The Tao of Gaming

I finally played it and it's an evolutionary upgrade to Vinci. Simpler base rules; I don't mind hidden VPs (in theory we could track them, but nobody does), no problem with fixed # of turns, although perhaps 1-2 more turns might be nice. Nicely compressed.

But my instinct proclaims that smoothing the hard edges made Small World ... not worse exactly, but flighty. Superfluous. Neutered. Is it really better to have everyone pounding on the perceived leader, rather than the actual leader? Halving cost to skip over a civilization makes diving deep for a good combo easier, not a gut wrenching choice. With scores so close, did my plan matter, or did I roll slightly better/worse later on? (Early luck tends to be corrected by the group, assuming they judge the leaderboard accurately).

On one hand, Small World feels like a denser Vinci. But I feel a disconnect between playing well and winning. [One other player commented that all the games our group has played have typically had 2-3 points between each player, and our game was 89-87-85-83]. This is just a gut feeling, but one that I never felt with Vinci.

I like the reduced gametime, but wonder if it's at the cost of gameplay. In some sense, that's silly, since the games are nearly identical. But with only 9 turns you have the first turn and last turn (both somewhat odd in that you can't hit other players effectively) and 1-2 declining turns, you really only have 5-6 'full' turns. Imagine chess as all opening and endgame, but with the same rules. Again, I'm overstating it ...

I can't explain this yet. I didn't dislike Small World, but ...