Euphoria
Stonemaier Games continue to mine their back catalogue with this re-release of their 2013 game Euphoria, designed by Morten Monrad Pedersen, David J Studley and Jamey Stegmaier. Labelled the Essential Edition, this new version incorporates some small tweaks to the original game to update it, while also taking on board elements of the 2019 expansion Ignorance is Bliss. It takes 2–6 players plus there's a solitaire mode.
Euphoria is a dystopian worker placement eurogame, albeit with dice as your workers; initially doomed to blissful ignorance. Its setting feels similar to the dystopia envisaged by Aldous Huxley. On your turn you either place a die out on a location to take its action or you take back dice for use on a future turn. You can go to a location already occupied by another player's die but in doing so you bump that die so that its owner gets it back for free. Inter alia, players are collecting various resources and/or paying them so that their dice can contribute to construction work and so earn stars, with a penalty imposed on players who failed to contribute.
A track records the morale and knowledge of your worker dice. You want to keep their morale high because that gives you access to more cards, but as your workers' knowledge advances they become aware that they are being exploited and they run away, tho' the Essential Edition provides a mechanism for enticing them back to accept their indenture.
Euphoria has always been a fast-paced game with quick turns and virtually no downtime so it's fitting that the Essential Edition revamp is similarly streamlined. The board has been modernised and reformatted so that it is clearer and easier to 'read'. The original game was a race to be the first to get 10 stars but now the game ends with every player taking a final turn after any player hits 9 stars so giving players a last-minute opportunity to overtake the player who's in the lead.
