Photo above is property of Arcane Wonders
Company: Arcane Wonders
Game: World Wonders
Country: USA 🇺🇸
Language: English
Type of Game: Tabletop Game (Board Game) 📬
Genre: Tile Placement, Territory Builder
Date Played: September 16, 2024
Difficulty (based on 5 players): 6.5/10
Size of Team: 1 to 5 ppl
Time: Unlimited (Approximately 60-90 Mins.)
Price: $50.95 USD
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"World Wonders" is a strategic board game that combines elements of city-building, tile placement, and resource management. Players take on the roles of architects in ancient civilizations, tasked with building a new city and constructing iconic landmarks, whilst maximizing resources and expanding the population.
The game is set against the backdrop of famous historical wonders (known in the game as ‘monuments’) such as the Great Pyramids, Colossus of Rhodes, and Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Each player must carefully plan their city's layout, balance the use of limited funds, and complete wonders before their rivals.
The game features competitive mechanics with a focus on efficient construction, tactical placement, and adapting to evolving strategies. Victory is achieved by acquiring more Victory Points than your opponents through thoughtful planning and optimal use of resources while assembling one of the world's greatest ancient cities.
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Despite the underwhelming, dull grey box, the components inside are perhaps one of the game’s biggest draws. There is a large assortment of different tiles, boards, and wooden structures that, come the game’s end, will leave you with a colorful 3D city, featuring many ancient monuments.
So, what’s inside the box?
A double-sided player map, that features a lake on one side and a river on the reverse, and a player resource board to track your money, population size, and advancement with food, ceramics, and gears.
One main game board for placing the building tiles and tracking the player turn order. This board can also be flipped over to track the end game scoring.
Specialty wooden resource markers and uniquely themed player tokens
Three decks of cards; Monuments, Public Objectives (for advanced game play and scoring), and Solo Play.
55 Road Tiles, offering three different road lengths.
80 Building Tiles featuring eight shapes across five different colors. The number of shapes will depend on whether you are 1-3, 4, or 5 players.
31 beautifully crafted 3D wooden Monuments and Towers. The Monuments are without a doubt our favorite component; they are bright, chunky, and full of detail which you perhaps wouldn’t expect in a game of this price point.
Overall, the components are visually appealing and crafted to a high standard. As you build your own miniature city, win or lose, you'll likely feel proud of your creation, so much so that you might even be tempted to take a photo of it as a keepsake.
Photos above are property of ESCAPETHEROOMers
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Like most modern board games, World Wonders uses several different mechanisms; tile placement, resource management, action points, and open drafting, to create a game that offers a lot of decision making coupled with short snappy turns.
Each turn, players start with seven gold coins to spend on upgrades to their city; roads, buildings, towers, acquiring the first player marker, or completing a monument. Moving in turn order, players may choose to purchase one item at a time, until all their coins are gone. However, each resource is limited per round, so think carefully what you’ll choose as another player might take it before it comes back around to your turn.
Once purchased, each item must be placed immediately on to your board, following their own set of specific placement rules.
Roads – Must be adjacent to other roads, the sidewalk (running along the base of your board), or a tower.
Towers – Can be placed anywhere, so long as they are adjacent to something and placed on land.
Building Tiles – Must always be adjacent to a road tile or another building tile of the same color. These are the main source of adding resources to your board.
Monuments – Each has its own unique set of placement rules, such as being on or adjacent to water, or adjacent to a certain type of building or road. The cost to build a monument is all of your remaining gold for that turn, i.e. placing one ultimately ends your turn for this round. Therefore, it is often wise to wait until you are down to one or two coins before purchasing your monument, unless of course you fear another player taking it before you.
At the beginning of the next round, all unused building tiles are removed and new ones are randomly placed out once more for purchase, along with more road pieces and a tower, if they were purchased in the prior round.
The game lasts for either 10 rounds or until one player reaches the final space on their Population track. During these rounds players will continue to build and expand, carefully planning and zoning with the use of roads and towers to see who can create the most prosperous city.
For advanced game play, you can add in the deck of Public Objective Cards. To do this, draw three cards randomly from the deck of ten. Each card requires something different, and bonus Victory Points are awarded at the end of the game based on who fulfills each of them the best. This might mean having the most monuments, or the most of a particular resource or building type, or having the longest road, etc.
Photos above are property of ESCAPETHEROOMers
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Each city will be judged and scored on six criteria; or seven if you include the Public Objective Cards.
Population – Score one Victory Point for each Ring their marker reached or passed.
Least Produced Resource – From the three resources you gain through placing building tiles (and some monuments), players will receive Victory Points for only their lowest valued resource. Therefore, it is important not to let one fall behind the others.
Monuments – Score one Victory Point for each Ring pictured on the Monument Cards.
Natural Resources – Score one Victory Point for each visible Natural Resource square left on your map.
City Districts – Score one Victory Point for each building tile that is surrounded on all sides by any feature other than green spaces.
Loans – Players lose two Victory Points for every unpaid loan.
Public Objective Cards – Award Victory Points based on the cards’ criteria.
Photos above are property of ESCAPETHEROOMers
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"World Wonders" is a fantastic family-weight game that offers more than just the sum of its’ parts. While the highly detailed and thematic 3D wooden monuments are a joy to admire sitting proudly in your new city, the game does offer strategic depth and replayability; through the different maps, Public Objective Cards, and expansions.
The game is surprisingly quick to learn and it only takes a couple of rounds before you are comfortable with all the mechanics and tactical decisions required to play sufficiently against your peers. However, even after two full plays, we did still catch one another making placement errors with certain tiles. It is important to pay attention to one another as you put tiles on the board ensuring proper placement is met.
To help remind you of the placement rules, the game does come with three player aids that can easily sit on the table.
The game feels streamlined and absent of any clunky mechanisms which slow it down or overcomplicate your actions. Therefore, we found the game to play relatively fast, particularly at the beginning of your turn when you have pockets full of gold and there are plenty of tiles to buy. However, the game can be slowed down by indecisive players who struggle to spend the last of their coins or who faff around looking for the perfect placement.
The Rule Book is very well written, it is clear and features plenty of colorful illustrations and examples to explain the finer points. It is clearly a good example of how a rule book should look and function. One section I would have liked to have seen expanded though was that surrounding the Monuments. This could have been more detailed, particularly when it came to those that have more than one building component.
This is certainly a game I would recommend to people who enjoy polyominos and collecting points through different achievements. Even though there is not a lot of player interaction, there is enough going on to keep you interested in what the other players are (or are trying) to do, and whether you win or lose, you’ll always have the satisfaction of admiring your own world wonder.
(If you do decide to try this game, give us a shoutout or tag us on social media so we know you heard it from "ESCAPETHEROOMers"!)
Disclosure: We thank Arcane Wonders for providing us with samples of the game. Although a complimentary experience was generously provided, it does not impact our opinion on the review whatsoever.
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