World Order board game review: Vying for Greatness

Designed to simulate the interactions between world superpowers in the year 2010, in World Order you must lead one of China, Russia, the USA, or the EU to victory on the world stage. A world power's work is never done. Over the course of six rounds you'll beaver away allying with and investing in countries, managing your natural, man-made, and political resources, constructing military bases and moving armies, all in service of putting little colored cubes onto a very familiar map and making your victory point tracker travel the furthest.

A complex game then, you might assume, and you wouldn't be wrong. But while World Order certainly looks daunting, and it's rather a table hog, it's actually much simpler than Hegemonic's last board game slash political education tool, Hegemony, and surprisingly easy to get to grips with.

Certainly, there are a lot of systems to learn here, and it takes a good deal of strategy to play this game well. But once you've grasped the core rules, World Order's advantage is that each turn is relatively short and simple. You usually play one card, take one action, and say go. This is still a lengthy game, one you schedule in for half a day rather than pull off the shelf when you've got a few free hours, but there's very little down time between turns, which helps to keep the whole table engaged.

At the beating heart of World Order is a card system, which is its action economy, and a resource control game, which is your main objective. You start with a deck of cards that you'll draw from to determine your possible moves each round. Each (typically) has one of eight different actions you can take: improve relations, trade, engage, move, build a base, produce resources, get a growth card, or invest.

You'll only play one card each turn, and there are four turns each round. With six rounds in the game total, that means each player only takes 24 actions in an entire game of World Order. This makes every turn feel important, and you'll strive to reach your goals as efficiently as possible, desperate not to waste a single move. However, you won't have every action available to you on every round, forcing you to make hard choices - like foregoing points now to set yourself up for future success.

Every action type has its place. You need to trade to get resources or money, improve relations to gain allied countries that make other actions easier (or possible), move armies around the board to keep control over the regions you have a vested interest in, and gain development cards to gain points and more flexible powers.

But your ultimate goal (i.e. the biggest source of points) is to have the most influence in seven different regions, which means you need to build bases or invest in your allied countries, or else engage in the region with your political power.

This territory-control aspect is where most of World Order's tension comes from. It's a zero-sum game. It's not good enough having a little influence across the whole Earth - you need to win particular regions. To do this, you have to watch your opponents carefully, figure out what they're up to, and decide where you're going to be able to compete and where it just isn't worth the battle.

This feeling of responding to others actions applies to World Order's military system too. There is no combat, instead each superpower has particular regions they're interested in. If your rivals have more armies in those regions than you (the EU and USA don't count each other as enemies for this) then you'll bleed points at the end of each round. This means, instead of a heated war where armies win or lose conflicts, you have a constantly growing military build-up, a sort of Cold War situation, with neither side firing a shot.

This system works, feels suitably thematic, and allows your opponents' actions to shape your own, but it's not super dynamic. Either you have the most military in a region, someone else does, or you're in deadlock. I could seldom see any reason to ever deescalate once tanks were committed to a region, for instance.

World Order features the best kind of asymmetry, where you only have to learn one set of mechanics but each faction still feels dramatically different to play. Each power produces different amounts of each resource, has its own starting deck, its own unique scoring incentives, two special once-per-game ability cards, and begins the game with different allies and starting influence. The differences between players are more subtle than a game like Root (or Hegemony for that matter) but in practice this usually works out better. The factions feel suitably different without massively extending 'The Teach'.

I want to talk a little more about the influence system, because it's so instrumental to the game and it has some interesting nuances. Each region has temporary and permanent influence slots, and, space permitting, you choose which type you want to add whenever you gain influence.

But while temporary influence gives you more victory points in the short term, it can be dislodged by your opponents. When there's no room left, a new temporary influence cube pushes the others one space to the left, which means whoever placed theirs first gets shoved off. An additional complexity: regions won't score in one of the two scoring periods (at the end and half-way through) unless all their permanent influence squares are filled up.

