Did you ever wonder how Pangaea was formed? Read a science book!
I'll wait.
OK. Now, did you ever want to form your own Pangaea? Play this game!
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Ecos is the world-buildingest world-building game on the market. When people usually talk about world building, they're referring to the construction of civilizations and backgrounds for broader storytelling, not crafting the land itself. In Ecos, you use hex tiles to build (and alter) the landscape on which the flora and fauna of your world shall grow and thrive (and die, if you wish it).
The hexes work very simply. The game starts with four tiles laid out in a particular pattern (first-timers are suggested to have a grassland and desert together with water on either side, but there are others once you're used to the game). From there, when hexes are placed, they're either grassland, desert, or water, and they can generally be placed anywhere adjacent to at least one other hex. Mountains can be placed on any land tile. Forests can be placed in any grassland, and an extra forest can be placed if there is a mountain on the tile (so grasslands max out at a mountain and two forests, deserts at a mountain and one forest). Animal tokens have icons to indicate where they can go.
The core gameplay loop involves the elements and players' cards. Each player starts with twelve cards, three of which begin face up on the table (the active cards). There's a bag with forty nice, chunky element tiles inside, representing sun, water, and so on. One player pulls an element from the bag; everyone then takes one of their seven energy cubes and places it on a matching symbol on one of their cards. When you have all the element symbols on a card covered by cubes, you use its effect(s). Rather than discard it, though, you rotate it clockwise. Every card has leaves on top, usually more than one; when you rotate it, the next side facing up will have one fewer leaf. In this way, you can keep using a card until it's down to one leaf, at which point you can use it once more, then discard it. Since there's no limit to how many cards you can have active at any given time, this is a clever way to give value to cards with less powerful effects.
But how do you get those cards? And what happens if you can't play one of your cubes?
These issues are where the dial comes in. Every player has a square dial. If you can't play a cube, or don't want to, you rotate the dial clockwise. Once you rotate it twice, you have the option to take a new card. If you pass on that and rotate it a third time, you have the option to either play another card on the table (which gives you more elements to play and/or more options for certain elements) or take another energy cube (which you'll need as you increase your number of active cards). And you want more cards in play; many of them let you add energy cubes of particular elements to other cards, which can let you finish those cards and obtain those effects, creating turns with some serious combo effects. And if you can't use the bonus elements, you get more dial turns, letting you play more cards so you can land combos later.
One player keeps drawing element tiles until they hit a wild. Then, if no one's reached eighty points, the next player draws in the same fashion. With forty tiles and only two wilds, this means one player can draw for quite some time before they have to stop... or only be able to draw a few. In theory, this sounds unfair, since effects are resolved with the Harbinger (tile-drawer) first and then around the table. However, this has little practical effect on the game, since it's quite rare to wind up in a situation where the first person's card dramatically impacts the second's, and even if it does, the second has the option to pull the last-placed cube off and turn their dial instead. At worst this effect might cost a player a couple of points, and with eighty being needed, it's extremely unlikely one person will benefit from this occurrence enough to swing the game unless it was already very close.
Overall, Ecos doesn't try to do too much with its system, and what it does is very clean. Every aspect of the gameplay loop is filled with an option, which means you're never really at the mercy of the system. Your twelve starting cards will carry you either to the end or close, which means it's good that they offer an option to get more, but you can focus on ramping up your capabilities with more active cards and energy cubes rather than trying to get enough cards to stay afloat. That's more fun. The luck factor of elements being pulled from the bag is mitigated by the fact the number of each element type is listed on your dial, and you can make decisions about which cards to play with maximum information about what the odds are of pulling the elements you need, both generally and on the current turn.
It's worth noting that this is not a game that leans heavily into its theme. Some cards let you play animals onto the tiles and move them around, and it can be fun to watch the antelope run once leopards are on the board, but the appearance of specific animals (as well as forests and mountains) is pretty random. You're not building a coherent ecosystem or anything like that; you're playing a game with a planet-building aesthetic. It will be much more of a draw for players who appreciate excellent game systems rather than games which play strongly into their themes.
One other thing: Bonus points for the containers. There are dozens of cubes and over a hundred animal tokens, but the game includes clever cardboard boxes you build when you first open the game that keep everything sorted. It's outstanding, and three years after Histrio came out, I'm still waiting for more games to do players this kind of service.
Score: Ten herbivores out of eleven animals (which makes for one happy predator).
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