Worms the Board Game review – seriously silly

Worms the Board Game does a remarkably good job taking all the silly weapons, explosive barrels, destructible terrain, and disastrous chain reactions that made the classic multiplayer videogame so enjoyable, and translating them onto the tabletop. Depending on how much chaos you like in your tabletop games, it may soar like a super-sheep, or sink like a concrete donkey.

This Worms board game review is based on a few play sessions by me, and another by Mollie Russell, with a variety of player counts. And if I was making my judgement on sheer hilarious chaos alone, I’d call this one of the best board games ever.

What is Worms the Board Game?

Worms the Board Game is a multiplayer combat game for two to four players. You control a team of worms armed with a variety of absurd ordnance, ranging from baseball bats to exploding sheep, to blast your enemies or knock them into the ocean. Don’t get too attached to your worms, or your plans – you’re never more than one dice roll away from everything being blown to smithereens.

What’s in the box?

Made by miniature games company Mantic Games, the Worms board game has some great components. There are four teams of plastic Worms who look absolutely spot on, plus colored base rings to distinguish the four squads.

More plastic doodads represent supply crates, flammable barrels, and mines. There’s a handful of twelve-sided targeting dice, a novelty cardboard coin for coin flips, some cardboard tokens, plus cards for weapons, end of turn supply drops, and sudden death conditions. There’s a good box insert that holds all the little components.

The game doesn’t exactly have lots of rules, but it does have more than you might expect given how chaotic it is. The rulebook is serviceable, if not exceptional, for teaching the game, and there are handy reference cards for the things you’re most likely to need to check mid game.

How does it play?

The Worms board game plays remarkably like the Worms videogames, albeit shifted from a side-on to a top-down 2D perspective. This even starts with setting up the board, which mimics the procedural level generation from the videogame.

The players generate the map together, each placing down one of four knobbly-shaped polygons made from hexes, to create a single continuous landmass. Everything around them is considered to be water. This terrain is destructible, and whenever a blast goes off in a hex during the game, it gains a crater – three craters and the hex sinks under the waves.

Each player takes a posse of worms and one of each of the other plastic components, then takes it in turns to place them around the map. Each hex can hold up to three Things (that’s a game term, and it includes just about every game object), but there’s no limits on how you place them. You could stack three worms from the same team in one hex, isolate a worm on one end of the map surrounded by mines, or anything else.

You’re not deploying your worms, you’re creating a random setup. Only after the board is set will you randomly draw one of the team cards, which tells you which set of worms you’re controlling. Don’t worry about balancing the setup – balance really isn’t a concern here.

Turns are very simple. First, you’ll pick one of your worms, standing them up if they’re injured. You can make up to two moves with them, either a cautious ‘inch’ from one hex to the next, or an ambitious jump that will move you two hexes but which may see them scatter off target. Then you can use one or more weapon cards, before drawing a Supply Drop card that causes more Things to rain from the sky and changes the direction of the wind.

The game ends when the first team of Worms is annihilated (or when only one team is standing, if you use that optional rule), and the bottom of the Supply Cards deck is lined with Sudden Death cards that will speed things to a conclusion.

Worm violence

So how do you eliminate worms? A worm can suffer two hits before it’s dead, the first one knocking it onto its back, the second taking it out. Worms also can’t swim, so if you can throw them into the water that’s curtains for them. You’ll start with a hand of weapon cards, and supply drops will provide you with more exotic options, from the reliable homing missile to the utterly indiscriminate banana bomb.

Weapons have varied and often unpredictable effects. Consider the humble bazooka: to use it, you simply place the target marker in a hex in a direct line away from your worm, then roll some dice – the further the target is from your worm, the fewer dice you roll.

You then get to pick one die result. If the result is a hit, the shot lands on target. If it’s a number, you’ll refer to the wind-marker hex, which translates each value into a direction, which is where the shot will drift. There’s also a wind symbol, which sends the target marker off in the direction of the wind.

So lets say you fire a bazooka at a target, but because of the distance you only roll two dice, and they both land on a ‘wind’ result. The bazooka shot has drifted off course, and lands in an adjacent hex.

Now that shot might land harmlessly in the sea, but because the board is packed and the worms are distributed at random it’s just as likely to fall in a hex containing one of your worms, and a flammable barrel for good measure. The hex is blasted, adding a crater to it. Your worm gets blasted too, taking a point of damage, scattering them up into the air and dropping them in another hex.

Lets say  your worm lands in a hex that also happens to have two enemy worms in it, plus a crater from an earlier explosion. As a hex can only contain three Things in total, three worms and one crater won’t fit, so a worm is going to be ‘nudged’ out of the hex. You pick an enemy worm, and roll one die to scatter it. Wouldn’t you know it, they end up in the sea! Great success!

But we forgot about that flammable barrel in the hex hit by the bazooka, didn’t we? That’s going to explode. You pick up five dice and roll them all, adding a single flame token to any hex in a direction indicated by one or more die result.

Because chaos loves company, one of those flames could land in the hex that your bazookad worm was flung into. What with the enemy worm and the crater in it, that’s more Things than the hex can hold, which means another nudge. This time when you prod the surviving enemy worm they scatter into a hex with a mine!

Their controller makes a coin flip to test whether or not the mine goes off, and they succeed, breathing a sigh of relief. They pick a worm, and get ready to take their revenge…

And that, right there, is the game – chaos upon chaos upon chaos. There are definitely safer and riskier moves to choose between: using the jetpack to maneuver over impassable water hexes is safer than the ninja rope, which is faster than simply jumping, and some weapons simply do a point of damage to a target with no roles. But your fate is almost always at the mercy of lady luck.

If you’re the kind of gamer who gleefully claps whenever something ridiculous happens no matter who it benefits, the experience is an absolute blast.

Who is it for?

If you have fond memories of the Worms videogame, and you want to play something just as silly and chaotic on the tabletop, this is a perfect game for you. If you like funny board games or party games, you need to be okay with learning some rules: it’s not a rules-heavy strategy board game by any means, but without a computer to simulate all the chaos, it’s up to the players and some dice to handle everything.

Worms plays fine with just two players, but it’s better with more. It’s a fundamentally social experience – chaos shared is chaos multiplied. The fact that players can be wiped out by random chance is a reason to use “first player elimination” as the condition to end the game, at least to begin with.

Gamers who enjoy mastering strategy and delving deeper into a game’s systems won’t be impressed. There is simply too much randomness here for you to reliably plan your next turn, let alone think up new strategies between games.

Verdict

Like a deep-fried chocolate bar, I thoroughly enjoy the Worms board game, but I don’t want it as a staple of my (tabletop) diet. It’s a fun knockabout game where plans are pointless, stuff blows up, and something ridiculous happens on most turns, and those simple delights are the sum of its offer.

Your first game will be halting as you learn the rules, your second will be a blast (unless your luck sucks), and your enjoyment of subsequent playthroughs will depend entirely on your enthusiasm for doing more of the same.

If you enjoy beer and pretzels games, and particularly if you remember the Worms videogames fondly, this will make a great addition to the rotation. If you like strategic depth and mastering systems, look elsewhere.

Source: Wargamer