Ethnical Debate

Board games that work well for more than 5 players are not as common as some might hope. In many cases, a game's mechanisms would work well enough for more than 4, but the down time in between turns would simply be too long to introduce any more players to the mix. Other times, the mechanisms themselves don't scale up well to the number of players. I think Ethnos might belong in that second category.

Ethnos is a game that combines card set-building with area control on a board. Each card in a shuffled deck depicts a fantasy creature of a particular type, and is also (unrelated) one of six colors. On your turn, you either draw a single card (from a face up spread, or from the deck), or play a set. The set must contain a mix of creatures all of one color, or be a group of the same kind of creatures. In either case, two things follow: you place a control token in one of six countries on a map (corresponding to the color of the top card in your set), and then you discard all remaining cards in your hand to the face up spread.

Each one of the monster types has its own special ability, which scales to the size of the set you play. As with the control, whichever creature you place on top of a set you play gives you its ability -- to cheat the map placement rules in some way, win tiebreakers for the round, manipulate the cards in your hand, and so forth.

The game is played in three rounds, with scoring triggered randomly near the end of the deck at the end of each round. Sets you played during the round score you points, more for larger sets. Then each of the six countries on the map scores for the round, giving points to the player with the most control tokens (and second most in round 2, and third most in round 3). Area control gets harder as you go, because placing a new token as you play a set requires that the set has more cards in it than the number of tokens you already have in the country.

My explanation may have sounded a bit convoluted there, but it's a really straightforward game to grasp. I think it involves quite a bit more luck than I'd expected on the surface. That luck comes down to one particular rule -- that you must discard the rest of your hand whenever you play a set. You're constantly having to evaluate whether the "one important thing" you're trying to do is worth wasting several turns drawing for it, and whether the extra cards you're accumulating are getting too good to put out there for others to draft when you're forced to discard them.

This is where I'm convinced that playing with too many players hurts the game. Ethnos takes up to 6. I've played now with 6 and 5, and I really think it ought to cap out at about 4. The face-up pool of cards never lasts long enough. Whenever one player makes a set and refreshes the pool with their discards, there's an immediate feeding frenzy on the scraps. Depending on how tightly other players are managing their hands, cards might not even be there by the time your turn comes around. Often, you're just drawing blindly from the deck, usually for lack of any other option. There is some meat to this "my trash can become someone else's treasure" mechanic, but you barely get to engage with it when playing with so many players. Instead, the game feels almost as random as Fluxx at times -- just draw and hope for the best.

For fast-paced game with area control and cards, I was much more impressed by Eight-Minute Empire. Still, the creature powers here did strike me as clever and interesting, and I would be willing to try the game again some time with a smaller number of players. For the 6 the box claims it can take, though, Ethnos feels like a bust. Withholding the option to revisit this review if I do ever get to play it with 3 or 4, I'm giving Ethnos a C. There might be an interesting game in there, but I think it doesn't know its limitations.