Worms: The Board Game Review

Overview

Since I cover and review both video games and board games, I tend to take a special interest in board game adaptions of video games. However, I have had pretty poor luck with them. They usually end up being poor adaptions, have broken mechanics, or end up just being pretty bad games.

Worms, however, seems like it should be a homerun hit. The turn-based nature of the video game is the perfect canvas to transform into a board game.

You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!

A mid game overview picture of the Worms Board Game — *The mechanics of the video game translate well to its board game counterpart*.

In practice, however, Worms: The Board Game comes exceptionally close. It translates the mechanisms of the video game in very clever ways that feel very close to the source material. It does such a great job that I can’t help but hear the many sound effects from the video game in my head when I play it.

Unfortunately, Worms: The Board Game is a victim of over-deluxification, at the cost of cutting away components that the game actually needs. It’s ironic because if I had the collectors edition, I would likely have a more favorable view of the game as it has the components that I feel are missing from the base version. At the same time, the price point of the base game is already tough to swallow for what it is.

Gideon’s Bias	Worms the Board Game Information
Review Copy Used: Yes	Publisher: Mantic Games
Number of Plays 8+	Designers: Jack Caesar, Matt Gilbert
Player Counts Played: 2 and 4	Player Count: 2-4
Fan of Genre: Yes	Genre: Hex-Based Battle
Fan of Weight: No	Weight: Light
Gaming Groups Thoughts: Disliked It	Price: $59.95

Presentation

The full contents of the Worms Board game Spread out on the table — *For its price tag, there isn’t a lot here.*

Worms: The Board Game comes with 4 sets of land tiles and a handful of water tiles to cover up the land as it’s destroyed. The land tiles are double-sided to convey a different aesthetic theme but are functionally the same. There is a handful of cards that represent weapons, drops, and sudden-death effects.

The cards have a nice visual layout that’s easy to understand with some pretty simple iconography, and the art is very consistent with the video game, which is nice. You get a handful of tokens to represent craters and fire, as well as a nifty set of custom 12-sided dice.

Worms Miniatures — *Miniatures make up the bulk of the game.*

There’s a set of ridiculously oversized help cards for certain game elements. These cards could have been condensed down into a single card. Having a separate large help card for Water, Mines, Oil Drums, Craters, Supply Crates, and Fire is just silly, and cumbersome.

Finally, you get the extremely unnecessary set of miniatures. 16 worms as well as 6 mines, 6 oil barrels, and 6 crates. So, it’s time for one of my iconic miniature rants. I like minis as much as the next person, and these ones are dark-washed and look very nice.

However, I take issue when I feel like the miniatures don’t bring much to the game except to inflate the price, or when I feel like other aspects of the game suffered to facilitate them. If I were to hang a poster child on my wall to serve as a prime example of both, I’d hang up Worms: The Board Game.

Object Miniatures — *There are even miniatures for objects like crates.*

This is a small box game, there is really not much in it. When I look at the other $60 games on my shelf and what they offer, Worms: The Board Game really does not compare. A good chunk of that price tag is simply sunk into the miniatures.

Furthermore, the game itself desperately, desperately needed more map tiles, which I’ll dig deeper into later. Miniatures look nice, but have no impact on the gameplay, the map tiles do and I’d trade all of the Mini’s for more tiles in a heartbeat. Especially the objects like Barrels and Crates, which could have easily been tokens.

In its defense, the game is incredibly quick to set up and put away, but largely for the wrong reasons.

What I Like About Worms: The Board Game

The Initial Set Up

In addition to being fast to set up, the way you begin the game is pretty clever. Once the map tiles are placed, each player takes 4 worms of a single color, 1 Oil Drum, 1 Landmine, and 1 Supply Crate, then they take turns placing these things onto various hexes. The Kicker is, that you don’t know what color worms you’re playing until after everything is placed.

A mid game close up of Worms: The Board game — *You don’t know which team is yours when players are still placing worms and objects.*

Once everyone is done placing their worms and objects, a set of reference cards gets shuffled and handed out to each player. These cards match one of the four colors, and whichever one you get is the color worms you play.

It’s clever, and it adds an interesting element to the game’s setup. You have to strike a balance between setting up your worms in an advantageous position, vs a bad one, because you may or may not end up playing that team. It’s one of the game’s small quirks, but one that I found really neat.

How Closely The Board Game Adapts the Video Game

In the video game, players take turns inching their worms along a destructible landscape, picking up supply drops, and attacking with a variety of weapons that can be affected by the wind and have their own physics-based quirks. The Board Game is pretty much the same and how it adapts those mechanisms is pretty clever.

Let’s take the iconic Bazooka for example. When you attack with the Bazooka, you place the target token in the hex you WANT to attack. Then you roll dice based on how far away you are, the longer the distance, the fewer dice you get to roll. You then choose one of the dice to use.

