World Wonders

• Designer: Ze Mendes
• Publisher: Arcane Wonders
• Players: 1-5
• Age: 14+
• Time: 70 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3S4G3Iz
• Played with review copy provided by Arcane Wonders

Take on the role of the great leaders of the past to build your own Ancient City. Each player will use their Gold each round to build tiles that will increase their city’s economy. A city that produces more food and generates commerce brings more population. Make your city grow! There are 5 types of buildings, and each of them provides a type of resource that will make your city evolve from a simple settlement to the largest city in the world. To place new buildings into your city, you will also need a lot of roads. As important as the buildings are its monuments and wonders tokens. This will bring you a lot of victory points, but will consume all your Gold. Be wise in choosing when and where to place it. If your Gold runs out, your turn is also over. Once all players have spent their Gold, a new round will begin and new buildings and roads will be available to everyone. In the end, as soon as a player reaches the maximum population limit, the leader of the best city in the ancient world will be the winner of World Wonders!

To set up the game, place the main board on the table and the appropriate building tiles.  One tile of each type is face up on the table with road tiles underneath it.  3 Monument cards are revealed.  Each player gets a map board (use the same side) as well as a resource board.  The game will be played over a number of rounds until either a player reaches the final space on their population track OR the end of the 10th round.

To start a round, discard any remaining building tiles and lay out a new row of tiles, one of each type. Road tiles are again placed underneath, and make sure there is a single Tower available.  Turn order is refreshed (based on actions taken in the previous turn). In each round, players have 7 Gold and take actions one at a time until they have spent all their Gold.  The things you can buy:

• Building Tiles – pay the cost shown on the tile’s stack and then increase production as shown on the tile
• Long Road – 1 gold
• Short Road stack – 1 gold
• Tower – 2 gold
• Player Order Pedestals – 1 gold – these guarantee going first or second in the next round. Otherwise, turn order is decided by population, lower going first
• Take or pay back a loan – either gain 2 gold or pay 3 gold back
• Monument – all the rest of your money; and then increase production as shown on the monument

When you buy buildings, roads and monuments, they must go onto empty spaces on your map. Roads must be next to other roads or the base of the map. Towers must be adjacent to anything else. Buildings must be adjacent to roads or similarly colored buildings.  Monuments have their own special rules as shown on the card.  As you place things, you also want to try to keep natural resources uncovered on your map as they can be worth points at the end of the game.

Your player board tracks things. The top track is gold – you unintuitively increase on the track as you spend gold, running out when you hit 7 (or 9 if you took a loan).  The bottom 3 record your Food, Ceramics and Gears.  These advance as you gain Buildings and Monuments.  If you pass a population icon on these tracks, you increase your marker on the Population track.

On a player turn, each player only buys a single thing, and they simply drop out of the round when they run out of money or when they are unable to buy anything with the money they have left.  The round ends when all players have purchased all the things they are able to buy.

The game ends at the end of the tenth round or at the end of any round when any player has reached the final (purple) spot on their Population track.  You can track scores on the back side of the main board.  Points are scored for:

Population – 1 VP per ring passed on this track

Least Produced Resource – 1VP per track space on the worst track

Monuments – 1VP per ring on each monument

Natural Resources – 1VP per visible natural resource on your map that is adjacent to anything

City District – 1VP per building that is completely surrounded by things (i.e. not green spaces)

Loans – lose 2VP if you still have an unpaid loan

The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the player with the most monuments.

My thoughts on the game

World Wonders is a beautiful game that offers some interesting decisions to be made with the placement of your roads, buildings and wonders.  The game itself is ridiculously simple – you essentially buy something on each turn, and there really aren’t too many options.  Supplies are limited though, so coming up with the right priority order for things is crucial. If there is something you want now, you better get it when it’s available, as it likely won’t be there the next time your turn comes around.

Now, when I said the action options are simple, I will say that the game does require all the players to be vigilant.  In all of my first games, we ended the game finding out that at least one player had made a placement error somewhere along the way.  While the placement rules are clearly spelled out – both in the rules and graphically on the back of the player aid – it’s on all the players to catch an error when it is made.

Oops. We went a few turns before realizing this happened. (Can’t have the road at the top)

Most common in our games is that players forget that a road must be adjacent to the sidewalk, another road or a Tower.  Yeah, the rule is clearly spelled out, but we’ve seen a lot of errors on our part.  Next would be the restriction that a building must be next to a road or another building of the same color.  I tend to get so excited about a perfect place for a specific spot for a building that I completely forget about the rules.

