Ethnos 2nd edition is broken at two players

Ethnos 2nd edition box art

This is a hard post to write since I really wanted to like Ethnos. I bought Ethnos for two reasons:

  1. The game is tagged with area control, a genre missing in my game collection
  2. The new art style attracted my attention

Out of the two, the art certainly fit my bill. I love the vibrant colors as compared to the first edition. But the actual gameplay itself? Not so much.

My largest complaint

My largest issue with the game at two players is that it does not incentivize "area control". You are incentivized to create stacks that produce the largest amount of grouped cards for end of era scoring.

As an example - the prestige tokens (end of era points) drawn for each area range between 4 to 12. Players have two options to move forward.

  1. Fight with your opponent to gain control over the territories (or strategically attempt to lower the amount of points they score via tie). This usually amounts to winning 4 victory points for the first era, and at most 12 (unless you have some special ability modifiers) in the second per area you dominate.

  2. Instead of fighting for areas, you fight for party size domination. For instance, if you're able to create a party of 4, you already get 6 prestige. As you can imagine, this increases with larger party sizes. A party of 5 would get you 10 points while 6+ gets you 15.

This problem is made worse at two players since each player can draw up to 10 cards. There's a high change for you to get some kind of flush combo with so few players, not to mention, most cards are discarded to the ally pool after you create a stack, so you end up with a game of trading stacks.

The special clan abilities can make this worse as well. For instance, the rabbit clan allows you to add an additional "card" to your stack during the end of era scoring. This can be overly abused at lower player counts.

The meta of the game usually boils down to this:

  • See which part of the region you can minimally control (i.e. to stop your opponent from winning an area uncontested - only matters in the second era since uncontested victories add the first + second prestige points)
  • When you have the region color you want (or ally), keep drawing until you reach 10 cards
  • Play the largest group for the area you want

When at least one person uses this meta, the other is usually forced to follow suit since you may not have game-breaking special abilities to counter it (e.g. the Owls on fast area dominance for the second era).

Final thoughts

I think Ethnos can be fun if both players are playing an area control game, but is it truly great for two players if both players need to agree on not playing the meta?

I'm not too sure about that 😅.