In Euphoria by Stonemaier, lead a team of workers to dominate a twisted, dystopian world with 4 distinct factions.

Place workers (dice) to generate commodities, mine tunnels, construct markets, and collect artifacts, while carefully managing knowledge and morale. If the collective knowledge of your workers gets too high, they’ll learn the truth of the system and desert you.

Start with the allegiance of an elite recruit from one of the factions with a unique ability, recruiting another once the allegiance with their faction is strong enough. Place the most authority tokens through actions contributing to the society to win.

Solo mode

In the solo mode – designed by Automa Factory – build an automa deck of various cards depending on the desired difficulty.

Play against 2 automas, but they’re handled through a single deck and take seconds to run once you understand them – and that 3rd player on the board is definitely needed!

In my first game I had a number of clarifications as the automa rulebook wasn’t as clear as it could be, but I flew through the next.

I’ve also played a 2p game with the automa and it worked well there too, other than remembering to take turns for the bots!

Thoughts

When I showed my partner the game he said “it looks like a spreadsheet”. Well good, because I ❤️ spreadsheets. But he’s right. 3 of the 4 factions work exactly the same other than the commodities and resources you’ll gain and spend there. But if you love satisfying optimisation puzzles then this will hit the spot.

And similarity in factions isn’t to say there’s no variety, this just comes through the abilities of your recruits (there are SO MANY), or the markets that get constructed during the game, with things really coming to life in the latter half.

It definitely shines at a higher player count. I’ve not played with 5/6 yet but suspect 4 may be the sweet spot – it’s fairly quick paced but there would still be reasonable downtime with more players.

Relative to weight, Euphoria is quick to set up, learn, and play and I can see myself reaching for this when I want a bit of crunch but not all the upkeep that often comes with it.

Disclaimer: Euphoria was gifted to me by Stonemaier Games for review purposes, but all thoughts are my own.