Euphoria

Eryn and I took a stab at playing Euphoria this evening.  It's the game of building a better dystopia that we backed on Kickstarter some time ago.  A lot of people backed it as it raised 20 times their goal.  It's been in our queue to try out, but we had a lot of other games to play first.  I was a little worried about how long it would take to learn given all the pieces, but the rules were quick to apprehend, and once we got going, we even figured out a bit of the strategy on our first run.  Although I think as it's a resource/placement game, playing with more than two people would make it much more fun.  Too often one of us was chasing the other's lead instead of carefully planning.

The goal is to build a better dystopia and manage your workers - the dice - to collect resources and products and crate new workers, open markets, dig tunnels, and score points.  The workers are represented by the dice and the pips are important as having workers too smart - total pips - results in their understanding of the predicament they're in, and they flee the coop.  All the while the levels for the various areas increases as resources are collected, changing the collection strategy and opening up your henchmen who provide some special actions and bonuses.


I won the first game, but it was within a point of each other.  I suspect the only thing that helped me was that one of my henchmen let me place my new workers right away. My second worker was too smart for his own good though, and took off.  The markets, where you can score victory points, are tricky because if you're not careful and contribute, you have to suffer a penalty or choose to play catch up and eliminate the penalty.  For example, every three rolled on a worker for me cost a resource.

Reclaiming your workers/dice from the board requires a turn, as does placing one.  Coupling that with the danger of them getting too smart (you roll all of them when you pop them off and the total roll determines whether one takes off) requires some strategy.  If you have three workers, you're pretty sure you'll get less than a 16.  Four or more, it gets dicier (ha) and you're more likely to lose a worker  Although you can choose to only pull three and hope the other one pops off because someone else wants your resource spot.


Excellent game play.  Fast.  Lot of thinking, even in a short two-person game.  I'll definitely be pulling it out next board gaming day.  The stack of minions is pretty sizable.  Basically two card decks.  I like it that I can find people I know in the deck.  Here's the two people I went to Run Lola Run at the Trylon with last night.


This one is pretty cool.  Not having to pay a resource is powerful as the variation in resources means you're generally short of at least something you need.  The minions are tagged to one of the four factions on the board, so it's in your interest to focus on a faction as pushing it's progress level to maximum allows you to score a point for each minion in that faction.  Matthew looks pretty shift with his sash.