World Wonders: Mundo Wonders Pack review — A mini review for a mini expansion

My primary complaint with World Wonders was that there aren’t enough monuments. At higher player counts, which I think the game plays best at, you could very easily run out of monuments to build half way through the game. For a game that is heavily focused on building these cool wooden structures on your board, that was pretty disappointing.

Well, it appears like they want to fix that problem, or they planned for it all along. The Mundo Wonders Pack comes with 9 new monuments. They are excellent painted wooden pieces, just like those in the base game. Each has a monument card that you can shuffle into the base deck. This pretty much solves the problem of running out of monuments, or at least lets them last longer, while adding some more variety as well.

This expansion also comes with an additional gameplay option called Mundo Mode. Each of the new monuments has a Mundo card variant. These are very similar to the normal monument card, except that they have an additional scoring opportunity on them. For example, Himeji Castle will score you more points at the end of the game for being connected to more natural preserves around the map. The Gate of All Nations wants you to have a very long road that runs through it. These are all fun extra goals to work towards when planning your city. I kind of wish there were Mundo cards added for all of the base game monuments as well to add even more variety.

What’s the downside of the expansion? Well, mostly that it feels like it should have just been in the base game to begin with. I will always want to play with more monuments for more variety. But the fact that the base game feels like it doesn’t have enough makes this pack seem like a separate expense to complete what should have already been there. The base game is going for $40 – $45 online and this wonder pack is going for $20 – $25, half of the cost of the base game. I understand that these fancy wooden pieces are expensive to produce, so this was probably the best way to keep the price of the base game down.

If you love World Wonders and can afford this extra pack, then I completely recommend getting it. It’s more variety for an already great game and the Mundo Mode is a great addition as well.

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