The World Game

This is an educational game, and it'll teach you about all the countries of the world. It is a card game. Every card is one country. On it you will find information like the capital, the population, the area and the number of neighbouring countries. 

This is a game for 2 to 3 players. You start the game by having everyone draw 20 cards from the deck. You hold all 20 cards in your hand as your own personal deck. At any point you only look at information on the first card facing you. That is your current country. During play, you try to win cards from your opponents. The game is played until someone loses all cards. At that point whoever has the most cards wins. 

On your turn you have two options. You compare stats, or you declare a challenge. If you want to compare stats, you announce one of the features on your card, e.g. the population. Everyone then shows their cards, and whoever has the highest number in that feature takes all the cards. The cards are added to the back of the winner's deck. This is how you win cards from your opponents. 

If your current country is a small one, you'd be at an advantage when comparing stats. You can decide to declare a challenge instead. When you do so, you pick a person to issue a challenge. It doesn't have to be yourself. The person who issues the challenge tests the knowledge of everyone else. If the question can be answered correctly, the first person to do so wins cards. If no one gets it right, the person who asked the question wins the cards. You can ask things like the capital, or which continent the country is in. You can show the flag and ask which country it belongs to. You can also ask where exactly the country is. The game comes with a world map, and you can point at the country on the map. The map itself is only labelled with numbers, not country names. 

My sister Mei bought this game for her 11-year-old son Oswald as a Christmas present. This is very much what you would imagine a parent buying for their child. It's something educational. My sister is not that keen about playing boardgames. When they visited Kuala Lumpur recently, they brought along the game so that Uncle (me) can teach Oswald how to play. The rules are pretty straight-forward. However, five minutes into playing, I was already itching to change the rules (sigh... game designers...). Based on the rules that come with the game, if the players are roughly equal in their knowledge about countries around the world, the game may drag for a long time. They will win cards from one another at about the same rate. It's not easy for one player to completely bankrupt another. Well, I might be wrong, since we didn't finish a game using the prescribed rules. I suggested that when we won cards, we could set them aside as a score pile, instead of adding them to the back of our deck. That way the game has a finite end. You'll play 20 turns, because everyone has 20 cards to start with. 

This game reminds me of Top Trumps which I used to play when I was little. I remember I have a deck with tanks, and one with battleships. The carriers were the biggest and often won. The submarines were the weakest.