The Bazooka card — *Just like in the video game, the basic Bazooka is a powerful weapon.*

The die faces have a direct hit symbol, which means you simply hit that hex. However, An arrow means you move the target token in the direction of the wind, while any number symbol means you move the target token in the matching direction on the wind dial. Your attack actually lands wherever the target token ends up.

If you actually hit a hex with a Worm in it, the Worm is damaged but also blasted, so they roll the dice to see which adjacent hex they are thrown into. If it’s in a water tile or off of the map, they drown instantly.

More powerful weapons take the concept even further, for example, the Banana Bomb blasts the same hex twice, scatters the target token, blasts some more, scatters again, and so forth. To anyone who has played the video game, you will absolutely understand what is happening with each and every weapon.

A demonstration of using the target token with two worms on the game tiles and a target token with one of them. — *You place the target token where you want to attack and roll some dice to see where you actually attack.*

The utility items have neat functions as well. You can use Girders to avoid fire and mines, or Ninja Ropes to zip across the map, but you chance landing somewhere different than where you intended, by using the same dice mechanic.

I also appreciate how you move around the map. You can move or jump twice in a turn, and many weapons allow you an extra movement after you attack. That gives you some flexibility, just like the video game.

After a player finishes a turn, they draw a drop card that will usually drop a supply crate and other items in the emptiest hex, making it so the battlefield is ever-changing and new weapons are available for Worms to grab.

A picture of Worms the Board game with a board covered with plenty of water tiles. — *Water tiles cover up parts of the board that get destroyed*

Destruction is handled really well too. Each time a hex is damaged, usually by a blast, it gets a crater token. Once it has 3 crater tokens, it’s destroyed, and a water tile is placed on top of it.

I’m very impressed at just how much the game feels like the Worms I know and love. The dice and target mechanic captures the feel and spirit of the video game quite well, even if it ends up feeling more random than I would like.

What I Dislike About Worms: The Board Game

A Bit Too Random

While the dice and target mechanic is a great way to adapt the video game to Worms: The Board Game. It’s not perfect. In the video game, aiming and firing a weapon is a lot more skill-based. You are contending with the wind and physics, but it’s YOU contending with them, not random chance. Screw Ups are often your fault. In Worms: The Board Game, it’s all at the mercy of the dice.

This makes explosions, blasts, and attacks feel much more unpredictable, and at times, pretty unfair. Worms get slapped into the water left and right purely by chance. Now, this is largely due to the compacted map issues that I’ll get to in a bit, but even on a larger map a good bit of randomness would always be present.

A custom set of dice from Worms: The Board Game — *The luck of the dice seems to dictate who wins more than anything.*

The big thing that sets it apart compared to the video game, is when shots go awry in the video game, it’s funny and entertaining. The board game can’t capture that same humor when bad luck befalls your Worms. It just feels kind of bad.

You can do your best to mitigate the luck factor, but you can only impact it so far. There wasn’t a single game I played where I felt like anyone won or lost through skill or strategy, it just felt like it was who the dice favored the best.

The Lack of Map Tiles

By far the biggest issue with Worms: The Board Game is the lack of map tiles. The base game only has 4, and this makes the play area feel extremely cramped. This is true even in a two-player game where you can choose to use all 4 tiles as opposed to 2. In a 4 player game, it’s an absolute clustered mess.

The small play area magnifies the frustrating side of the randomness as any blast attack has a good chance of killing off your worms, regardless of any strategy or tactics from the players. There is very little space to maneuver around, and you can’t really get out of the way. It brings the entire experience down.

A side view of Worms: The Board Game — *The cramped play area in the base game really brings down the fun factor.*

This problem is likely mitigated in the Collectors edition, as it has far more map tiles that you could use. This brings me back to my distaste for the miniatures, because the small play area impacts the whole game in a very negative way, and I feel like the game’s budget was eaten up by miniatures that feel entirely unnecessary for a game of this scope.

While I would still have a problem with how much the game leans on luck, you would be able to mitigate bad rolls much more with more space to move around, especially as hexes get destroyed and replaced with water. As it stands, it can be a very unpleasant experience where you hardly get to enjoy the weaponry you pick up.

Verdict

Worms: The Board Game manages to capture the spirit of the video game in clever ways, and it makes a genuine effort to be a respectable board game adaption.

The Holy Hand Grenade card — *It’s neat to see how each of the video games iconic weapons work in the board game.*

For the most part, it’s gameplay mechanics work and it would be an enjoyable game if the play area wasn’t so compact and clustered. A few more map tiles would have made a massive difference in how the game feels to play and it’s a shame that this small box game opted to provide a bunch of miniatures instead.

Not every game needs or should utilize miniatures, not when it could instead provide additional crucial components that would make for a much better gameplay experience overall. I could swallow the $60 price tag better if Worms: The Board Game came with more actual game and less fancified plastic.