EGO

Oh geez, have I just offended the aliens again, for the fifth time today? I guess that wasn’t their hand I was shaking? I am perhaps not the best person to send to greet new species. EGO is a game about negotiation, bidding and risk. The planets have sent their best envoys to negotiate across the stars and build relationships in different systems. The best players will negotiate hard, bid well and use their resources wisely. Welcome to EGO.

EGO is a retheming and slight reworking of Renia Knizia’s Beowulf: The Legend, from 2005. While the theme is drastically different, the game's mechanics are mainly the same. Auctions, hand management and resource shifting will be the tasks of the day and how well you juggle these things will determine how well you fare.

System Spanning

As part of EGO’s setup, you arrange five boards to make up the galaxy you will be traversing. While your ship, that all players occupy, will always move left to right, top to bottom, the order of these boards and what boards are chosen certainly matters.

Some systems will be better for cash, some systems more of a risk than others and each one had differing events, auctions and push your luck games. How each system flows into the next, what cards you need and how to manage the transitions is where EGO is interesting. As well as what you can hold on to, until the end, to score.

Risk vs Reward

A lot of the events in systems offer you a boon or two, a few points here, a few cards there, you know a little choice here and there. The beefy stuff in the systems though comes from auctions and risks. THe main deck of EGO is made up of five suits; gifts, persuasion, intrigue, tech trade and charisma. The latter being bright pink and standing in for any of the other suits.

In the risk events, you have to decide whether you want to flip a few cards over with the chance to keep the ones that match the two suits for the risk event. This symbolizes trying to negotiate and communicate with an alien race, if you match all the cards you turn over, then the event was a great success and you keep them all with no down side.

Be careful though, if you only match some of the cards you flip then you have partially succeeded but also offended the aliens. You must take the penalty listed on the space, which is normally a few alien offence tokens. The more of these you have the end of the game, the less points you gain, or even worse, if you have really been offensive, you lose points.

If you match no cards, nothing happens and you move on. You merely confused the aliens and everyone goes about their business. These events are ways to get cards into your hand for the auction events and end game scoring. It is up to you if you want to risk it. How lucky are you feeling? As with all push your luck style mechanics, I am usually all-in, which is probably why I regularly do quite badly. It's always fun though, going head-to-head with chance itself.

Auctions and Bidding

The meat and potatoes of EGO are the auctions. There are two types, hidden, closed auctions and the standard ‘round and round’ auctions. They both have the same outcome though, the winner getting the first choice of rewards and the loser normally offending aliens or getting some paltry reward. Each auction normally revolves around playing cards of two suits, so now you can see how looking ahead, preparing your hand and taking the odd risk here and there for extra cards is worthwhile.

Another thing you can do in the ‘round and round’ auctions, if you're short on a suit you need, is to do one of the risk events from earlier in the review. This can pay off big but can also end in disaster with additional offenses being earned or even being kicked out of the auction and getting the rubbish reward left by all other players. If you can even call it a reward!

WHat I enjoyed about these event is how transparent they were, how you can see them ahead of time and how you have time to prepare or even gamble to get a leg up on your opponents. It does not al work out that way but you know, that’s board games.

Middle vs The End

It took me a few games of EGO to wrap my head around, not only how to play it but how to face each auction and what I should save for the end of the journey. You get a lot of points in the final system for trading in your various resources. Cards, cash and various tokens can all be traded in for points. I initially went all-in on the auction and bidding events, only to later realize how much I was wasting, when I could get more at game's end.

I now realize that end-game points are very important and the stuff in the middle, is there to tempt you to burn your resources. Don’t get me wrong, I still participate in all the events but I think, after multiple plays it's more a game of “What can I get for the smallest amount of resources” sort of shindig. Rather than, what I did in my first game and chucked away so many points for little reward. Once I knew that, the gme started to shine, much more brightly for me.

Components

I adore the style and aesthetic EGO is going for, sort of a minimalist classic scifi look with bright colours and bold iconography. Everything, after a few turns, is easy to parse and very concise. EGO really is a very simple game; I never had to consult the rulebook after a game or so. The rulebook is also very well written and clear, with a little bit of narrative fluff to boot.

The boards are thick card, the tokens are clear and everything just works. The ship miniature everyone controls is also washed, really bringing out the detail and making it a lot more intricate looking than standard flat plastic. I thought everything about EGO, from a perspective standpoint, is great and well-presented.

