Gamehelpitsawonderfulworld
You are leading an expanding Empire. You must choose the path that will get you to develop faster and better than your competitors.
Playing
It's a Wonderful World is played in 4 rounds with three phases each: first Drafting, then Planning, and finally Production.
Drafting
In a 3+ player game, 7 cards are dealt to each player. In a 2 player game 10 cards are dealt instead. All players simultaneously draft a single card from their hand and then reveal them. Remaining cards are passed and drafting repeats until 7 cards are drafted by each player (in a 2 player game some cards will be left over).
Planning
Then players will choose which drafted cards to:
- keep for building
and which to
- recycle (discard) for cubes (shown bottom-right). Cubes gained are placed onto kept cards to pay for their building cost (upper-left) or on starting Empire card where 5 will immediately be converted to a single red (wild) cube to be used on demand. Non-red cubes on the starting card may only be used to make a red cube.
When all costs are paid the card may be added into player's Empire tableau (tokens on card are discarded) and any bonus (if any shown bottom-middle of image above the bottom bar) is gained to player's Empire card.
Note that any incomplete card may be discarded to gain its recycle cube to your Empire card at any time. Resource cube placed on a recycled card are returned to the supply.
Production
Each production phase is sequence grey, black, green, yellow, and finally blue cube production sectors. Each of those productions have three parts.
- 1. produce cubes of a color - each player produces cubes of current color according to what is shown in the bottom bar of cards in Empire tableau.
- 2. award highest production - single player with the highest production of current color gains one character token (each with 1 vp) matching the icon shown for that sector. Blue Financier for grey/yellow, red General for black/blue, and winning player's choice for green.
- 3. place cubes - as during drafting cubes are placed on incomplete cards and completed cards may immediately be built and added to Empire tableau.
Sector production is repeated for each color ending with blue which ends the round.
End of round
Incomplete cards remain. If not round 4, each player gets new set of cards to restart drafting but passing in the opposite player order.
Scoring
Besides 1 point per character token, many cards have some victory points in lower left corner. Some score by other types of cards added to Empire (see bottom-right icons). The player with the most points wins. Ties broken by having most Empire cards and then most character tokens.