In the expansion review series, we take a look at a game expansion to discuss whether it is a necessary purchase/addition to one’s collection.
This breakdown is for the excellent fantasy area control game Small World, and the expansion is named Sky Islands, from Days of Wonder.
This expansion includes a new double-sided game board, seven new races (with tokens) and seven new special powers, and a bunch of expansion-specific cardboard tokens all shown below.
Sky Islands adds a new board that is added somewhere on the table near the main game board and offers locations to conquer through use of a magical beanstalk and Stairway to Heaven tokens. Along with all the new races and abilities, gameplay is relatively similar to the base game with just a few scoring rules for the Sky Islands themselves: should one of your races entirely occupy all regions of an island, that race will score an additional bonus coin at the end of the round.
Is it necessary to own? No, not really. Small World is an excellent game all by itself and the number of combinations or race/abilities to be had are already staggering. However, adding in Sky Islands increases the combination total and gives more variability to each subsequent play. The addition of another board to play upon is really nice for a literal change of scenery, and allowing the players to take to the skies is wonderful for variation’s sake.
Official Recommendation: If you own Small World and are tiring of the same old races and abilities, but also would like a new place to do battle, then pick up Sky Islands. It doesn’t really change a lot of rules from the base, and adds more of what you desire. While it’s not necessary, I would say it is very enjoyable to play and I would certainly recommend it to anyone wanting to expand their own Small World.
