Ethnos is a fantastic game. My gaming group really enjoys it, but there have been a lot of complaints about its generic them and art style and bland graphic design, but the thing that annoyed me more than anything was the tiny game board and annoying control markers.
The little plastic “stackable” control markers are awful. They’re fiddly, they don’t stack particularly well, and the small gameboard can become pretty cramped at higher player counts, making it extremely likely to be knocking over stacks in the later rounds.
The game screamed for a larger board and better control markers. So I upgraded it. I redesigned the game board, made it significantly larger, and had it printed on a nice, high-quality playmat. Then I made sets of custom poker chips for all the control markers, and designed and built custom boxes to hold them.
Note: In truth, it was entirely unnecessary to make custom stickers for the poker chips. You could just as easily play the game with just blank poker chips, but I wanted that extra little bit of design to pull it together.
It wasn’t my goal to re-theme the game or fix/change the issues with the graphic design. I wanted these new components to match the game’s original design, so that’s what I went with.
We played a 5-players game last night on the new board, and I’m never touching the old components again. It’s a wildly improved play experience for a game I already really enjoy.
EDIT: I’ve made the upgrade files available here on BGG:
The playmat image can be found HERE. It is designed to be printed on a 24″x28″ playmat (although some printing services may require you to rotate the image 90 degrees).
The poker chip images can be found on the Ethnos file page HERE. For instructions on making custom poker chips, check out my tutorial.
Here are the pics:
