Epona

• Designer: Vladimir Suchy
• Publisher: Delicious Games
• Players: 1-6
• Age: 10+
• Time: 40-70 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Welcome to Epona, an immersive, tableau-building card game for 1-6 players in which you step into the boots of an ambitious equestrian entrepreneur in Central Europe in the 1920s, a time of relative peace and prosperity. Now is the time to finally invest in your dream: to build the most prestigious and successful horse business in the land. But will Epona, the Roman and Gallic goddess of horses and fertility, bring you good fortune as you set out on this endeavor?

Over six rounds, you’ll acquire new locations for your stables, hire expert staff, purchase essential equipment, and build everything you need, from training arenas to thrilling race tracks. Of course, you’ll need horses, too, but choose them wisely as each one brings different ways to score points.

Want to go the extra mile? Breed your horses to create future champions and secure your name in equine history! Every choice matters, and every card you add to your tableau brings you closer to greatness — or leaves you in the dust. Will your stables rise above the rest?

Before you start to play, the table has to first agree on which version of the game they want to play: the lower interaction variant or the high interaction variant.  Additionally, players will need to decide on whether to play with symmetric or asymmetric owner cards.  Set up each of the card decks, shuffle them and place them on the table.  Each player gets 2 random Stable cards, one from each Setup Stable deck, an Owner card, 3 coins and 1 Stud token.  

Setup the rest of the game based on the mode you want to play.  In the low interaction variant, you will use another deck of cards which will give players options on which cards they will draw from the decks each round.  In the high interaction variant, you will use pairing cards which will pair up different players, one of whom will draw cards and split them, and the other will choose first from the lots.

In both styles of play, once cards are chosen, they are then placed into each player’s tableau. You can only place into rows that have a Stable card in the leftmost slot.  The stable card tells you how many cards are supported by each stable, and essentially you have that many slots in which to place cards.  Once you place a card, it cannot be moved except with one special action card.  There may be a cost in coins required to play a card, and there may also be an immediate bonus reward for playing a card.

If you have fewer than 3 unfinished Stable cards, you can choose to add a new stable to your tableau, though you cannot have more than 6 total in the game.

As you finish a stable (that is, have the required number of cards in its row), you then check to see if it is complete or not – that is, have you placed the requisite types of cards in it or not.  This will trigger extra endgame scoring if you have done so.  Either way, you will usually also get an immediate bonus action for completion of a stable.

Finally, once cards have been played, players can check if they want to breed their horses. This can be solely with their own horses OR it can be with the opponent with whom they have been paired with this round.  The mother horse gets a foal token while the father horse gets a stud token – each are worth VPs.  In the game, female horses can only have one foal all game which a male stud horse can mate multiple times.  Foals are worth more if the parents are of matching type.

After this, the round ends. Players may keep at most one card between rounds. Continue this for 6 rounds (though a beginner game is recommended for only 5 rounds).  The game is then scored:

• Score each stable card 
• Points from owner cards
• Points for each card in the tableau which awards points
• Points for foals and stud cards
• Points for leftover coins and stud tokens

The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the player with more cubes on their owner card.

My thoughts on the game

Delicious Games has a great track record of publishing games that are at the right level of high complexity FOR ME.  In the past few years, I’ve admittedly become less interested in the hypercomplex game, and games such as Underwater Cities, Resafa and Evacuation are more in my wheelhouse when I’m looking for something crunchy. Epona seemed a bit different theme-wise, but I’m willing to give anything from Suchy/Delicious a try, and we set out to build our horse farms…

Set up does take a bit of time as there are a lot of decks of cards to shuffle (and you do need to double check that the decks of the same color are separated correctly) – but it’s the sort of process that keeps everyone busy as there are little tasks that can be delegated to the different players.

Once things are set up, there are only six rounds in the game – and you would think that it would not take too long – but there’s a lot of thinking to be had.  The first decision point is for the splitter to choose which cards they want to draw (the backs of the cards tell you what sorts of icons you can expect to find – as this helps a lot) and then split them into two groups quickly followed by the chooser having to decide between the two groups.

Though this might be against the spirit of the game, after playing Epona, my local group has made a house rule that we specifically try to NOT look at our opponent’s tableaus as we find that this just slows the game down to a crawl.  There are so many different possible card interactions to consider on just your own board, and frankly, none of us want to spend the time it would take to fully maximize card choosing.  So, our compromise is to limit people to looking only at their own little area and make decisions based on that.  

Once your lot of cards has been decided upon for the round, then you have to puzzle out where is the best place to put them.  Depending on what your area looks like, you may also decide to add a Stable card to the mix.  There are so many things to consider when placing a card:  does it have a cost to place, what are the immediate bonuses for placement; how does it score points, does it need to be placed in a particular spot for another card to score, does it have icons that work with other scoring conditions, is it a male/female that you need for breeding, etc.   As you can see – there’s a lot to think about.

I’d make sure that you’re playing on your largest possible table – the game can be a serious table hog!  The area for the decks of cards is fixed, but as players add rows to their tableau, this one needs a LOT of space. It’s not uncommon to have five or six stables by the end of the game, each with a bunch of cards strung out to the right of them.

The rules are mostly fine, though the ruleset does hit one of my big pet peeves.  Don’t give me two different ways to play the game… or if you do, don’t make the rules difficult to follow through that process.  My brain really didn’t like the way that the interactive and basic game rules were split in the rulebook.

Also, I do wish that there were better icon references provided, either in the rules or on the player aid.  It feels like they have given you a bare outline of the icons and then expect you to be able to extrapolate all cases from the examples given – and well, at least in this group, it hasn’t proven to be that easy.

Epona is a game that challenges players to find the best layout for their cards (as well as trying to get the best cards through the I split/you choose mechanism).  I thought I would love this multi-layered puzzle as each card can be used in so many different ways, but in this case, I just find myself overwhelmed by all the possible card interactions and placements.  I still really like the puzzle here, but my solution generally turns out to be the first reasonable one that I find rather than min-maxing the situation to find the optimal choice.  Even when playing to find the first reasonable card placement, the game feels long for what it is.  I shudder to think how long it would take to play maximally.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Doug G.: I’m with Dale on this one – too much going on to the point of being overwhelmed. We loved Resafa and some of the other Delicious games, but this one just wasn’t for us. It has already found a good home elsewhere and it’s definitely not one I need to play again.

Lorna: The game needed an index for the cards and symbols. I like other placement games and maximizing points but for some reason Epona fell flat for me. Maybe because there were so many scoring icons it was rather difficult to get matches that would work together. The pie mechanism which I really usually enjoy also fell flat here.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it.
• Neutral. Dale Y, Lorna
• Not for me… Doug G.