By W. Eric Martin
June 20, 2010
Designers: Laurent Verrier & Philippe Keyaerts
Publisher: Days of Wonder
Rules Language: English/French/German
Price: $15
Release date: June 2010 (Europe) / July 2010 (North America)
Links: 
Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Twice, both with two players
You know what’s awesome in a game of Small World? Marauding seafaring necro-Tritons supercharged with a temporary shot of Commando. Normally this combination is not possible in Small World, players being limited to the oh-so-mundane combination of one Special Power and one Race, but Small World: Tales & Legends gives you the chance to open up the throttle, create new and more powerful armies, and blaze your way across the game board.
Or be blazed across, I suppose.
Small World: Tales & Legends consists of 54 event cards, and the basic idea of the deck is that one event card is put into play each game round (after the first), with players having a single round of advance notice as to what’s coming.
Sometimes the advance notice is crucial and pushes you in a direction that might not have come to mind otherwise. Forbidden Forest, for example, prevents players from conquering forest regions on the turn that it’s active. If you’re worried about being bottled into part of the board in the subsequent round, you can take action this round to perhaps avoid the future trouble. Golden Age prevents players from going into decline the turn that it’s in play. If you’re on the verge of deciding that your race is running out of gas, you might feel compelled to head into decline earlier than you otherwise would – even though doing so would lessen the obstacles for players taking actions after you. Lower your defenses, or risk having your army dwindle to nothing? Which will you choose?
With other event cards, knowing the event doesn’t really clue you in as to what’s coming. The Art of Combos, for example, kicks off an auction on the turn it becomes active for the bottommost Special Power in the stack; the auction winner adds this power to his active race or sets it aside until he takes a new race. You don’t know what the power will be until the turn starts, so you can’t position yourself on the board to any effect, but you will know what’s up for auction when the time comes. Marauding Tritons – time for you to go seafaring!
The 54 cards are classified two ways: First, with a theme icon such as “Miracles for Sale!” or “The Gods must be Crazy,” and second, with a rating of how much the event will impact game play, from minor affairs to wordly consequences to mind-blower. When using Tales & Legends, you can draw 7-9 random cards from the deck (depending on how many players are in the game), draw randomly from all cards with a specific rating, or use only the cards in a theme. Each theme has nine cards, so in a two- or three-player game all of these cards will come into play; only the order of the cards will be surprising. With four or five players, one or two of the themed cards will remain out of play.
Opening a Larger World
As I noted in my April 2009 review of Small World, success in the game will depend on your ability to choose the right race/power combo based on the number of players, which round you’re in, the current situation on the game board, the other race/power combos on display, the weather forecast, and a host of other data points. A combo that romps at the start of a two-player game might flounder at the end of the game or be near useless with four or five players.
Tales & Legends adds even more things to consider each round, whether you’re choosing a new race/power combo, thinking about going into decline, or deciding where to attack. Since a number of the cards auction their power to the highest bidder, you also have to evaluate how valuable a power might be to you – or to an opponent – to determine how much to bid.
For example, I nabbed Necromantic Elixir for what, in retrospect, was the bargain price of three points, granting my Tritons the Ghoul ability to go into decline, yet still attack in future rounds. I immediately sent the Tritons into decline in order to get a second race on the subsequent turn – and not coincidentally on the turn that the Tough Love event card would become active. Tough Love is another auction card that grants the winner the Commando power for all conquests on that turn. After winning that card in auction – on the tie-breaker, mind you, which states that the shorter player wins ties – I had Marauding Seafaring Ghoulish Commando Tritons attacking twice along the coastline and around the lake, then Commando Swamp Kobolds racing across the bottom of the two-player board to claim seven regions. (Commando Kobolds is not necessarily a great combination, but since I was attacking occupied regions, the discount paid off.) My opponent’s forces were annihilated, and I scored double-digit points in the next four rounds.
Interpreting the Legends
Based on only two plays, I can already predict that Days of Wonder will post a FAQ for Tales & Legends once the expansion debuts. The rules within the expansion are brief and don’t detail any of the event cards’ abilities; with 54 different events, some of them boasting more than ten lines of text, you can be sure that questions will arise about some of them.
With The Great Curse, for example, or its counterpart Rats ["All Racial Powers (including those in decline, if any) are useless this turn. Special Powers still apply"], how do those abilities play out during the game? With Rats it was clear that my Tritons lost their discount for attacking shoreline areas, but what about my Kobolds? Did they lose their “special power” – which is really a handicap – of requiring two tokens to be in an area at all times? I feel confident that Ghouls would not be able to attack when Rats is in play, but would you have to discard tokens in regions that hold more than one Ghoul since being able to have multiple tokens in decline is one of the Ghouls’ special powers? Does your tower of declined Priestesses topple? If Seafaring is useless, do I need to remove any tokens on the water?
Another oddity is Blue Genes, in which players auction for the right to choose a race and power (not necessarily an existing combo) from those currently visible in the queue. The winner must pay coins equal to the location of the more expensive combo half, but where do the coins go? And how do you handle coins already in the queue? The base rules state that when you pass, you place a coin on the combos that you skip – but now Blue Genes lets you tear apart existing combos. We placed the coins in a position in the queue (instead of on the combos themselves) and got on with the game, but I can imagine others being anxious about how exactly such abilities should be handled.
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