EPOS: A Gentes Game

The following morning, with coffee, couscous and unpunching, EPOS displaced Gallerist from the table. I wanted to see it anyway, both because I love Gentes and Risthaus, and because I had gone through a small odyssey coordinating deliveries while on holiday in Lemnos. Only, I had failed to account for the trahana: the box contains an endless amount of stuff. Before we had even played, we realised that if we did not separate it by scenario, it would suffer the fate of our TI3: one “throw everything in” packing job, followed by no chance of ever reaching the table again. Two relaxed hours of organising for zero lift later, we had earned crisps and the pool.

At its core, EPOS is a slightly improved Gentes. The foundation did not disappoint me at all in the quick introductory game we played while drying off from the pool; on the contrary, it gave me the feeling of a familiar, already beloved structure that now asks to be seen with everything built on top of it. From what I saw, player interaction does not need to shout in order to exist: the interest lies in how the extra material changes the terms of that same core experience.

That extra material is a campaign with group and personal unlocks — a genuinely very interesting idea — and eight scenarios, meaning small modules with altered or additional rules. In the first scenario, players spread out onto the map as well, while a small area-majority mechanism is added. That is where the friction between us became clear: we are not merely playing the same foundation with more things in the box, but also contesting the space opened up by the scenario.

The second game, using the first scenario, was precisely the confirmation I wanted. The base game stands on its own, but EPOS left me thirsty to find out how far the remaining scenarios can take it. If the campaign continues like this, it promises that lovely Tome Saga feeling from the Phillips trilogies: a beloved foundation that gains a reason to return to the table again and again — provided, of course, that it stays organised.