Stonemaier GamesEuphoria Build a Better Dystopia Board Game

Euphoria is a worker placement game where you attempt to gain influence over a dystopian regime faster than your opponents by keeping your workers happy and ignorant of how appalling their monotonous, hard lives are. Influence can be obtained by trading in artifacts that could remind workers of a happy time when there was opportunity for leisure or by building markets with accrued resources, penalising those opponents who were too slow.The game sticks to theme reasonably well throughout, with options to wake new workers with an electric shock or hearty blast of water, choose to resolve an ethical dilemma, sending your workers into mines to steal resources and by paying your workers with 'bliss' as an alternative to food.The board and components are such a high quality that Euphoria is the only game where I haven't felt the need to sleeve the cards, as they are so thick and tough. After more than 50 games I've only noticed wear on the hinges of the board so far.Euphoria was a game I bought almost a year ago and this is easily the game I most frequently play, especially at 2 players. The game is well balanced at any supported player count (best at 3-5), though 6 player games can be slower.At 3+ players the game guarantees that at least one player will miss out each time a market is built, which incurs a penalty to them for failing to help in its construction. This adds to the importance of strategy and keeps the pressure up during the stage of the game when no one wants to be penalised. This in turn adds to the tactical feel of the game, as players are forced to choose between negating a penalty with hard earnt artifacts or taking the penalty on the chin. Larger games can make keeping track of your own and others' penalties a bit of a pain, but this is rarely a huge issue.The game does rely heavily on dice, so planning how many workers you will retrieve and roll, based on the probability of losing workers is a fun challenge that feeds well into the tactical play in the game, as retrieving workers will mean a greater probability of getting a double turn as well as increasing the time before the next occasion you'll have to spend a turn doing so. This consideration is balanced against the odds of those dice plus your workers' over all knowledge reaching 16 or more, however. Should this happen, a worker will leave. When a worker is lost in this way in spite of incredibly narrow odds, this can be incredibly frustrating, especially if one player is having all the bad luck. However, generally I find this to be an exciting mechanic in the game.The recruit cards provide players with advantages in different areas of the board and add a really fun way of guiding players in a fairly general way so that no 2 games are the same. This is also true of the random market setup, as these all offer different prices for land as well as differing penalties if they are built without your assistance. I feel that one or two of the recruits are slightly overpowered, which can have a noticeable impact on a 2 player game. I don't think this is a big problem, as it is so rare, but it's something to be aware of.Setup of the game is about 5-10 minutes due to all the pieces, especially the cardboard tokens. Game play tends to take around an hour once you get the hang of it. The art work in Euphoria is beautiful and while the board looks incredibly complicated, all the support is right there with excellent use of symbols to indicate resources, costs and rewards of each action. In my experience this is a tricky game to explain, often receiving blank looks, but I find after a few turns it's easily picked up.Over all, I think this is a particularly good looking, well produced and balanced game. The theme is strong throughout and the necessity of changing tactics, combined with the excitement of whether you'll lose a worker every so often keeps the game fresh.

Really simple to understand game but quick deep strategy thinking behind. Really good game for those spare moments to play. As always with Stonemaier, the quality of the components is excepcional.

All good.