Stonemaier Games Euphoria Build a Better Dystopia Board Game

Product Information

And that’s one of the interesting things about the game. It seems that everyone has their own ideas about how to win and they just go for it. I’ve found one person that likes to hit the Icaritan artifact markets over and over while another loves to construct markets. As a player, you almost have to be flexible with your strategy as the game unfolds. If people are rushing to build the markets, you had better make sure you get in on that (players without authority stars on the markets once built are penalized). In Euphoria workers are represented by dice, and their individual knowledge of the inner workings of the Euphorian dystopia is represented by the pips shown on each die. The more pips, the more effective a worker can be, but too many can drive up your group’s overall knowledge, prompting individuals to leave as they learn how the world really works. Four distinct societies, each of them waiting for you to rewrite history. What are you willing to sacrifice to build a better dystopia?

When I first opened the box, I was pleased with the quality and number of bits that you get with the game. The art is very easy on the eye and the theme is one that interested me. I was a little put off by the board and how daunting it looked but there are plenty of videos online that got me through the setup and a few turns. Dice worker placement set in a dystopian society where the number on the dice reflects their intelligence.” I’d say my biggest complaint about the game is the special powers of the recruit cards. Each recruit comes with their own, unique special ability. The game has 48 different recruit cards, each with their own power, and let me tell you, they do not feel balanced at all. Some powers are clearly better than (and are much more used) others. For example: The oracle agent lets you gain 2 knowledge to draw 2 artifacts cards and keep one when you would normally draw one. Gaining knowledge in Euphoria is a really bad thing, so this power is rarely used. Compare that to the Hydroelectric agent who lets you gain an energy when you gain a water (if you have no artifact cards). I’d be using that ability all the time, especially early in the game. The agent cards in Euphoria have many different, unique powers. However they don’t quite feel balanced from one agent to the next. It’s our experience that adding artificial opponents is not popular among those who play with 3+ players, so we didn’t want to add rules that got in the way of the audience we were aiming at to create a dubious benefit for players that likely wouldn’t be interested anyway. So to give players more agency over which artifact cards they drew, David designed the New Antiques Bazaar. It’s a mat that sits next to the board, populated with 4 face-up cards at all times. The artifact on the far right has no additional cost (beyond what you paid–if anything–to place your worker on the board), while the others have additional costs of 1 or 2 commodities.Product Details: The SKU is STM206. It is available in a number of languages from localization partners. I decided on jumbo commodity tokens. One small issue in Euphoria is sometimes players run out of commodity tokens, as they’re easy to collect and hoard. Now, with the expansion, you can use a jumbo commodity token to represent 5 of that commodity (or 3 or 4 or 10–the multiplier can be anything you want). We included 6 of each token. An alternative would be to the reduce the number of Automa players from 2 to 1, but that would also require extra explanations in the rules. The Euphorians aren’t alone. Outside the city are those who experienced the apocalypse firsthand—they have the memories and scars to prove it. These Wastelanders have cobbled together a society of historians and farmers among the forgotten scrap yards of the past. While Euphoria has an interesting theme, it doesn’t resonate in gameplay. It’s a nice placeholder and it can give you some sense of what you’re doing, beyond just gathering resources and victory points. Aside from that, it doesn’t really tie in with the gameplay all that much.

We took this to heart when designing our solo mode, but before I get to that let me briefly explain how our solo modes work. Knowledge indicates your workers knowledge. If they gain to much they won’t believe in you cause and will be removed from play until acquired again costing you. Noah suggested that if it wasn’t too late, we could include the tray in the reprint of Euphoria. He offered to make some updates to the tray (the original was great, but Noah’s learned a lot about 3D modeling and tray functionality over the last few years).The number of choices you can make can be overwhelming in the beginning, but as you learn how to play, the game opens up and becomes very engaging from start to finish. The early game has a slow pace, but once you get into marketplace construction, artifact use, and victory point gathering, the pace rapidly increases. Cons: