Exploring the Ancient Marvels: Early Impressions of World Wonders

Welcome to this week’s gaming post! This week I’m discussing a relatively new polynomial/tile laying game, and I also recently did an unboxing for it. So without further ado, let’s jump into the recent highlights.

I recently picked up World Wonders during this year’s Nerdz Day sale. During the game, each round players have up to seven gold to spend, which they use to purchase buildings and roads of various sizes and shapes. As the name of games suggests, players may also purchase wonders; however, as soon as they do so, it uses up the rest of their gold for that round. The game ends either after ten rounds or when one player maxes out their population, usually done by advancing up their three resource tracks, which are gained through buildings and wonders.

Let’s start with my favorite part of the game – the wooden wonder pieces. In the base game, there are 21 wonders from around the world, all recreated as nice wooden components that are satisfying to place in your city. Each of the wonders have different requirements in order to be placed, usually to be adjacent to various other buildings or roads. This creates an interesting puzzle of trying to fit everything into your city, and some of the larger wonders can be particularly challenging to find room for, especially late in the game.

I also enjoy that the game is pretty easy to learn, and the rulebook is only a handful of pages. This isn’t a super light game, but I could imagine this could be a game I could fairly easily teach to even non-gamers. The game also comes with an optional module that includes public objectives that score points for the player who best completed them at the end of the game. I’d always choose to play with these public objectives, but you could leave these out if you want a lighter game.

While I really enjoy the wooden wonder pieces, I wish the bonuses they provided were more interesting. Outside of maybe a couple of wonders, most of them provide one victory point at the end of the game and maybe a resource or population. This resulted in me usually just picking whichever wonder I could easily fit in my city, and I wish it had led to more interesting decision making.

While the game is fairly light, the game took longer to finish than I would have thought for a game of this complexity. Of the handful of games I played, they all ended after ten rounds, so even with only two players, I found the games were running over the one hour mark. Usually for light games of this style, I am looking for a game that takes closer to 45 minutes or an hour max. I just covered The White Castle, which is a fair bit more complex, and with two players we were getting that game finished in around 45 minutes. I haven’t played World Wonders with four or even five players yet, but I can imagine a game could reasonably take an hour and a half to maybe up to two hours with five players.

In addition, while the wonders received a lot of attention, I wish the same treatment had been done to the other buildings. I know having the other buildings look ordinary next to the wonders makes the wonders stand out, but while there is some detail in the artwork on the buildings, they just don’t look all that impressive on the table. Similar to my critique with the wonders, the buildings also feel very similar. The only difference being that larger buildings reward more resources, but other than making sure I had the right building to place a wonder or trying to keep my three resource tracks in synch, I never felt myself agonizing over which building to take. In addition, by the end of the game, I had usually gotten close to filling up my entire map, so later in the game, I usually just choose whichever building I could make fit.

Finally, while I was initially really excited about the mechanism that lets you choose a wonder at any time (provided you can meet the adjacency requirements), it ultimately causes you to forfeit whatever gold you have remaining (effectively becoming your last turn for the round). I thought this would lead to tough decisions like having to choose between taking another building or selecting the wonder you really want. Instead in the two-player games I played, I don’t think either one of us selected a wonder early in a round, it was always the last turn we both took when we only had one or two gold left. You might expect that to lead to us not taking as many wonders, but instead outside of couple of turns through the handful of games we played, we almost always both took a wonder each round. Since there are always three wonders available at any time, even if one of us took one of the wonders, the other player could almost always meet the requirements on one of the other three. My hope is that at higher player counts, this would create more tension in decision-making, but then again I worry about the length of the game at higher player counts, and I have to decide if that decision-making is worth the extra time spent.

This may feel like a fairly critical review; however, I have enjoyed my early plays of World Wonders. I enjoy that it’s a light game that also has some cool wooden pieces. Would I play this over other polynomial or tile laying games that I really enjoy like Isle of Skye or Castles of Mad King Ludwig? Probably not. It’s still likely to remain in the collection for the foreseeable future, but I was hoping for a little bit more out of World Wonders considering some of the praise it has received.

With that, I’ll wrap up this week’s gaming highlights! I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of the games I’ve mentioned, future content, or format in the comments section below. Happy gaming!

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