It’s a Wonderful World asks players to expand an empire into the future.

And that future is full of cubes.

In It’s a Wonderful World, you are an expanding Empire and must choose your path to your future. You must develop faster and better than your competitors. You’ll carefully plan your expansion to develop your production power and rule over this new world.

It’s a Wonderful World Game Play

For setup, there are a bunch of cubes in the middle of the table in a certain order which we need to be aware of but we can ignore them for now. There are also piles of tokens that represent Generals and Financiers.

Each player gets an empire board showing them their special ability that also gives them a place to put their stuff.

A game is played over 4 rounds of 3 phases.

Draft – Each player gets 7 cards and they are drafted in the direction on the game board which will alternate each round. Each card picked is placed face-up in the player’s play area.

Planning – Players now decide what to do with each card they drafted. They can be recycled, which is to discard them for a particular coloured cube.

Others you put aside to ‘build’ later. To build you need to add cubes from your supply onto the spaces on the cards to fulfil their requirements. As soon as they are complete, you discard the cubes on them and stack them onto your empire board.

Some buildings need you to cash in General/Financier tokens to complete.

Completed buildings will often give a bonus for completing them in the form of cubes or General/Financier tokens but most give income on future rounds and/or ways to score points.

Production

Production – This is done one at a time in order from Grey to Blue across the cube types on the game board. Players will take a number of that coloured cube equal to their income and can use them to build immediately. This means if you receive grey cubes as income to finish off building a black building, you will then be able to use that building to produce this round.

But, if you get black cubes to finish a grey building, as grey has already gone you won’t get that income this round.

If a player produces more of one cube colour than any other player they get a supremacy bonus in the form of General/Financier tokens depending on the colour.

Cubes that you can’t place on buildings go on your player board. If you get 5 on there, they are swapped to a red cube which is a wild resource.

After 4 rounds players score. The buildings have multipliers that score based on what you have. For example, my Empire board gave me 2 points for every green building I built. You not only get 1 point per General/Financier but some buildings can give you points for them too.

The player with the most points is the winner.

Theme

Weird one. It’s futuristic but is based on real or theoretical things. It’s not for me.

Setup

Piling the cubes on the board is the hardest bit I guess. There is very little else to do.

Components & Artwork

The cubes are nice. The cards slide around on the Empire board making it tricky to stack them correctly sometimes. Putting cubes on cards is always tricky too.

The art is OK but I never really paid attention to it while playing

Ease of Teaching

It’s fairly straightforward. As with any drafting game you can sit new players between experienced ones if possible.

It’s a Wonderful World Summary

Obvious 7 Wonders comparisons straight away as is compulsory with any drafting game. I said while playing that it feels like 7 Wonders is every card was a Guild and cube management bit aside, it’s not far off.

The cube management is fun. When drafting, you need to calculate what you need, what you’ll get and what you can do with it. Also, you need to see if the building itself is actually any good.

When you recycle a card it’s kinda like discarding cards to pay for other cards like Marvel Champions, one of my favourite mechanisms. Many times I had to discard a cool card just to get a yellow cube or something.

So yeah, good fun game. Very thinky yet incredibly simple.

Jesta ThaRogue