I have ethnos and agree entirely with the Maestro. It’s a really fun blend of area control and set collection, that’s light and breezy with enough stuff to chew on to maintain interest. It s essentially just a simple card game, but I love it a lot. Also agree it’s not really a 2p game.
The one failing is it’s graphic design and art, which I can’t deny is terrible. When a game’s BGG page is just a bunch of people sharing their DIY retheme, or people asking if it’ll ever be reprinted with better art, you know there’s an issue.
I always have to jump in here and defend John Howe. The only reason that his art looks “generic” is because he literally defined the genre and thousands of uninspired artists have had nothing better to do than copy him for four decades. It’s like calling Beyonce generic because now everyone’s trying to sound like Beyonce and the market is flushed.
That said, sure, maybe John Howe should have done more to reinvent himself over the years but come on, the man’s a legend.
Ethnos, though… I like it. I would compare it foremost to Thurn & Taxis in that you’re building sets and the primary excitement comes from a push-your-luck mechanism that ramps up over the game. In T&T the mousetrap is that you lose your route or default to poor house placement. Here it is that you dump more face-up cards onto the market to help your opponents. In both, things start slow but you need to build bigger and bigger sets throughout the game, leading to more aggravation and bigger failures.
It falls in the Smallworld camp for “surprisingly hard to teach for what it is” for no other reason than that each game starts with a half dozen factions requiring a surrogate rules explanation after you’ve taught the core game. This is what keeps it from coming out more.
It’s primary selling point is the feels. It’s mostly a game about excitement, with just enough intellectual decisions to make it all mean something - small decisions like when to play your set and which way to go when your hand offers you a choice. The emotions come as the pressure builds to get that perfect hand or when someone reveals a hand that snatches away one of your regions, and when two dragons are out of the deck already and every card draw gives you a heart attack.
[Edit: I once saw a documentary where John Howe and another guy went and researched armor, then learned how to draw it. Before that, no one could draw realistic armor. Every time you see any fantasy art with a suit of armor, thank John Howe.]
This may well be true (not doubting you, I just don’t think I’ve ever heard of him), but to me as a relatively uninformed gamer the effect is “meh, if I look past the generic brown this is generic fantasy”. And I’m already disposed against generic fantasy anyway.
(Thinking of my Star Realms / Fantasy Realms experience, I suspect that if this had had a space theme I’d have been much more enthusiastic about it, and the map could have been the Slovenia Galaxy without too much trouble.)
I will note, I did not say “generic” in reference to the card art (that was reserved for the board, and is 100% accurate). I said “muddy” and I stand by that statement. Other than the Wizard, Merfolk, and Wingfolk, everything is some combination of browns with maybe a hint of green or grey in the coloring. The Wingfolk are black. We get blue and white in the Wizard and Merfolk, the only real spots of color in the artwork other than brown.
It’s all so incongruous. The card art, card frames, board, and counters. None of it fits together. The graphic design could’ve worked to pull the art together, but it doesn’t at all. And it’s only made more apparent by how the game mechanics and theme are already quite distant to begin with.
Compared to, say, Dogs of War (another CMoN game that’s putting counters on a simple board), where all the components do work together for the theme.
The one time I took this to a convention and attracted a bunch of strangers to play it with me, I made the horrible mistake of explaining all of the special rules for the factions we’d be using before I’d explained the rest of the game. Don’t do that. Make sure everyone sees and understands how simple the gameplay is and how the game works in general before you start explaining any of the faction-specific bits.
Likewise for me. I think it’s a fun game, and I’d like to play it, but I can’t remember the last time I picked it over anything – I always end up thinking that either the teach will be too fiddly, or the theme will be unappealing, or both together.
Same same. My worst game of it was when I detoured at the “pick a leader for your band” stage to explain each faction. It does seem to go well when I just say “each card says what it does. Ask questions if you have them” and we just play.
Yeah, definitely best to just teach the main rules of the game first, before even dealing out the tribes. Then cover just those as you finish the game setup. This is what I did at SHUX '22 when teaching Ethnos to a new player, as well as refreshing the memories of two others who had not played it in a long time. Worked well.
A couple of friends who create the Arkham Horror Card Game podcast Drawn to the Flame streamed a play through of a game yesterday called Gloom of Kilforth.
Has anyone here played it? I’d never heard of it before but it looked interesting from what I saw.
Gloom of Kilforth? I think you are mixing me up with someone else. I don‘t know the game and on looking it up still have no idea. If I knew about it though, I‘d happily give you an overview… sadly, I don‘t know about it.
FInally, yes. I like it better as a light and speedier version of Terra. The game became 100% about board presence rather than 50% thinking about the tracks. But I miss the temple tiles that gives on-going or one-time bonuses. It’s a major tool kit for you to build up your engine. But I feel like it needs something more to help itself after removing a lot of baggage - preferably something about the spatial board rather than bolting on another freaking side board or something idiotic that modern designers do.
