<aside> 🛠️ Designed by Paolo Mori
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<aside> 📊 My Number of Plays at Time of Review: 8
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<aside> 👥 2-6 Players
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<aside> ⏱️ 60 Minutes
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Ethnos is a light strategy game of set collection and area control, released in 2017 by designer Paolo Mori. Players will collect cards depicting different fantasy races, and play bands from their hand in order to score points and jockey for area majority in each of the regions on the board. After three ages, each with their own scoring rounds, the player who has earned the most glory will be victorious!
At the beginning of each game, six fantasy tribes (five in a 2-3 player game) are randomly chosen, and the cards for those tribes are shuffled together to create the main deck. The board consists of six regions, each of which is randomly assigned glory point markers, which will define how they will score at the end of each age. Each player is dealt one card from the deck, and then three dragon cards are shuffled into the bottom half of the remaining deck. Players then take turns choosing between just two options:
Take a Card – At the beginning of the age, a certain number of cards will be dealt into a face-up row. A player may take one of these cards to add to their hand, or take the top card from the deck. Note that unlike Ticket to Ride, this card row does not replenish when cards are taken. Therefore, it could (and likely will at points during the game) become completely empty, leaving only the top card of the deck as an option. A player is only allowed to hold ten cards, and cannot take this action if it would violate that limit.
Play a Band – Instead of taking a card, a player can choose to play a band. A band is a set of cards that are either all the same tribe or all the same color. A band is played in front of the player, and will remain there until it is scored at the end of the age. When playing a band, one of the cards must be played on top as the leader. The leader indicates two things: the color of the leader shows the region where the player may place a piece, and the tribe of the leader specifies the special ability that will trigger. For example, if a band was played with a red leader, then the player would be able to place a token in the red region, but only if the size of the band was greater than the number of tokens the player already had in that region. This means that the more tokens you play into a region, the harder it will be to play additional tokens there, as it will require larger bands. If the band is not large enough to surpass the existing tokens, it can still be played for points (which are scored at the end of the age), it just won’t result in a token being added to the board. Once a token has been added to the board (if applicable), and the leader’s special ability has been triggered (more detail on this later), the player must then discard the rest of the cards in his hand, face-up to the public card row. This is a big paradigm shift from a lot of games that encourage stashing up tons of cards (you all know that Ticket to Ride player that has a quarter of the deck in their hand, or you are that player), as any cards that you can’t include in your band will only gift your opponents with more choices in their card selection. Starting on your next turn, you can take a card to start building up your hand from scratch again, working towards your next band.
Play will continue around the table with players taking these two actions. Tokens will be played onto the map, and cards may be returned to the card row as the bands are played. At some point, a player will draw the first of the three dragons that are shuffled into the bottom half of the deck. The dragon is set aside and a new card is drawn in its place, but everyone knows: only two more dragons to go. This starts to put the pressure on, because when the third dragon is drawn from the deck, the age ends immediately! As a result, the end of each age turns into a game of pushing your luck: do you take another card this turn to try and make a larger band, or do you play a smaller band with what you have in case the dragon gets drawn before your next turn?
One of the biggest selling points of Ethnos is the special abilities of the different tribes, and the fact that only 6 of the 12 tribes are used in any one game. Each gives the game its own flavor, and they provide interesting decisions as you try to determine which card to make the leader of your band, thereby activating its ability. Here is a brief overview of the twelve different tribes included in the game: