Epona - Board Game Review - Bred For Victory Points
Transcript
Why do they have five legs in Burma?
Maybe it's so it can milk itself.
Should we spend Should we spend all day looking at a horse's willie or should we go? Hi everyone. I'm the broken mele. Win or lose, I'm going to be honest with you. This review is for Iona. This is Vladimir Suhi's new game from Delicious Games and it just came out of nowhere. I mean, did anybody expect this one? Did they actually advertise it or buzz about it? No, it just turned up. It's like, yay, we're horse game, Vladimir. Go buy it. I mean, what? You know, a little bit of like fanfare wouldn't have gone a miss, but Vladimir Sui games are they are more they're certainly varied with me. There are some Vladimir fans out there and the guy's great, but the, you know, I still have Pulsar 2849 and Underwater Cities on my shelf. Those are the two games I think are his best. The thing is, ever since then, nothing has come out that's really got my interest.
I mean, I didn't like Shipyard. I didn't like Woodcraft. I didn't like um Messina that much. It was all right, but it was a bit me. I mean, Praga Kaboot Red is probably the best one I've had since then. Didn't like evacuation, had problems. So yeah, you know, his games aren't necessarily for me, but you know, Apona is a small little game, small card game, just small tableau card game about horses. Well, firstly, who doesn't like horses? And secondly, it's something a little bit different. It's like, okay, you're normally here doing these biggestish euros, you know, these dry euros. Let's see if you can come up with something better when you do something a little bit smaller scale.
So, bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for them.
Now, there are two variants for this game. You can play a low interaction variant or high interaction variant. If you play this solo, which is the majority of the games I've played, you are playing the low interaction variant. This basically revolves you using a bunch of selection cards to play out each round. If you use high interaction variants, you have to do this multiplayer. And this basically takes the iclit you choose mechanic from some other games and incorporates it into this one. But what you're effectively doing is building a tableau of horses and various other equipment. You have stable cards that you will start with a couple and you can have more during the game. And each one has a card limit on it. It tells you how many cards you can put into the stable and what type of cards it needs in order to get the completion bonus on it, which you are pretty much going to be gunning for all the time. In fact, I've yet to see an occasion where somebody hasn't got a completion bonus on these things. But what are these cards? Well, they come in various guises. You have two different types of horse cards. So you got these purple ones which are kind of like the sporting horses and then you've got the gray ones which are kind of like the working horses. I think that's the right way around. And basically they just have lots of cool pictures of various types of horses. There'll be stallions.
There'll be mayers. There'll be you know whatever. I mean it's weird. Some of them are mayors, some of them are stallions and the rest are just what neutral. I don't know. But the idea is is that these will have different icons on them. So they have bonuses that they'll give you for actually playing the card. They may have a cost. There will be a symbol like a type of horse, a type of equipment, whatever. And it will have maybe a victory point scoring bonus if you can get certain things next to it or in the same row or in your tableau. Basically, the whole game revolves around symbol matching. You know, you will build out rows of these horses and equipment via your stables, and all of these horses are going to score in various different ways. So, one will say, I want this particular like horse box equipment on this particular row. Okay, cool. I'm going to make sure on this row I've got plenty of that, right? Well, in this row and column, if you can get a bunch of dress horses, then I'll give you some VPs for that. And it's basically about building your grid of rows as you go through the game trying to get the most points from all these different things that can trigger. In terms of each round, basically what you have is a bunch of selection cards. So, if you're playing as multiplayer, basically a bunch of these will be laid out and you take it in turns to choose one. This basically dictates how many cards you can draw as you know for that particular round. It will take so many off the deck, might give you a bonus, might cost you to take the card, but it might even let you draw some bonus cards if you want, you know, cards of your choice. But once you have taken a bunch of these cards, you will then only be able to keep so many of them as per the selection card. So you got to decide, well, hang on. I really need one of
these. That's kind of useless. Won't bother with that. I'll take this one and get rid of that. Get rid of that. All right, fine. There's the two ones I'm keeping. And then after that, you play these into your tableau in any way you see fit. really as long as they go into a particular row or they're hopefully going to score you well as a result. And you've got different two different types of horses. You've got two different types of equipments. You've got like the uh sort of like the racetracks, the fencing, the paddocks, and that you've also got the horse boxes. You've got the riders where if you put a token on a horse, it gives some extra points maybe. Uh you've got like other little bits and bobs like people, employees. So, I mean, the theme is kind of whatever, but the idea is is that these different cards have different symbols, different scoring criteria, and for the stables, you might need to get one of each type.
