just printed up thick card board pieces representing each of the wonders, but dear reader, the warm feeling that will come over you the first time you earn a cool structure like the Easter Island statutes and place them on your board, rising up above the green and blue and purple tiles, is absolutely indescribable.
So what is clever about collecting the wonders, you ask? Each of the monument cards has a requirement, like having a certain color of tile next to the river running through your board. Some of the monuments are small and easy to earn, looking for just one or two tiles. Some of the monuments are diabolical, wanting very hard combination of tiles that seem to come out infrequently or cost too much to grab more than one during the game. But if you have the prerequisites, you can place them directly on your board and earn the points or get the track movement (or sometimes both) that comes as a reward.
But there’s a catch. You must spend ALL of the gold points on your board. Every last nugget, all the moolah, your entire wallet dumped out like you are hitting the Raisin’ Canes after a late night at The Thirsty Tiger. Of course, maybe you try and wait until near the end of the round, when you probably only have one or two gold left on your board. Ah, that makes Machu Picchu super cheap! But you better keep a close eye or three on your partners, because if they are working the same prerequisites as you, they might just snap up the monument for three gold instead of letting you have it for one. It’s all in the timing, my friend, and that’s why having a push your luck element, even if small and subtle like here, makes most games better.?The tension as the round moves on ratchets up, and yet everyone is afraid to talk about it out loud.
The downside to World Wonders is that for all of its elegance, it does have some fiddly rules that need reminding each round. The way that the tiles are laid out, color by color, should be intuitive but I’ve taught this game a ton, and it just isn’t. Players want o be able to lay out tiles end to end, no matter the color, but the rules say you can only place tiles adjacent to each other if one part of the tile touches another tile with the same color or a road.
The importance of towers is not intuitive either, as players forget the placement rules quickly and then corner themselves with no ability to place more tiles because Jerod went on a tear collecting the colors you needed. You always need an out, and the towers give you that ability, to start a new road system and explore more of this tiny little bucolic pasture.
I think you get the gist of how the game is played. Place tiles, spend money, work on the requirements for the wonders in front of you, praying that the monument will still be there next turn so that you don’t have to spend four gold on it. It’s fairly easy to teach and quick to play, at least for those that don’t suffer from tremendous analysis paralysis issues.
The game is competitive, of course, so there are points to be scored so that you can out wonder your friends. You’ll get points in multiple directions: Take points from the monument cards, score points from the rings you earn from population, enclose your buildings and connect the natural resources locations for bonus points, and if you are skillful, meet the requirements of the random end game scoring objective cards by the end of the game for even more points. The point scoring sounds rote and done before, but it really isn’t.?The tight economy means that the point spreads should be pretty close each game.
There is a lot to like about World Wonders. But the best thing about World Wonders, what shoots it up somewhere into my top six games for 2023, are the last two rounds.
Stop for a second near the end of the game, and gaze about your dominion, but not top down like an eagle would. Become a traveler. Lower your head and neck to come nose and cheek with the side of your game table and spy horizontally at the game board. You’re a tiny little traveler now, wandering down these cobblestone paths, kicking around lose rocks as you spy the Parthenon or the Lighthouse at Alexandria off in the distance, rising up from your game board. Take mental pictures of the juxtaposition of Obelisks next to the Thien Mu Pagoda. It’s jarring, but beautiful, and something you won’t see anywhere else.
Hey, friend, tap your pocket. Just how did that small piece of shoo fly pie tightly wrapped up in a cloth get in there?
Until next time, laissez les bon temps rouler.
— BJ from Board Game Gumbo
