For game designer Philippe Keyaerts and Days of Wonder, 2009 is really becoming a very small world.

"Small World" is a game in which a variety of races, 14 in fact, are trying to live in a world that is much too small. The only solution is for the races to expand and take over other parts of the world, previously inhabited by other races.

The races include dwarves, wizards, amazons, giants, orcs and humans.

Each of these races have special powers, 20 of them, in fact. But each game the races and powers are mixed and put together randomly. So the game is infinitely replayable.

“My first concern was to have different ways of earning points, giving players different sub-goals and strategies,” said Keyaerts. “Then (I wanted) to have a lot of them, so that each game would be different. The best way I saw to achieve this was to combine some simple powers.”

But as these races continue to grow, they ultimately begin to weaken as they are spread too thin. They go into decline and become much easier for newer races to conquer. Once the player sees that happening, he will put a race into decline and begin a new one of his own. “I wanted a game picturing the rise and fall of civilizations,” said Keyaerts. “Decline would come in a natural way. I tried several mechanisms until I thought of a drop of oil falling on the ground: it spreads but become thinner and thinner. This was the basis: a fixed number of pawns invading regions on a map. The more regions, the more points, but fewer pawns inside a region means fewer defenses against neighbors.”

So a successful strategy in this game involves not only picking the right races with the right special powers, but also in knowing the proper time to decline a race and introduce a new one. Points are accumulated throughout the course of the game. The game ends when a predetermined number of turns have elapsed.

For Days of Wonder it wasn’t difficult to see the appeal of the game’s design and to decide it was something they wanted under their company umbrella.

“We only publish one or two new games a year, so we have a pretty stringent set of requirements to help us decide whether something can be a Days of Wonder game,” said Mark Kaufman, Days of Wonder Vice President of Sales and Marketing. “We like games with evocative themes, that are easy enough for even non-gamers to learn quickly and that don't take too long to play.

We also like games that appeal to a broad audience, so that everyone in the family can not only enjoy it, but also have a reasonable chance to win the first time they play it. Small World fits all of those requirements.”

Response to the game has been strong, which has prompted the company to make future plans for the game.

“We've had great feedback from players, both hard-core gamers and more casual players,” said Kaufman. “We ran a contest where fans could submit their ownspecial powers or races and have a chance to have their ideas published, plus win a trip to Essen this year for the big European game fair in Germany and the response was fantastic. We had over 702 different race or special powers submitted, and the best ones were so exciting we're actually giving out three grand prizes instead of just one.”

The designer is quite pleased with the reception the game has gotten.

“Very happy, and a bit surprised,” said Keyaerts. “Even if I worked hard to keep the game simple while appealing and interesting, I always thought of ("Small World") as a gamers’ game. And now, I see 6-year- old kids enjoying playing. It’s wonderful.” Nobody is saying exactly what the future plans are for Small World but they certainly do involve publishing an expansion or two to take advantage of the contributions that were made by the gamers from the contest. Those expansions are likely to be available later this month at Essen.

One of the unique things about this game is that there are different boards to play on depending on the number of players in the game. "Small World" can be played by as few as two and by as many as five players. The game plays especially well with three or four.