You might need just a bunch of purple horses, that kind of thing. And in each round with the cards that you have decided to keep, you'll play them out and hopefully get some decent efficiency going. On the side, you can also do breeding. So if you can get stallions and mares together either in your stables or one of in yours and one in another players's then you can basically say I want to breed these two horses. You get a victory point token for doing it. And of course each you know female horse mayor can only breed once. If you do it in your own stable that's fine but you might get a little bonus if you and another player can agree to do it via each other. I mean that's like the minor bit of interaction with the uh the game outside of ice you choose. Now, with the high interaction variant, essentially it's a similar fair, but instead of using the selection cards, you basically have you basically are put into pairs as set by a little deck of cards. And then what happens is that one player will like each player will draw certain amount of cards. And then based on the nice split you choose, you kind of sort of go, right, okay, uh, I'm going to put this in this pile, this put in this pile, and then you pass them to another, you pass those groups to the whoever you're paired up with, and then they decide, right, I'm going to take this group, you're going to take that group.
Other than that, the game plays out exactly the same. It's just how the cards are drawn and selected is slightly different. In solo mode, you play exactly like the low interaction variant. So, you basically play the six rounds as the game goes on as normal, and you try to score as many victory points as you can. It's basically beat your own score. But in terms of like selecting cards, you just use these ones. And in terms of breeding, you have a couple of neutral horses that you can breed with, but other than that, you're just doing your own and you're doing your own thing. So, the game plays over six rounds, and at the end of the six rounds, you total up your victory points from the various horse scoring criteria, the stable completion bonuses, and even potentially some scoring off your owner, which is kind of like a mini asymmetric bonus thing that you can grab as well.
And once you've seen how many points you got, whoever has the most wins,
of course, it is a pretty nice looking game overall. The artwork is kind of like a sort of art deco style. It's It's weird. It's a different style of art to what I've seen in a lot of recent games, but it's very nice and colorful. I mean, when you have built up this tableau of cards here, it does look very nice. The horses look nice, the people look good, you know, the equipment looks good. It's it, like I say, it's a different style, and some people will like it, some people won't, but I think it's nice and colorful. You know, it's a visual it's a visual spectacle on the table. People will look at it and go, "Oh, it looks cute. A horses," you know, and and and they'll they'll get that similar feeling. The rest of the components are pretty bare bones though. I mean, it's cardboard coins, you know, so there's nothing like major there. Cardboard tokens, these cubes and little rider tokens, you know, they're quite tiny.
You have to put them on your cards. And these can get a little bit fiddly to mess around with, but you know, the the component quality here is fairly basic. Although, the game is still priced the same as other games I've reviewed lately, which have far better production quality than this does. So, yeah, you know, I'm not entirely certain this game justified the price tag. I paid at Essen, you know, for the production that it's got, but it looks nice and it's pleasant.
I think it's pretty
quiet, bud.
The game doesn't take too long to play either. I mean, 40 to 70 minutes is on the box and that's relatively accurate if you're playing with say a few players all by yourself. You know, if you play in the upper echelon of the scale, then it gets a little bit ridiculous. We'll get on to that a bit later. But the if you play with say two to three players, four absolute max, then you should be able to get this game done in about an hour. You know, hour and a quarter, 40 to 70 minutes easily. And certainly if you played this solo, 40 to 60 minutes is actually kind of realistic. I mean, 40 is if you're going at a pretty good pace, but an hour, yeah, you should be done, set up, played, and done and dusted in about an hour. You know, if anything, the scoring takes longer than half of the game or something because you got to go through all the different horses and figure out how each of them are scoring, which is a bit of a chore.
IT'S OVER 9,000.
THE GAMEPLAY itself is relatively smooth once you get the hang of it. More on that later. But the, you know, during each round, you're basically picking a bunch of cars and deciding where you want to put them. And there's a decent amount of thinking involved as to where you want to put them in your grid. You can't just slap them down willy-nilly. You know, even when you take new stables, you can put them like above and below ones that you've already done. And that may be important because a lot of the scoring criteria is based on placement, you know, spatial awareness. So, you need to know, right, this guy, you know, if I put him here, he wants purple horses all surrounding him, right? Well, I better make certain he's in the center then and then make sure and I get purple horses around. But then, as you play through the game, you come across so many of these different scoring criteria that you actually kind of struggle to figure out which ones you should be focusing on. And if you diversify too much, you actually might hurt your score a bit. It's much better to say, right, you know what? I'm going to focus on a few really well and then some others you just ignore because you cannot do everything in terms of scoring. It's just not going to happen.
