Review of Smallworld: Underground

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I was excited to hear about the new Smallworld game: Smallworld Underground, picked it up, and finally had a chance to play it yesterday at my weekly board game night. Here are some of my thoughts:

First, some background:
Smallworld is a game by Days of Wonder in which several races are all vying for territory in a very small area. It plays a little like Risk, but each race comes with a built-in power, and is also paired with a random second power to add game mechanics that make each game different.

Smallworld has a few expansions which simply add more races and powers to the core game, but Smallworld: Underground is a completely separate, standalone game (although you can merge them together somewhat).

I encourage you to find out more about the core Smallworld game, as the rest of my review will probably go into some details that won’t make sense without at least some basic understanding of the game.
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Yo-Gamma-Gamma

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Let me tell you something about Gamma World.
Imagine the future – like, Fallout-style, Post-apocalyptic, bad 80s-movie, mutant-infested, crazy future.
Imagine this future as crazy as you can imagine it, and picture that this vision is next to a dial set at “1″.
Now crank that sucker to 11. Welcome to Gamma World.

I highly recommended reading this Article about Gamma World if you don’t believe me (or even if you do, just because it’s amazing).

After Combat Cast sort of fell apart a few months ago, I’d been on a D&D Hiatus. Choosing instead to focus on awesome board games, and other stuff. But the urge to get an RPG group going again started tugging at me recently, and I decided to tag some friends to play some Gamma World. The friends I asked are all regulars in my weekly board game group, and had various levels of interest in playing D&D, so I thought GW would be perfect to spark their interest and get them right into the game to start having fun.
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A Frozen Journey

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Oh man… so it’s 5 ºF this morning, on my way to work, just dropped off Naomi and was sitting at a Stop light. Over on the corner near me, I see some movement and watch as an elderly man, covered in snow up to his shoulders, is struggling to get up this hill carrying a large bundle like 2 sticks wrapped up.

I can see the path he’d taken up to this point, and it was pretty much straight up this steep hill. I watch as he pitches forward and lands on his knees on the snow, then uses the bundle to get climb to his feet and then stagger laborously up to the crest of this hill. He stops, straightens out his back, and catches his breath – his short, sharp exhalations visible in the frozen air, as he surveys the street and the area.

Now he plants one stick of his bundle into the ground, and then trudges a few steps over carrying the other half of the bundle, rests for a minute and then stakes the stick into the ground like a modern-day Amundsen claiming the South Pole.

Clearly cold, winded, and exhausted, red in the face, and covered in snow, he fidgets with the banner being held between the twin poles, and then sets off back down the hill – and as the light turns green I catch the words on the banner just before traffic starts moving: “Friday: Bingo”