Final Thoughts

I thought, after the first play, EGO was a very strange game that I struggled to gel with. After a few more plays and after I had worked out that a massive chunk of points come from end-game scoring, it really started to excel. Each event was an exciting decision. I needed to win stuff but spend as little as possible, keeping resources back for the big end-game finale.

The auctions are tense battles, but you must be calculated and not get carried away by spending all your hard-earned resources. The push your luck elements are also fun and do serve a purpose by giving you cards for the auctions. I still think EGO is a strange game, but now it is a strange game that I can see the tactics and strategies in and therefore enjoy the game, much, much more.

Right, I am off to offend some aliens. Again!

Zatu Review Summary

Zatu Score

79%

Rating

Artwork

Complexity

Replayability

Interaction

Component Quality

View author posts

You might like

• Quite a quick game, even with more players
• Tense battling for resources
• Fun push your luck elements
• A lovely presentation

Might not like

• Can feel a bit weird for the first game
• Card draw can hinder you

EGO has a somewhat misleading title and a totally disingenuous box cover. The game has nothing at all to do with Freud and psychoanalysis, but is actually a trek across space, and is part of the Reiner Knizia ‘epic sci-fi trilogy’ published by Bitewing Games, along with SILOS and ORBIT. Like those games, it has a somewhat convoluted fully expanded name, Extraterrestrial Greeting Organization, which gives a better idea of the theme. Is should be noted, though, that aside from a space theme and tortured acronyms—and yes, the designer and publisher—the only things these games really have in common are they come in cardboard boxes.

EGO is a 2–5 player game in which ‘Rival ambassadors compete to befriend—and not offend—aliens in this epic galaxy trek.’ Bizarrely, this 2025 game is pretty much an overhaul of Knizia’s 2005 Beowulf: The Legend, reusing most of that game’s mechanisms, but with a much less jarring fit to the theme. (This is similar to the relationship between his Gold Country and Spectaculum, and as with the former, EGO’s rulebook includes a page from the publisher explaining why and how the earlier game was changed.)

Players are diplomats travelling together (in a ‘super ship’) through a sequence of alien civilisations residing in their own star systems, which are represented by one of the boards making up the central map. The first board is our Solar System and the last is the Arrival board, where final scoring happens. The 3 civilisation boards in between are randomly selected from 4 (Alliance System, Market System, Treasure System and Sinister System) and arranged in any order. Each star system has a different mix of gaining resources or penalties and bidding against each other in auctions; each also has some form of risk-taking action—these are optional, but it’s unlikely that you’ll win the game without participating in at least some of them. For example, the Sinister System’s event outcomes are generally negative, while the Treasure System offers benefits with penalties. The different boards and their ordering can significantly affect overall gameplay, offering a high degree of variation across games.

Playing the Game

The game looks much more complicated that it really is, and much of the busyness of the boards shown above is mere artistic clutter. In EGO, everyone progresses through the boards in a rigid order, taking a specific action within each distinct area; most of those actions are simply resource gain or exchange events (every action set in the game is referred to as an event), but some—the big circles—are where players interact in auctions in the form of negotiation or bidding events, and final category—the large triangles—are push-your-luck benefit vs risk events.

Aside from the boards, the main components are tactic cards and various resource tokens. The tactic cards show five different icons: gifts, persuasion, intrigue, tech, and the final one, charisma, acts as a wildcard which be used in place of any of the others. Some cards have a single icon, some have two identical ones, and some a credit icon as well as a tactics one, meaning that card can be used in place of a credit token. The available token types are credit (used to pay for a number of things during the game), success tokens (which provide the final score), alliance tokens (granted at various points in the game, providing a variety of credit or success tokens when used) and offence tokens (negative points accrued through offending aliens—normally by getting a penalty as a result of unfortunate risk taking).

The different events that players can encounter are:

· Prepare and compose events—reveal 1 or 2 cards per player, and players take turn in selecting them;

· Supply events—take the indicated tokens or draw cards;

· Option events—discard some cards to draw others, or convert combinations of tokens into those of other types;

· Risk events—in turn, each player draws the indicated number of tactic cards, hoping to match the indicated symbols; they keep any cards with matching symbols, but if some don’t match, they take a penalty, such as offence tokens. Except for the case when none at all match—this is deemed such a humiliating failure that the aliens are bewildered and unable to take offence!