So, you know, it's not to say your score will be terrible if you diversify, but it's a lot harder to do well, I think, if you do. I find picking a focus and sticking with it and just not trying to get lured in by other scoring criteria, you know, works in that front. You've got a little bit of asymmetry with the owners. I mean, you can play the basic side or you can play the asymmetric side. Main difference is that the bonuses that you can grab from completing certain stables and that will be slightly different on some of these asymmetric owners. So, it gives a little bit of variety there. The card variety, I mean, these are goodsiz decks, so there's not a huge amount of rinse repeat. Although, at the end of the day, is basically just like symbols and some scoring criteria. So, it's not like you go in one game, oh, I got this horse this time. This horse is like, yeah, I remember this horse. This is great. just like no, it's just the fact that you've got a lot of different combinations for types of horses, types of, you know, equipment, types of people, mayors, stallions, stables, equipment, you know, the works, you know. So, you've got a decent amount going on with the like the different interaction variants. I mean, if you want to play just low interaction and fine, but I find that low interaction just really isn't worth it unless you're playing it solo or maybe two-player with somebody who's not used to interactive games because the the low interaction variant is pretty much a solitire game. And we know with the solo mode, it actually does work quite well in that because you basically just draw three of these cards, decide which one you're going to use, and the other two you get rid of, and then you draw your cards and keep so many of them, and then you play your grid. So, the solo mode is nice and speedy. you know, there's not a
lot of extra rules on top. It is unfortunately just beat your own score. There's no other objectives or automa or anything like that. I don't think it needed an AI, but maybe just something a bit more interesting than beat your own score. Like maybe there was some objectives that you had to do. You could have done like a Cascadia and had yourself with tweaky the setups and tweaking the uh um like endgame objectives like you know, I've got to do the swim, but I also must have six full stables this time round and achieve a certain amount of points. You know, just something like that just to add a few challenges. But it's a barebones solo mode, but it works. And honestly, with the low interaction variant, this game might as well just be a solo game anyway. So, you know, it's going to cater for that crowd. The high interaction variant though is a little bit more interesting because you have you and granted you do need to play this with even players really to justify the high interaction variant. Like, this is a game that I kind of say you play with either one, two, or four players really.
And even the two-player mode in high interaction does have a variant in the back of the book to make it a little bit more interesting. So it's it's not perfectly designed, but a four player game of this with the high interaction variant is actually pretty cool. I mean, you've got to obviously got the slowest common denominator in terms of getting stuff done and the game can maybe go on a little bit longer. But with two with four of you, you end up with two pairs each round that can breed horses together. And the ice split you choose works a lot better with even players. But I split you choose is an interesting mechanic. I like it personally and it works here for thinking bro well I need these particular horses but I also need these but hang on is the opponent also wanting these and it's like well you know they are looking at that particular equipment as well and it's like well if I if they take this equipment I better make certain they get rubbish on top so I'm going to decide this and this and I think that actually works well. You know a high interaction variant is fun. It's not direct like punch you in the face interaction. And it's not like, oh, I I take your horse or I, well, actually, that's going a bit dark if I say that kind of thing. No, but you know, you're not doing anything negative, shall we say, to other people's horses and stables, God forbid, you know, right?
So, but you know, so you haven't got to worry about negative interaction. The ice split you choose is basically what they call high interaction. I mean, I mean, high interaction, uh, it's a bit of a stretch, but at least it means that you actually do care a little bit about what the other players are doing, as opposed to the low interaction version where you honestly couldn't care less. Hooray! People are paying attention to me. So, on to some of the negatives. I hate having to bash this again, but for crying out loud, publishers, can you please just pay somebody to look at your rule books? I've the last few games I've been played with the exceptional one. I'm like seriously what is going on with it? Is there just a trend now where rule books are now a tertiary like care with publishing? But this is not a complicated game. I mean, you know, you're putting cards down into a tableau and getting symbols. All right, how hard can it be? But this rule book goes as far as it can to make it irritating to learn for what is meant to be an easy game. I mean, you know, it's worded pretty badly in various like various instances. The breeding rules took me several reads to quite understand how the hell that was supposed to work. You know, they really do not explain it that well. But what also sort of complicates things is yes, you do have a a reference aid, but even though there's a lot of information on this reference aid, I swear in a few occasions actually causes more questions than it solves. But this rule book also commits two cardinal
sins. Firstly, it explains key rules of the game while it's going through components.
