It’s a Wonderful World Review – A Game to Replace 7 Wonders

It’s a Wonderful World is the reason why I’ve never reviewed 7 Wonders.

When I started this blog, I loved 7 Wonders. It’s a card game of building civilisations and one of the first games I bought. The drafting is great, and the decisions are bountiful.

Yet, as soon as I started playing It’s a Wonderful World, I stopped playing 7 Wonders. I put it on the shelf and after several months of gathering dust, it went onto the sell pile, never to be seen again.

Why the swap out?

Well, that’s one question we aim to solve in this review.

Overview

In It’s a Wonderful World, you’re trying to create a new utopia by drafting Development cards and expanding your empire. You’ll collect and use resources to construct Development cards and generate even more supply. With any luck, you’ll collect victory points along the way and win the game.

Each of the four rounds starts with you holding a hand of seven Development cards. These all have a construction cost, a benefit once built, and a recycling bonus.

Then the drafting begins, look at your hand of cards and, like a kid at a utopian-flavoured candy shop, pick the one you like the most. Put it aside and pass the rest of your hand to your neighbour.

Everyone does this simultaneously. So despite giving away your hand of six cards, another six should appear from the other direction.

Keep going through this process until you end up with a hand of seven hand-picked Development cards.

Now you’re faced with the difficult task of choosing which cards to Construct and which to Recycle.

Cards slated for Construction are placed in front of you. From now on, you can add resources to the card. Once you’ve added enough to cover its cost, you then place the card on your player card. Here it will generate resources for you for the remainder of the game.

Any cards not used for Construction are Recycled.

For most cards, this gives you a specific resource to place on your Construction cards. However, if there’s nowhere to put this resource, you add it to your player card.

The only way to get this resource back is by trading five resources (of any type) from your player card for a shiny-red wild resource called Krystallium. Oooh fancy.

During this phase, you can take as many actions as you want. Eventually, everyone will run out of cards, moving you to the Production phase.

Here you move from left to right through all the different resource colours. From grey to black to green to yellow to blue.

For each colour, everyone checks their completed cards for Production icons. You then gain resources equal to the sum of these icons. Just like with Recycling, these resources must immediately go onto your cards under Construction. Otherwise, they’re added to your player board.

Then, whoever generated the most gets a bonus victory point.

Throughout the Production phase, you’ll finish filling up Construction cards. If the finished card can generate any colour cubes that haven’t had a turn yet, then it will produce resources within the current round.

Upon finishing the Production phase, give everyone a new hand of seven Development cards and begin the next round. After four rounds, count up everyone’s victory points to find out who won the game.

One kick 10,000 times

I fear not the man who has practised 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practised one kick 10,000 times.

– Bruce Lee

In my case, it’s not fear but love. I love not the games with 10,000 shallow mechanics, but I love board games with one mechanic and 10,000 layers of depth. Games like Splendor, Century: Spice Road, and now, It’s a Wonderful World.

It pushes its scarce ruleset to the fullest to create a game that’s greater than the multiplication of its parts. Every rule fits together seamlessly to create a board game I have trouble putting away.

Perhaps the biggest example of its perfect formula is how the drafting only works so well due to the Production phase.

My biggest complaint of 7 Wonders is that as good as the game is, you’re always holding and looking at your hand of cards. Putting a physical barrier between yourself and other players. It doesn’t seem like much, but I found this barrier stopped players from talking and engaging with each other.

It’s a Wonderful World has the same problem, but mitigates it with the Production phase. This phase is fun for other reasons. But in this paragraph, we’re celebrating how it slows the game down and lets it breathe. Letting you take a moment to focus on what everyone is building and who’s doing it best.

As a result, you gather additional information and can change your strategy accordingly. This makes It’s a Wonderful World feel more involved than its counterpart.

Continuing with the Production phase, letting players build and use their new Constructions throughout this phase is exhilarating. It feels so good when you chain together the completion of several buildings in a single phase.

But beyond the warm fuzzies you get from this phase, it also changes your thinking. Expanding your decision-making beyond what to build into the realm of when to build.

Resource management is such a large part of It’s a Wonderful World. With most of your thinking around how to generate specific types of resources, and the most efficient way to build with them.

Because, if you remember, unused resources fall onto your player card. Once that happens, you won’t see them again until you lose another four resources. It’s a Wonderful World isn’t a long game. With only four rounds of play, it’s too inefficient to let resources fall through like this.

The same worries arise during Drafting.

While selecting cards for your final hand, you must consider which cards you’re saving for Construction and those for Recycling. The two worst things you can do in It’s a Wonderful World are put a card up for Construction and never build it, or Recycle a card only for its resource to fall to your player card.

So you need to be decisive and draft good Development cards to build but also good cards for Recycling. But when almost every card is so good, it makes this decision incredibly hard.

It’s a game that allows you to succeed

Now that we’ve touched on the drafting, let’s talk about the engine-building. Surprise, surprise, it’s also fantastic. It’s a Wonderful World taps into the power fantasy of going from poverty to providence.

Unexpectedly so, when you mightn’t even build one card by the end of the first of four rounds. That’s happened to me on a few occasions, but I still managed to bounce back. By the end of the game, I amassed a stack of built cards all producing obscene amounts of coloured resources.

We’re talking Scrooge McDuck bathtub levels of grey, yellow, black, green, and blue cubes.

Still, it’s never enough.

Even with this stockpile of resources, you end the game with unfinished construction projects and plans to build even more. Wishing you had just one more round to complete them all.

While this may be frustrating for some, it left me eager to play again. Wanting to do better and try to complete those unfinished Development cards. Of course, this is a fool’s errand. You always have more ongoing Construction than resources to build with. But it hasn’t stopped me from trying.

This leads me to why I’m so high on It’s a Wonderful World. It draws me in and invites me to play over and over. Each time I enjoy the challenge of Drafting the right cards and choosing the right projects at the right time.

It’s a game that allows you to succeed and rewards you with a large empire and many, many resources for doing so.

Now, before I wrap up this review I want to cover a few other things.

First is the two-player variant found in the back of the rule book. Like the rest of the game, it’s incredibly sleek. The only rule change is instead of drafting from a hand of seven cards, you draft seven cards from a hand of ten.

Whereas other drafting games (again, looking at you 7 Wonders) focus on scarcity, leaving you to worry about all the good cards being taken by your opponent. It’s a Wonderful World approaches the same problem through a lens of abundance. Giving you so many good options, the hard part is picking the cards you won’t be Drafting.

I found this to be a lot of fun, and better than most two-player drafting games I’ve played.

There’s also a widely well-regarded solo mode. I played through it a couple of years ago and while my memories are a little fuzzy on the details, I remember not hating it. This is high praise given my overall stance on solo board games.

All in all, It’s a Wonderful World is an awesome board game. So if you’re in the market looking for a new drafting game, be sure to put this on your list to check out.