· Negotiation events—here, the first player plays 1 or more cards showing one of the indicated symbols (or the charisma wildcard) to indicate the number to beat, and everyone takes turn to bump the number (it doesn’t matter if their cards have the same symbols as played before, just that all cards in one bid have the same symbol and must match those in the negotiation circle) or to pass; when everyone has passed, players get their choice of the rewards shown on the dial in reverse order of passing; one additional wrinkle is that each time someone wants to bid, they can optionally perform a risk-taking action (similar to risk events) to boost their chances in the negotiation; and

· Bidding events—similar to negotiations, except everyone reveals their bids simultaneously.

Each negotiation and bidding circle shows 5 segments indicating the potential rewards for players (one of which is always a bad option). When there are fewer than 5 players, some segments are covered up (the example above shows the 3-player situation), forcing someone to have to accept a penalty option.

Some of the negotiation and bidding rewards are ‘power cards’ which provide a range of immediate or deferred benefits.

With that out of the way, let’s play the game…

The super ship token starts in the first space on the Solar System board. On each turn, the ship moves to the next space—down and across the board, and then onto the first space on the next civilisation board when it reaches the end of the current one. Players take it in turn to perform whatever action that event entails, as described above. The Solar System board is a gentle introduction to the mechanics of the game, with a majority of low-risk, beneficial actions, while other boards can be less forgiving (such as the earlier mentioned Sinister System).

The Arrival board includes, among other things, option events to convert other types of tokens into success tokens—the only ones that count as the final score. The player with the highest success score wins.

For a longer game, you can add extension boards to some or all boards on the map; these include variations on negotiation and bidding events, e.g., using credits rather than tactic cards when making bids, as well as transmission events where you show what cards you have rather than dispose of them, as in normal trading events. Although not mentioned in the rules, I imagine that adding in the fourth civilisation board could also lengthen gameplay, and removing one could lead to a quicker game.

Expansion

As with ORBIT, EGO’s rulebook includes instructions for a separately purchased expansion. EGO: ID Expansion, which stands for Interstellar Disruptions (sigh), features 2 new game modules which can be included separately or together: Ships and Special Alliance.

In the first, randomly selected circular ship boards are placed between each pair of civilisation boards; as players travel through each of these on the way between star systems (hmm, the super ship travelling through other ships, or perhaps the way to think about them is the players’ ship encountering other ships on its voyage), they reveal cards in their hands to receive benefits or penalties. Some of the ships, ‘super ships,’ are generally positive in outcome while others, ‘hostile ships,’ tend towards being more punishing.

The Special Alliance Tokens Module, as the name might suggest, provides extra alliance tokens with different abilities than those in the base game: 4 of them allow players to remove an offence token, and 4 allow players to draw more tactic cards.

Impressions and Verdict

Auctions are pleasantly tense at higher player numbers, but they feel slightly off and distinctly unsatisfying with only 2 players—they all become strictly positive vs negative outcomes, rather than having a degree of rewards, so there’s little nuance in bidding.

A lot of luck is involved in the tactic card and alliance token draws, so the game can swing significantly; some players will find that rather frustrating.

Overall, I was somewhat disappointed by the game. After a couple of risk taking and negotiation actions, they all felt kind samey for the rest of the game, and it was a bit of a plod to get to the end, but at least the game is fairly quick. The size of the final scoring penalty for offence tokens seemed to swamp points gained elsewhere, making the game seem to be a race to get rid of as many of them as possible before it was too late.

I do like a lot of Knizia games, but I don’t think this one is for me.

Ratings

Overall score of 50/100.

Artwork: 3/5

Complexity: 3/5

Replayability: 4/5

Player interaction: 4/5

Component quality: 4/5

Likes

Easy to grasp

Fun competitive element

Dislikes

Looks overly complicated

While the random board selection does add variability, there’s a sameness about overall play

About the Author:

When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.

Zatu Review Summary

Zatu Score

79%

Rating

Artwork

Complexity

Replayability

Interaction

Component Quality

View author posts

You might like

• Quite a quick game, even with more players
• Tense battling for resources
• Fun push your luck elements
• A lovely presentation

Might not like

• Can feel a bit weird for the first game
• Card draw can hinder you