What? No. Get the components of the setup out of the way first, then teach me the rules. I don't need to know key rules while you're explaining what is contained within the box. That doesn't make sense. But then also, and I there is a place reserved behind a twitchy stallion for whoever thinks this was a good idea. But the low interaction variant and the high interaction variant, two separate rule sets, right? They are written, as you can see, blue and green alongside each other in the book. Who thought that was a good idea? Having two separate rule sets side by side on the same page is weird and confusing and it just makes it a lot harder to read. I mean, it's not that you can't play the game from the rule book. All right, the game is not complicated and you will get it, but the breeding rules and just the layout and some of the weird choices that they've made with this just make it, as I say, it it doesn't make it unplayable. I'm not going that far, but it's when you have a relatively straightforward light game that should be a breeze to learn and they go out of their way to make sure it isn't a breeze to learn. It's like that's a fail in that component. But yeah, I it could be worse. But still, for crying out loud, it's not like it would have taken much to have made this easy to learn.
Oh well. But I digress. Other negatives that I can think of, I mean, I've already mentioned a little bit with some of the component quality. The theme, I really wish there was a bit more theme to this game. I mean, there is none. You know, it looks nice to sort of go, "Oh, look, we're building up a little stable of horses. That's great." And certainly the imagery on the horse is the horses are nice. All right. If you're like me and like animals, you're going to like the look of these horses. But the theme means nothing. There is no theme in this. And if you read the overview on board gamegeeek with um you know where it says like you know you will like you know breed horses to make the new champions and set yourself a name and equin history. Steady on guys. All right. This is literally a tableau builder where you put stuff in rows and columns and match symbols. That is it.
This could be any theme whatsoever. It's literally just symbol matching in rows and columns. That's all this game is. All right. The theme is completely non-existent. And I mean, that is a shame, you know. I mean, yes, animals can breed. Well done. You get 10 points for if innovation and theme immersion for that. Do you? No, it's it really is not like a fanatic game in any way. And it's a shame because, you know, I would like to have a fanatic game about raising horses in stables and, you know, you know, breeding them for for races and stuff like that. It would have been cooler. You know, I'd love to see a a horse. Yeah. a horse like breeding game where you actually try to win victory points or money, shall we say, from raising horses, breeding horses, and competing in races. I think that would be pretty sweet. I mean, we get horse racing games and we get card games where horses appear on pictures apparently now, but I'd love to see something that creates some coolatic euro. Maybe Lero should start thinking about that and less about uh grand libraries and um you know and prohibition laws. I don't know.
But you know that that's it's I just would have liked it to have been a bit more fanatic. You are basically just drawing cards from decks and hoping that the symbols work for you as well. So there is a bit of a luck element in this. It's a light game, so you have to accept that. But yeah, if you're trying to get specific stuff in rows and columns and you draw cards and they just don't appear, well then sucks to be you. You kind of have to just make do with what you're after. And this is the one reason the diversification tactic can kind of work because it allows you to adapt a little bit more to bad draw luck. But, you know, if you're focusing particularly hard on like two or three different things that score really highly and then you just never seem to find what it is you need, that can suck a little bit. And even like the breeding side of things, particularly in a solo mode, you know, if you can breed with certain types of horses, like matching types, you get more points. And if you don't, well, you try to draw to find the matching types and one for a particular male just doesn't turn up. I mean, a lot of these horses don't even have the male and female symbol. So, you know, they they do appear, but nowhere near as often as other stuff in the cards. You know, we're not talking Sanctuary levels are bad with that whole um male and female pairing system that game had.
But, you know, this one still finds that you're drawing a bunch of cards and you're like, where the hell is there a male of any type here? It's like seriously, get on with it. it it just it it can get a little bit, you know, lucky sometimes with how your game turns out. But it's a light game. It's meant to kind of be that way. The player count scaling, as I mentioned, is also another problem because, you know, as I mentioned, playing this solo is fine and probably the second best way to play the game. I think uh maybe the best way to play it is solo. You're playing a low interaction variant and you can get it done nice and quick and at the end of the day, it's pretty much a solitire game at that point anyway. But two player has a variant in the back of the book to make the isslit you choose mechanic a little better. But you're probably only playing this with multiplayer at four because with split you choose you really want even players.
