The World Game - The fun geography board game

Get to know the world while playing. The description of The World Game could be something like this. 

Game idea

Show off your knowledge, get lucky with the dice and be the first to reach the finish line. In each round you either have to win a country duel or prove your country knowledge.

Game material

You get 194 country cards, 26 action cards, 1 game board, 6 game figures and 2 dice.

Gameplay

Each person chooses a pawn and places it on the starting space. All country cards are shuffled and laid out in a stack. You can also split up the deck so everyone can get their cards more easily. The action cards are also shuffled and initially set aside. 

The youngest person starts and play continues clockwise.

1. Each person draws a country card
2. The active person rolls a die
3. The person chooses
   1. One fact: The person names a fact from their country map and says it out loud: area, population, GDP, highest point or number of neighboring countries.
      In turn, all people lay out their cards face up and announce the respective value. Whoever has the highest value moves his figure forward by the sum of the dice.
   2. A quiz: The person on the left asks a question about their card. If the active person can answer this correctly, they can move their figure. If she answers incorrectly, the other people take turns answering the question until one person answers correctly. You simply go through all the people in turn in a clockwise direction. The quiz questions are divided into 4 categories and levels of difficulty. You can decide in advance which ones you want to play with.
      1. Continent: You say the country and the continent is searched for.
      2. flags: You show the flag and ask for the country.
      3. Location: You say the country and look up the exact location of the country (using the numbers).
      4. Capital: You name the country and ask for the capital.
         You can also reverse some categories; you say the capital and ask for the country or show the city and ask for the country.
4. Then each person discards their card and draws a new one.
5. Now it's the next person's turn and rolls the dice.

The player who reaches the target space first wins.

action cards

As soon as your character reaches a continent, you receive an action card. The first time you reach Europe. Action cards can be kept and are removed from the game only after the game has been played. When the respective card can be used is written on the card. The action cards can put the other people back a few spaces or force a different category in the quiz.

My Opinion

The World Game is interesting but also challenging. If you don't enjoy geography games, you won't enjoy this. But if you know something about the world or would like to learn something new, you will definitely be able to have fun. 

The game works best if you have roughly similar knowledge of geography or adjust the categories per person. However, this only works to a limited extent. You can decide in advance which knowledge categories you want to play with. The "continent" category sometimes seems too simple. The next level, the flags, is already very demanding on some maps. 

Our solution was to decide for each card how difficult the category should be. If Germany is drawn, then you should already know the exact location. If the location is probably not known, but the flag is known, it is sufficient to assign the country to the flag.

But you can adapt this individually to your playgroup. Apart from that, there is also the duel variant. If you think you have a good map, you can collect movements without any knowledge of geography. But you need a good map and you have to be able to estimate how good the respective values ​​are. After playing a few cards, it's relatively easy for you.

The action cards spice up the game a bit, since you can now also hinder other people. Overall, this is also an element that I could have done without. 

The fact that the dice are rolled before each turn may annoy people who don't like to play without luck, but I thought it was quite appropriate since it is also random whether you draw an easy or a hard card. 

Another big minus point: There is no red character 🙁 

You can find the website for the game here and You can order it directly from Amazon here.

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