First family play of Smallworld - great game!

We've had Smallworld for some time now and now we have several add-ons I thought it a good time to invite everyone for a game. A couple of us had played before so we kind of knew what to do - everyone got their Races and Race Trait cards and we set off, conquering territory from all corners! The idea of the game is to use your race to conquer as many of the maps territories - using a basic idea that a normal, enemy free, flat land costs two of your own units to invade, a location such as mountains or 1 enemy unit, makes this go up to three, two enemy units and this goes up to four etc etc. For each piece of land the player owns, they gain 1 coin at the end of the turn.

A race is selected from a line of Races plus Traits. At game start you get 5 coins. If you don't want the first race or 2nd race, you place a coin on the 1st race and one on the 2nd and select the 3rd. All the others are moved up and the next player makes their selection.

As the player expands of territory, at the end of their turn, they can freely redistribute their units to defend their land against other players. Each race has its own traits for attack and defence. Also, when the player has found that they have over expanded and no longer able to take land or attack, they can go into Decline; all spare counters are removed leaving one in each conquered land, flipped to the Declined side - these still gain 1 coin for their player until conquered by other players. In the meantime, the player can select another race to begin conquering again. If this race goes into decline, the 1st race is removed completely.

For us, Anita played a race of Giants and conquered a reasonable area in the bottom right of the map; Roshni had firstly a race of Dwarves that ended up being put into decline quickly and she restarted with Halflings; Maya started with Amazon Warriors and had to decline to Ratmen; Kavita started with Sorcerers and didn't need to go into decline; I started with Elves on the bottom left and had to decline to Skeletons, attacking in earnest from the far right hand side of the map. In the end Anita won the game. An excellent family game all round that Anita wanted to replay with just 2 players to get used to the rules.

End game - Anita is counting up her score on the right