Welcome to Euphoria, citizen! It’s a perfect city, where everyone has their place, and there’s a place for everyone! Don’t worry if you don’t feel like you belong; we have electroshock therapy to get your mind in the right headspace, and watercannons to keep you motivated!
Euphoria: the Essential Edition is the original game of crafting and seizing control of the perfect dystopia, plus the expansion for Euphoria as well as a cleaner board layout. The game is by the same folks who brought you Wingspan. Euphoria is what’s known as a worker-placement game; this means you’ll have a set number of workers you can place at different tasks on the board to create resources for you. You’ll then use those resources to achieve the victory conditions of the game. In the case of Euphoria, this means placing all ten of your Influence stars in play.
In most worker-placement games, you want as many workers as you can get. Euphoria adds a fun, push-your-luck wrinkle to the game. The workers are represented by six-sided dice. Whenever you acquire a new worker, or you pull a worker off the board and return them to your hand, you roll the die. The number on the die tells you how intelligent your worker is. The more intelligent, the more efficient they tend to be at the different jobs you assign them to. However, if the sum of all your worker’s intelligence is greater than 16, that means some of your workers will be clever enough to escape! So you want a lot of workers, and you want them to be smart, but not too smart.
The core of the game is setting your workers to building Markets. Multiple workers will be needed to complete a market, and more than one player can place a worker to be building the same market. Every player who took part in building a market can put one of their Influence stars on the market when it’s finished. In addition, when the market is finished, you’ll flip the card over and see the penalty every player who wasn’t involved in building that market must pay.
There are four different factions in the game, each with their own resources. You’ll likely need some of all four resources to win the game. You’ll start the game with two cards, each of which represents a Convert to your cause who is associated with one of the four factions. You’ll place one face-up and get to take advantage of that Convert’s special ability starting right away. The other you place face down, and you’ll get to flip that card over and take advantage of this second Convert’s special ability when the faction associated with that Convert has enough of their goals accomplished.
The first time you look at Euphoria, the game can appear to be complicated. But turn-by-turn, it’s fairly simple: you can place workers to do things like harvest resources, make new workers, or help in construction projects, or remove workers from the board to return them to your hand (so you can place them in new positions next turn). It’s easy to understand what happens when you place a worker in a certain zone, but the benefit of all the workers in a zone goes to every player who has a worker there. So you have to consider where you want to send your best workers, knowing that the work they do might also benefit your opponents, and consider where you can block your opponents from placing their workers.
The result is game that tends to stay tense all the way to the end, with no one player getting far ahead of the others. It’s also a relatively quick game to play, usually lasting about an hour, letting you get in a handful of games in a single evening. Talk to the happy and productive citizens at your local Dragon’s Lair Comics & Fantasy® today about adding Euphoria: the Essential Edition to your game library.
