World Wonders Components Overview and First Impressions

World Wonders took the board game world by storm when it was first announced, and copies of the game quickly flew off shelves – including at GenCon 2023. This was a game I was hoping to pickup, but availability, even here in Canada at 401 Games and Board Game Bliss (our largest online retailers) has been near impossible.

Recently, Arcane Wonders sent over a copy of the game along with the Mundo expansion, so let’s take a look at the base game and everything that comes in the box!

Polyomino games are my wife’s jam – if there are crazy tiles that need to be placed down on a board, my wife is all about it. Thing is, I’ve found over the years that the quality of polyomino style games has slowly decreased, which I argue is a result of the genre’s popularity. As it becomes more popular, more and more companies are looking to churn out experience with less than ideal components. Thankfully, that doesn’t seem to be an issue here.

The game includes player boards for everyone, and they look great. The sidewalk is printed along the bottom of the board (where your roads will need to start from when you begin the game), and the rest of the printing is fantastic. The design team could have easily opted for a less interesting looking player board, but they went above and beyond.

The cool thing to do post-COVID (just using that as a reference) is to have dual layered boards for your games, and I think if there was one thing that could elevate this game, it would have been a dual layered player track board. Having a spot to nicely nestle in your track pieces (coins, culture (?), etc.) would have been a nice, albeit unnecessary, touch.

The wooden pieces used on these tracks are great – again, you could have easily seen Arcane Wonders include cardboard tokens to track these things, so having wooden pieces is a great touch.

Version 1.0.0

I continue to talk about card quality in these reviews, but it’s usually a fairly useless discussion especially when you are talking about games were shuffling isn’t something you do often. The cards here are perfectly serviceable for what they need to do, which is basically just look pretty and display placement information for the wonders.

I think if you wanted to sleeve them, it would be a relatively inexpensive endeavour. I don’t typically sleeve my board games, but with so few cards this might be the exception.

The cardboard polyomino pieces are great! They have a lot of detail so they look great when they are played, but they also have all the iconography you need so you know which tracks you will move up on when placed. They also punched really nicely, so that is a major plus.

These pieces do highlight one potential flaw in the production, and that is regarding an insert. I don’t hate pulling out baggies of pieces to setup my games, but for some reason this game seems like an ideal candidate for a nice plastic insert. That being said, it’s probably not a great environmental option, which may have factored into the decision making process.

Now to talk about the wonders. These look absolutely amazing, and the detail on each is phenomenal. I have seen many argue that these wonders could easily have just been polyomino tiles themselves (although not with the arch in the Mundo expansion) but I think it was VERY important that these be impressive, wooden pieces.

Wooden is key here, because I think had they opted for plastic wonders, it would not have the same appeal in my opinion. These pieces pop, and make for a great table presence. I’ve said it many times in the past, a good looking game is objectively more fun to play. It just is, that’s a fact, don’t argue with me. It’s more fun. And having these nice, chunky wonders is just fun.

Overall, I’m really impressed with the components in World Wonders and the Mundo expansion, and I cannot wait to get this down to the table to play. It was one of my most anticipated games of 2023, and now that I finally have it, I’m expecting big things!