Ethnos

On your turn you make a binary choice: either pick up one card (from a 4-12 card face-up market or blindly off the deck) into your hand, or commit a 'band' from your hand by playing 2+ cards that share either a tribe or a color, designating one as the leader. Committing a band discards every other card in your hand — so the tension is hand-size versus band-size. Each band lets you place a control marker in a kingdom matching the leader's color, and trigger the leader-tribe's special ability.

Setup: 6 of 12 tribes are randomly chosen for this game (5 with 2-3 players); a deck of those tribes' cards is built; 12 glory tokens distributed (3 per region in 6 regions, ascending values). Each turn: (1) draw a card OR play a band; if you draw, play passes left; if you play a band, you discard the rest of your hand, place a control marker, and use the leader's tribe ability. The Age ends when 2 (or 3, depending on player count) Dragon cards are revealed from the draw deck — at which point the deck is reshuffled minus dragons, hand is cleared, and the next Age begins. Scoring: end of Age 1, top region holder scores token #1; end of Age 2, top two holders score #1 and #2; end of Age 3, top three score all three. Plus end-of-game band-size bonuses (a band of 5+ scores extra). Player with most glory wins.

Core tension: every card you draft into your hand is a card opponents could have taken, and every band you play torches your remaining hand — so the meta-decision is 'how big a band do I commit, and at what risk of losing the rest?' Tribe-and-color overlap creates combinatorial possibilities: 7 cards in hand can yield several legal band shapes, each triggering a different tribe ability, each marking a different region. Push-your-luck pressure from Dragon cards: when the Age might end any draw, sitting on a 5-card hand is dangerous. ~5-10 reasonable plays per turn; planning horizon is 2-4 turns into the same Age.

Dominant skill is tempo management — knowing when the Age is about to end (Dragon-counting and deck-thinning math) and squeezing one last band before the cleanup. Second is hand-shape optimization: balancing tribe versus color overlap so a single hand encodes multiple potential bands. Third is opponent denial — taking face-up cards opponents need, racing into regions where you're 1-marker behind, exploiting tribe abilities (Wizards peek the deck, Centaurs chain-band). Memory matters (which cards are gone). Math is simple. Weak players hoard hands; strong players cycle hands aggressively, knowing the band-size bonuses reward small frequent commits at scale.

Recruit fantasy tribes — giants, merfolk, halflings, minotaurs, wizards — to dominate six kingdoms over three ages. The art is the experience; mechanically you are sorting cards.

John Howe (Tolkien illustrator, Lord of the Rings concept artist) painted fantasy: rich oils, classical fantasy archetypes (giant, elf, troll, merfolk) rendered in heroic-realist style. Earthy palette, painterly textures, no cartoonishness. The art outclasses the game's mechanical depth and is the primary purchase driver — many reviewers note buying it for the cards alone.