Small World 2 - Be not Afraid (DLC)

Small World 2 - Be Not Afraid is a content DLC for Days of Wonder's digital adaptation of the classic area-control board game. If you already know the base loop - pick a race-power combo off the draft queue, spend victory coins to skip past better options, expand aggressively, decline at the right moment, repeat - then this pack simply broadens that loop with ten new variables to slot into the rotation. The five new races each carry a built-in cost that makes the decision tree more interesting than a straight power upgrade. Barbarians get a large token count but cannot redeploy at the end of their turn, which punishes overextension hard. Pixies similarly flood the board but lose excess tokens when inactive, so timing your Decline is much more precise than usual. Homunculi have no special power at all, but grow every time an opponent skips their combo in the draft queue - a passive snowball that rewards patience in the queue phase. Leprechauns place victory-point pots of gold on territories they hold for a full turn, creating a press-your-luck territorial clock, while Pygmies refund a token whenever they take casualties, making them surprisingly resilient late in a race's active life. None of these feel like filler; each one changes how you read the board. The five new special powers are similarly calculated. Catapult lets you leap over one territory to conquer a non-adjacent region at reduced cost, which punches holes in what was previously safe rear-line territory. Barricade rewards being pushed into a corner by paying out bonus coins when you occupy four regions or fewer. Corrupt turns your own conquered regions into a tax on enemies, earning coins every time a rival takes one of your territories - useful for a deliberate decline-rush strategy. Imperial scales with empire size, and Mercenary lets you spend coins to make attacks easier, converting your victory bank into a tactical resource. The mix of economy-focused and combat-focused powers means these slot usefully into combos with both base game and other DLC races. The honest caveat is that Be Not Afraid tilts the design toward higher complexity. Some of the race mechanics and especially the new powers take a few games to read at a glance, and the combo interactions require a more experienced player to evaluate quickly during the draft. For players still learning when to decline and how to read the victory-coin differential, this pack can feel like too many moving parts arriving before the fundamentals click. Veteran Small World 2 players will find the new combos push session variety higher, which is the real metric for a DLC like this - how many more distinct strategic situations does it generate, and the answer here is genuinely more than a five-race pack has any right to produce.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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