Board & Card Games Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people who like playing board games, designing board games or modifying the rules of existing board games. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
So I got a copy of Small World, and in our first game, the "Amazons" came up early. According to the rules, they get "+4 when attacking". What exactly does that mean? We argued it out and what we eventually decided it meant was
At the beginning of each of the Amazon player's turns, they receive 4 extra tokens. When they end their "conquering regions" step, they remove 4 tokens of their choice from the board, then go on to compute VP.
But we're not at all confident in our interpretation.
Excerpt from the rule book itself:
Amazons
Four of your Amazon tokens may only be used for conquest, not for defense, as indicated by the +4 on the banner itself. So you start your initial turn with 10 Amazon tokens (plus any additional ones that may be granted to you by the Special Power associated with the Amazons, depending on your combo). At the end of each of your Troop Redeployments (see Troop Redeployment, p. 5), remove four tokens from the map, making sure to leave at least one Amazon token in each of your Regions if possible, and only take these four tokens back in hand to redeploy on the map once you Ready your Troops (see Ready your Troops, p. 6) at the start of your next turn.
Sounds right to me. Compare and contrast to the Ratmen, who get 8 men both "on attack" and "on defense", as it were. The Amazons are balanced with that race by getting 2 more men (women?) to attack with... but 2 fewer to defend with.
When I started thinking about it that way, it became obviously right that the Amazons should attack with 10 but only defend with 6: the numbers match up nicely!
That's how it worked in the one game I've played. At the time I felt like it was incorrect in some subtle way, but since it was my first and only game so far, I'm not sure either.