It gets a little bit weird and fiddly with odd players and no there's no re rhyme or reason why you should play this with five or six. I mean for starters five too many players and it's not even players anyway. So why the hell would you six? Okay, you got even players. Now, this is taking up a fair amount of my table just for the the display of cards and my tableau. You want to try and do six people worth. This game this game will take up the entire long table for six players. It's kind of ridiculous on how much space it's going to need. And that's and I didn't even have six stables with this setup. So, I got this much of my table being used up here. And I didn't even have six stables. I needed a little bit more to get six stables in there, which is the maximum you can have. And then try to do that with six players. And even then, people are going to take forever like with the I split you choose thing. Like, you know, I finished splitting. Are you done splitting yet? Okay. Right. I'm going to put these in here. Put these in here.
Are you done doing it? Hang on. We'll wait for you then. Okay. Get on with it. And then when you get to the scoring at the end, we I mean, let me put it this way. I have got in this solo game I was playing here. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 of about 25 no 25 cards. 17 out of about 25 cards have endgame scoring bits on them. So when you get to the scoring bit at the end, you got to do your owner, you've got to do all your stables, which is a little bit of time as well. Uh, you got to count up your sort of breeding tokens, but then you got to go through every single one of those cards and score it up. Have fun doing that with multiplayer, particularly six players. I double dare you. So, you know, this the scaling is weird. You know, I recommend this as a solo game for low interaction, maybe two player for low interaction, but for high interaction, I recommend this more as a fourplayer game only. Two if you use the variant. I just don't think odd numbers work. So, it's a little bit confused as to what it wants to be.
So, Aona is not particularly the best hit that I could have imagined. I mean, there wasn't a lot of buzz or fanfare for this game, and I can kind of see why. You know, it's got some good merits. I like how it looks. It's a simple game once you get past the rule barrier to entry. Um, and you know, it can be a fairly quick little tableau game and it's got a nice aesthetic to it, even though the theme beans jack, but you know, it's really just there as a little solo puzzle. Like, if you just want a pleasant solo game, then this one could be something you might want to look into. But I reckon that when this gets wider distribution, it's going to get forgotten pretty quickly. You know, I, you know, five or six players is not recommended with this game. Even free player isn't really recommended, you know, because you want to play this with a high interaction variant and it doesn't work as well at free. So, you're looking at one, two, or four. And even then, you've got to choose which variation you want. I mean it, you know, the fact that they've got two variants on how you can play the game and then several variants at the back of the book for mixing around with experienced players or asymmetric stuff or whatever, you know, it kind of gives me that impression that they didn't really know how exactly they wanted to design this game and they just thought, well, you you know what, we can't decide on it.
So, how about you lot decide? And that just feels kind of lazy to me. So, it's it's a fine game overall, but I think it's just going to get it's going to get lost, you know, when I don't think this will suddenly be bought up by everybody when it releases. I'm already hearing reports where people have looked at how this game plays or seen some playthroughs and they've gone, "Yeah, that doesn't seem like it much for me." You know, they're probably going into this with high expectations because of the designer's name and the theme. And certainly the theme was what drew me in at first. And then when you see what it actually is, you're kind of like uh you know, so you need to set your expectations accordingly. It's an it's a fine game, but you know, for what it is, for the price point and everything, h it it just boils down to a simple matching game, a tableau, so it does have some fun elements. It's just there's not much else, you know. Um I'm giving it a lowish 6 out of 10. You know, it's above average if you're playing it solo. You know, for me, it's pretty much a solo game. Yes, you can play it four players, high interaction, but for me, I'm going to play it solo.
And for that, I could give it a six out of 10 above average. But I would probably say that because it claims it can go to six players, which is absolute nonsense. And, you know, has like the terrible rule book and, you know, and the theme's kind of lost. I would probably say it's a five out of 10 for, you know, multiplayer side. So, six out of 10 for solo, five out of 10 for, you know, multiplayer. And you know, it's a game that's fine. It will give, you know, it'll entertain me for a few plays, and it has done, but it's not something that I feel like I'm going to come back to that regularly, and I feel like this game will get forgotten pretty quickly. So, it's a shame. I'd love to see a really nice horse racing game from somebody, but this one isn't it.
Oh, that's not well. So, that's it for me on this episode of The Broken People. If you like what you see, then please thumb it up on YouTube, wherever you see it, or on board gamegeeek, and let me know your comments down below. What do you think of this game? Do you love it? Do you hate it? Was it what you expected? Was it completely not what you expected? Have you already forgotten about it even? You know, by all means, let me know your thoughts. What do you reckon about the idea of a big Euro game about horse breeding and racing? That'd be pretty sweet, right? And until next time, remember, it's only a game. And I'll see you on the next Broken People video. Take care, guys.