Got my PnP for Power Vacuum today, uploading it to my PnP repository (I’ll make them all eventually!) and saw I had Luzon Rails. CHecking out my geekbuddies and @lalunaverde is pretty fond of it.
Hey, there’s a new edition, with a new map and art by Sai Beppu. OK.
I think I like the look of old Ethnos better than the Ethnos 2.0. I kind of dig the crap font and the old style drawings rather than something that just looks like it was made on the internet.
A 2nd Edition is surprising to me – Archeos Society was mostly a re-themed Ethnos, only last year.
It would be kinda funny if most people wound up preferring the (much-disparaged) visuals of the 1st Edition. Albeit I think it was mostly the board that people didn’t like rather than the cards?
I don’t disagree with you about the side-by-side you’ve shown; but just looking at the new version on its own the whole package looks like it gels reasonably well.
I know symbols and icons are often preferred as it makes games language independent other than the rulebook, but I am finding it to be a bit of a miss in this instance.
I have Ethnos and have played it dozens of times, but I am having difficulty deciphering the symbology on the 2nd edition cards. This is obviously the Troll equivalent, as you can see the star shaped tokens from 1-6, so this one is not too bad, but there are three other cards at the top of the photo, and I can only decipher the right-most one as being the Elf equivalent of keeping cards in hand.
I also think it’s a bad idea to make different artwork for each card in a tribe. Being able to glance at a card and know what it is easily is vastly preferred (to me, obviously) to making each card distinct.
Also, is that two different shades of green I see in the photo? That seems silly when the original had such very distinct colors for the regions. (Okay, I see from other pictures that the bar along the left of the card designates the region and in addition to the icon in the upper left, each tribe has been color coded, so that can help the ease of identification across the table.)
I have been extremely critical of the 1st edition artwork, and while the new edition really pops compared to the muddy mess of the original, I feel that some misses were made in overall clarity. I know it doesn’t take long to internalize what each tribe does, but I think the new design will make it harder for new players to pick up and play.
Super excited to see a shop offering preorder for a German edition of For Northwood! Completely unavailable here and one of the very few games from the Top 250 Solo games list that I am keen on acquiring–I already have so many of the games, that is not an issue with the list.