Base price: $49.
2 – 5 players.
Play time: 45 – 60 minutes.
BGG Link
Check it out on Kickstarter!
Logged plays: 1
Full disclosure: A preview copy of EGO was provided by Bitewing Games. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game.
I actually don’t think I’ve published a review not on a Monday in … years. I could check, but with a few exceptions (accidentally publishing at 11:58PM on a Sunday) I’ve been pretty consistent since the late 2010s. Wild to think about. But Bitewing asked if I’d be willing to hold off until their Kickstarter launch, and there’s not anything explicitly preventing me from doing that, so, here we are. I’m not waking up at 6AM, though, so you’ll briefly get to see the buggy joy that is What’s Eric Playing? with a janky placeholder that I’ll delete after I wake up. I … just generally am not a morning person. It’s 1AM right now while I’m writing this and I’m considering getting a root beer because it just seems like the right kind of Writing Juice. Or something. I’m getting a bit off-track, so let’s get to the game.
In EGO, players are members of the Extraterrestrial Greeting Organization! It probably exists. Thankfully, you’re actually getting to do the work, since aliens are coming! This means you’ll need to put in the work, though, since you can’t afford your own ship. Reminds me of a different game. As Ambassadors on your Super Ship, you’ll tour through various systems trying to make friends and influence people with everyone’s favorite tool: politics! You even get to take turns being Mission Leader. Thankfully, you’ve got Tactics on your side: gifts, persuasion, intrigue, and technology exchange! That might impress some people. If not, you’ll have to tap into your James T. Kirk and go for raw charisma. That’ll probably be okay. He was known for that specific thing. As the Super Ship makes its way through various events and opportunities, eventually, negotiations will emerge and you’ll have to play your Tactics to win priority over your opponents. Good luck! Risks can also pop up, and if you play those wrong, you’ll offend the aliens. You generally don’t want to offend the aliens. But bid, plan, and execute your way to interstellar diplomacy for the good of … your specific planet. Will you be able to gain the trust of our friends beyond the stars?
Contents
Player Count Differences
This one’s pretty hectic and fun no matter how many you’ve got. That said, with two, you’re really just directly competing for “good effect” and “bad effect”, so, it doesn’t really end up making the negotiation / bidding phases as interesting as they are with more players. You really want to have the thrill of trying to shoot for third place in a five-player game, rather than the zero-sum game you’ll often see with two players. Naturally, the game takes a bit longer with more people, but it’s not agonizingly so. EGO moves at a pretty good clip once you get the hang of it. I’d more generally lean higher player counts on this one; I think that’s where you’re going to see the most exciting things happen with negotiation, bidding, and chaos.
Strategy
- There are times you may legitimately not want to participate in the auction. Sometimes you can live with the worst outcome (or you want to save your cards for later, since you can trade in sets of icons for points at the end of the game). Having those options visible isn’t bad; it just lets you make your own decisions.
- Keep an eye out for when you can trade up cards or tokens. Sometimes it’s also worth not playing a card because it has a credit symbol on it, so you can discard it with some credits to earn actual points.
- The final bid is pretty tight; your goal really is to not come in last, since otherwise you’ll take a bunch of Offense Tokens. It’s challenging because you want to save cards for that final trade-in, but if you play too conservatively, you’re going to lose all the points you might have otherwise gained. Try to see how many cards other players have in hand and what they’re playing in other rounds to see if you need to be aggressive. That said, sometimes it’s the only move worth making.
- Taking a few Offense Tokens isn’t bad, though it’s awesome if you can avoid taking any. You get a ton of points if you don’t offend any aliens, but you only start losing points if you take, like, six. Try to balance those two things out.
- Being Mission Leader has its perks. You get first pick for card distributions, but you also go first in negotiations, so it’s usually pretty easy to outbid you. It’s a delicate balance, but being able to get first pick of a wide range of cards is usually pretty good.
- Generally, taking a Risk action isn’t terrible, but it’s probably going to result in some Offense. It’s hard to guarantee that you’ll get all the cards you want with the icons you want and succeed perfectly. That said, sometimes it’s worth taking the Offense to get extra cards that you can use. You might be able to spend them later for better benefits anyways.