From my experience, this turns the first half of the game into a land-grab, with each player striving to scoop up as many permanent influence spots as possible, and also ensure their regions score come turn three. The latter half then becomes a cat-and-mouse game, where players want to wait and see, only committing influence to the regions they're in contention for when they're sure it won't just be removed again. Such a simple system, but it creates really fun shifts in the strategy.

Another interesting mechanic in World Order is the game's light deck-building element. You draw six action cards in a round and use four, and the ones left in your hand then give you resources (usually cash, political power, or tanks) and research to buy new cards.

This adds a particularly heartwrenching dilemma, as you have to decide between taking the best actions in the round, or preserving cards to buy new ones for later. Honestly, I found this a little paralyzing, and so mostly focused on making the best choices in the moment, just keeping the idea of saving some research in the back of my mind, rather than planning out what I wanted to buy ahead of schedule.

I think this may actually be the intended approach, because the deck-building in World Order is relatively minor. Compared to a somewhat similar game, Dune Imperium, you cycle through your cards less often, and you only have five opportunities to buy more. It's perfectly possible in fact, that you won't be able to buy anything every round. Indeed, in one game, playing China, I missed over half of the opportunities to pick up new cards, but still managed to take second place.

Not that the new cards aren't worthwhile. Strong cards let you take multiple actions at once, or give a minor effect while letting you play a second card. Others might give you a slightly superior version of a regular action or let you reset temporary influence at the same time, upsetting the applecart, as a different player now stands to have their influence pushed out.

When teaching World Order to less experienced gamers, I found the real-life theme helped quite a lot. While action cards with names like Assign New Diplomats and Minimize Bureaucracy aren't going to thrill anyone's pants off, the fact that World Order tries to be a political simulation, aligning with real life as closely as possible, makes it feel easier to learn.

This doesn't just apply to little particulars like the US being unable to cosy up with North Korea (it's 2010, not 2026), it also works when applied to each power's overall strategy. Russia wants to go big on military, China wants to sell consumer goods to the world and get rich, the EU wants to make friends, and the US wants to be a global superpower and do everything at once, requiring careful decision-making to avoid spreading itself too thin.

There were even bits of moment-to-moment gameplay where I found the - is it ludonarrative harmony? - very satisfying. For instance, while Russia was causing problems for me with its military posturing, I as the EU still had to buy tons of fuel from them. That's Realpolitik, baby!

There is one place where the theme doesn't really match the experience. For a game about politics, there's no deal-making to be done (any trades are forced) and while you're always responding to others' actions, there's practically no direct interaction between players. I think adding this in would've just bogged the game down, but it's worth mentioning, as this could be an expectation mismatch for a potential player.

From what I've experienced, World Order works well at different play counts - from two to four. While probably best with four, it has an extremely easy-to-run automata system representing the actions of any absent powers. This adds an element of randomness. You can also see what these NPCs are going to do ahead of time, creating a slightly different dynamic as you prepare for their moves.

The production value of World Order is top notch. I love its chunky wooden tanks, and I love that your resource count is tracked by moving wooden resource symbols along a track. A lesser game would've done this with big piles of different token types. I'm not a fan of the tiny country cards - little, hard-to-shuffle decks are the bane of my existence - but otherwise, it gets a gold star.

You'll need a large table though. While World Order doesn't have unnecessary components, those it does have are pretty large, and between a huge central map, individual player boards, and room required all over for various cards, the game takes up a ton of space. It packs away very neatly and intuitively though, something I always appreciate.

Overall, designers Vangelis Bagiartakis and Varnavas Timotheou have skillfully made a game that sticks in your head long after you're done playing. Its many systems bely a relatively simple core gameplay loop, and there's plenty of replay value here as you try out different factions and strategies. I think this is a really clever game, and it's the sort of title that some people will find really fun to master.

Even if that's not you, if you have any interest in this theme and don't mind a longer strategy board game, I heartily recommend giving World Order a whirl.