Before Scythe and Wingspan made Stonemaier a household name, the studio put out a strange, brilliant little dystopia called Euphoria. Over a decade on, it is getting the full revival treatment as Euphoria: Essential Edition, and it reaches shops worldwide in late June.
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Set up your group for freeEuphoria: Build a Better Dystopia was funded on Kickstarter in 2013, the same year Stonemaier released Viticulture, and hit tables in early 2014, long before Scythe or Wingspan. It is a dice worker-placement game where your workers are literally dice, and here is the twist: the higher their collective knowledge, the more likely they are to realise they live in a dystopia and desert you. Keep them a little dim and keep them working. You generate commodities, dig tunnels under rival territories, build markets and chase artefacts to spread your influence across the dystopia's rival factions.
The Essential Edition, designed by Jamey Stegmaier with Morten Monrad Pedersen and David Studley, folds the original game and its expansion into one box and sands down the rough edges. The board has been redesigned for easier teaching, there is a new Lost and Found space so workers who fail a knowledge check can be recovered for a bit of food rather than vanishing forever, and the endgame has been trimmed from a race to ten stars to a race to nine, with a final round for everyone. The fiddly bazaar is now built into the board, and a solo mode is included.
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Find events near youIt plays 1 to 6 in about an hour and sells for £59, down from the old £65. Webstore copies have shipped since mid-May, with local game shops getting it through June and a full worldwide retail launch on 26 June. If you missed Euphoria first time round, this is the version to start with, so round up a table and dig in.
Sources: Stonemaier Games | ICv2
