Ecos: First Continent

Board Game Geek Reviews

1. 10 out of 10

   buckles75

   Ecos is a super fun game where you're always doing something and always thinking about your next move, big or small. You can have an overall strategy, but this game really forces you to think and act on the fly as well. The theme and flavor of this game truly comes through. You really do feel like you're building a continent or an ecosystem, and that's the part of the game I love the most over and above the excellent game mechanics. This is sure to be a personal favorite for years to come.

2. 8.8 out of 10

   bigred15162

   I'll start by saying I believe the drafting saves this game from being lackluster to absolutely incredible. I think the starting sets of hands they recommend are stupid and, when I used them, don't provide the full experience this game has to offer. I loved comboing my cards to greater effect and nothing felt random except the tile draws. Curating your hand is also a matter of diversifying your symbols. If you only have 2 or 3 symbols, you'll struggle to get out multiple ecos in the same turn. This game is almost a pure engine builder from the very beginning. Except the engine feels much more like a living breathing thing. Betweeen the landscape and the animals you are putting out, the environment changes over the span of the game in an eerily natural way. There is a surprising amount of player interaction just by the way of manipulating the landscape. Sometimes you accidentally help your opponent, or sometimes your opponent misplaces one of your animals. You always feel like you're doing something. I love that the blue and red cards compliment each other. You certainly want more of the point cards, but the point cards aren't worth much unless properly boosted by the engine/ecosystem building cards. That said, the only thing I don't really like is drawing more cards from the deck. I feel like I have more than enough cards to get through the whole game. Plus the cards in my hand are curated so why would I want to add a random card that might go against my gameplan? This mechanic could easily be taken out and not hurt the game at all. The final thing I have to say is, for the ease of set up and play time, this game feels like a full fledged game game. All in all, the production is incredible, set up is quick, and there is almost no downtime when playing, it's all action.

3. 3 out of 10

   casualcasual

   I was interested to see just what the Bingo mechanism would be like, and it was like Bingo. Which was fine, but the effort required to make use of the Bingo stuff was where I had trouble - round and around and around to get very minor, unthematic, things happening. Not enough to really hold the kids attention either. I wrote, somewhere - "The bingo - it's just too repetitive for me. You draw relatively meaningless symbols out of a bag and then put cubes on your cards when they match, or tap a card which pays out in a cube or a card every couple of times. When you fill a card you get to use its abilities. On the surface this is maybe interesting but the abilities are just minor manipulations to give you points. If you play smart you'll get a few more over the course of the game. Eh. The thing I was hoping would work for me was the fact that there is a central board (well,,tiles). You add biomes and species to it via those cards and manipulate it to get the points. But it feels very abstract, coupled with a tonne of slightly different abstract cards. I move these antelope over a hex here so that your card pays out a point less (if I'm even paying attention to all the cards everyone has going). I put a mountain down to get a point extra when my other card pays out. Repeat 80 times."