- Not all boards are the same! Take a look at what you’re getting into and plan accordingly. The negotiations change a lot, for instance. In the Sinister System, there are no good outcomes, only less bad ones. There, you might want to win just so you don’t have to take even worse penalties.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- The aesthetic of this game is immaculate. I absolutely love retrofuturism. It’s just such a fun and imaginative design choice, and here it captures an almost 80s pulp idea of what alien first contact could look like. The slightly desaturated color scheme works so well to create that vibe, as well, and the whole game ends up looking amazing.
- It’s also a pretty fun theme! I like games where everyone is only working together out of convenience, but going out and greeting aliens and occasionally making an ass of yourself is pretty much precisely what humans would do, so it feels on-brand.
- I love a push-your-luck element, and I appreciate that a critical fail just results in your deep shame. Push-your-luck is so captivating just for the thrill that it might work. Here, though, you’ve got a net below you. If you push your luck and draw cards trying to get certain icons, you might get all, some, or none. All is great! You keep them. Some is bad; you keep the relevant ones but you also take Offense. None is fairly rare, but when it happens, nothing bad happens! You’re just embarrassed. It’s a silly bit of gameplay balancing that also feels fun for the players.
- I appreciate that you can see what the rewards for each negotiation / bid are, so you can decide how much it’s worth to you. Makes it all feel a bit less abstract. This is the best part of the game for me. It takes a lot of the mystery out of bidding and trying to outbid other players. If I know what the reward options are, I can try to figure out who’s most likely to take what, and as a result what place I need to get. Sometimes it’s last! Rarely, but sometimes.
- There’s also a lot of opportunities for converting things to other things, which is nice. You usually get a shot at that after the main negotiation of each round, so you can stay a bit flexible with all of your resources.
- The Power Cards can be pretty useful! Plus, they have a cool back, and I appreciate that. But they let you bend the rules of the game pretty impactfully at times, so don’t pass up the chance to get one!
Mehs
- It would be nice if they’re going for the tabs on the various boards if the tabs were offset like actual tabs so you could grab different ones out of the stack. I’m not entirely sure why they didn’t do this.
- I didn’t realize some of the tokens were Alliance Tokens when I was first setting up the game, so I had to sift through all of the tokens a second time. That was annoying. Imagine having to turn over almost every token in the game looking for the ones that have a different back.
Cons
- Between the auction / bidding elements and the heavy use of iconography, this is going to be a game that’s a bit more on the challenging end to learn for newer players. I think the payoff is worth it, though. That’s the general challenge with games that use a lot of iconography, though; the startup cost to learning the game is much higher. These games are betting that you’ll keep them around long-term, so taking on the cost of learning the icons is worth it. This isn’t to say that games without icons see themselves as disposable; I just think the cost of learning starts to balance out with more plays for icon-heavy games. Nonetheless, you should walk new players through each step of the game so that they start learning to read and understand the icons.
Overall: 7.75 / 10
Overall, I liked EGO! I think I want to try experimenting a bit more with the various expansion elements at different player counts to see exactly how it lands for me, but it generally manages to create lower-stress bidding events than other games where I generally dislike bidding. It comes down, partially, to how it’s structured: there’s only one blind bid per game, and there are reasons for holding back from that, to some degree, so it’s much easier to figure out how much “intrinsic value” some of your cards have. With the other bids, you’re just outbidding the previous player, so you can very easily say “I don’t particularly need to spend my cards just to get X or Y reward” and pull out of the negotiation. It feels like there’s a lot more player agency in those decisions, and that makes me, a somewhat-notorious auction-hater, a bit calmer about this whole game overall. I will say that the game took me a bit of time to pick up, just because it uses a lot of iconography, but it’s a pretty rewarding game to learn and play through. Plus, it’s got that retrofuturistic aesthetic that I absolutely love. The art is all a bit muted but still vibrant, colorful, and strange, and that’s kind of what I’m looking for in a spacefaring board game, these days. I just think they could stand to be weirder. EGO is plenty weird, however, and that’s delightful. If you’re looking for a pretty interactive auction-esque game, you want to make friends with aliens, or you just occasionally like to press your luck, I’d recommend taking EGO for a spin! It’s been a lot of fun to play.
If you enjoyed this review and would like to support What’s Eric Playing? in the future, please check out my Patreon. Thanks for reading!