The issue with these errors is that the errors are hard to undo.  As players are buying things in order from a limited supply market, things which are purchased and then placed in illegal spots totally changes the dynamic of the round and of the game.  Sure, all players should be watching all placements to ensure legality – but I tend to get so wrapped up in my own planning that I often do not look much at my opponent’s boards; unless, of course, I’m trying to calculate the likelihood that they’re going to want to buy a building or monument before I can get to it!

Speaking of monuments – the game really gives you an interesting choice about when to spend the rest of your money to get a monument.  The perfect monument might be available in the market, but you might not be willing to spend your last 5 gold on it (and miss out on buying other things).  There is a really nice tense cat-and-mouse game trying to see which player will cave in first when there is competition for a particular monument.  Conversely, you might be able to slow roll a round if you are the only person who can legally place a monument, doing as many other things as you can before ending the round with a monument purchase.

Monument placement rules were a little confusing to me, but everyone else at the table seems to find them intuitive.  All of the rules are iconographically represented on the cards, and there is a key to the icons in the rules – though it is not complete.  Each time we flipped up a monument card, we had to go over the placement rules and make sure we all agreed on them.  There are some arrows and stars that show up on some of the cards, which I think are only there to underline the mandatory nature of the rules, but really, all of the placements are mandatory, so it caused confusion when some cards had these notations while others didn’t.  The adjacency rules also don’t seem to be spelled out completely as we had multiple questions about what the iconography was trying to tell us.  I would have preferred more details in the rules on the particular monument cards.  In the end, as long as the whole table agreed upon how a monument should be placed, everything was fine – we were all playing with the same rules; but man, for a few of them, I’m not sure if we were playing by the rules as the designer intended.

I’m still on the fence about how much emphasis to put on the monuments.  While they are the centerpiece of the game, they are only worth 1 or 2 VP each.  Sure, you can use them to try to surround other buildings, and some of them give you track bumps, but on the whole, you might be better off trying to improve your worst commodity for that scoring.  Sure, at the end of the round, it might be an easy 1-2 points that you can afford – but I think I’d be hard pressed to let most of a turn go by buying a Monument early; I just don’t see enough VP value in them.

The game is visually stunning – the wooden monuments are great, and they really add flavor to the player boards as they are added into the game.  I love the way that the polyominos make an ever growing pattern on your board as the game progresses.  The rules are clean and easy to read, but as I have mentioned above, I would have preferred more descriptions for some of the monument cards and their placement rules.  The final 2 pages are essentially flavor text talking about the actual monuments; and man, that space could have been better used IMHO giving me detailed descriptions on how the cards should be played.

The box has an oddly specific time of 70 minutes, but dang it Bobby – so far all of my games have come within 10 minutes of that target, so it’s pretty accurate.  As one who likes tile laying games and puzzly things, I find that I’m pretty engaged through the whole game, and I felt the length was fine.  Other gamers that I have played this with have mentioned that the game maybe feels two or three rounds too long (they wanted it more in the 45-60 minute range).  

World Wonders has a lot of things that I like: the puzzle of the polyominos, the timing and risk/reward of the buying system, the constantly changing goals from the monuments – all of these things are normally in my sweet spot.  The ambiguous placement rules and the propensity for anyone to mis-play a tile which upsets the game balance are minor issues – but not enough to reduce my interest in the game.  I still look forward to my next go-round at World Wonders and hope to do better (and play by the right rules) next time!

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Joe Huber (1 play): The presentation of World Wonders is great – the monuments are well made and easily identifiable.  But in our game, we finished building monuments in turn 5 or 6 of 10 – and the game just kept going.  Playing with a full five players was certainly part of the problem, but I’m concerned that the game expects a different play style from how we played it without explicitly incentivising the desired style.

Dan B. (3 plays): This is an interesting beast: everyone has their own board to build on, which is pretty common in recent years, but unlike many games where everyone is building on their own board this is very interactive due to the very limited pool of things to draft from and the restrictive placement rules. It’s not my favorite sort of interaction – there can be a lot of screwage – but in a reasonably short game I am fine with it.

So far I like the game well enough. But. As Joe mentions it’s possible to run out of monuments well before the game is over; this happened in my five-player game as well. On the one hand, as Dale mentions monuments aren’t all that – you can get more points by increasing your commodities and/or surrounding your buildings. On the other hand, the monuments are fun, and once they are gone the game definitely loses a lot of its luster. (Imagine playing the game without monuments in the first place.) So while I am willing to play it, there’s a strong chance I will tire of it soon and drop my rating.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y, Dan B (for now)
• Neutral. Steph, Jonathan F., John P, Craig M.
• Not for me… James N, Joe H

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3S4G3Iz