The plot and setting are almost identical to Devir’s La Vina, which I reviewed last year. Inherit a vineyard, do better than the other players, yadda yadda, you know the drill. The gameplay is vastly different, however. Viticulture is a classic example of my favourite genre of board game, worker-placement. In each round (or year, as it is in this game), you take turns placing workers in the available slots to improve your vineyard, plant and harvest grapes, and even give visitors a tour, earning some much-needed coin in the process.

The biggest difference between Viticulture and many other worker-placement games is how much effort the game goes to, to try to bake the theme into the mechanisms. Certain varieties of grape require certain improvements in the growing conditions. Ageing wine requires better cellars. If you want to play a visitor card, you’ve got to assign one of your workers to give them the tour, putting more strain on the remaining workforce. All of that is before we even take the changing seasons into account.

Last of the summer wine

In creating Viticulture, Jamey Stegmaier and Alan Stone have gone to great lengths to weave the theme into the game. Half of the worker spots on the board are available in the summer (i.e. the first half of each round), and the others can only be used in the winter. The part that makes this seasonal segregation really interesting is that each of your workers can only be used once per year. So, if you place a worker in the summer, you don’t get them back for the winter.

I can only assume they’re just too tired to work in the winter? I can relate.

It leads to some interesting decisions, and plenty of room to employ a little experimental strategy. The seemingly natural choice is to use half your staff in the summer and half in the winter, but there are times you might want to min-max and throw everyone into the winter, for example. It’s not often that a game asks you to make decisions like these, and it’s something I particularly enjoy about Viticulture. It’s something that sets the game apart from the other worker-placement games in my collection.

The visitor cards also tie into the seasonal settings, where each visitor can only be played in its respective season. Cardplay is really important in Viticulture, and learning how best to combine your visitors and vineyard is the key to scoring well.

In vino veritas

Stonemaier Games have a habit of managing to work in a decent level of player interaction in their games, which is certainly not the norm for Euro games. Viticulture is no different and does a great job of employing passive interaction. Space for the workers is limited, and more often than not you’ll find yourself competing to carry out the same actions as others. The competition is balanced, like a good merlot, with the wake-up track. Before the start of each year/round, players take turns choosing the player order. The earlier you wake up and get to work, the better your choice of spaces to work. Late risers are compensated with additional cards, money, or VPs.

All of these things result in Viticulture being another game that brings out laughter and annoyance in the players, which I love. If someone takes the last spot to get something that you really wanted, the level of annoyance is directly proportional to the level of joy the person doing the blocking experiences. It’s something that is present in a lot of Euro games, but Viticulture nurtures and grows the interaction to a level that elevates it above something like Lords of Waterdeep, but still never gets as far as the outright meanness possible in games like Troyes or Hansa Teutonica.

The thing I enjoy most about Viticulture is again, another Stonemaier hallmark. The end of the game is player-driven, not turn-limited. If you’re ever frustrated at games like Ragusa or Merv, where it seems to end one turn too soon, you’ll grow to love the Stonemaier approach. The game ends when someone hits 20 VPs, and the game is scored as you play, so everyone knows when their last turn or two is coming. I’m a big fan of this, which is just another reason why I enjoy Viticulture as much as I do.

Final thoughts

There’s a reason that at the time of writing, three Stonemaier games sit in the top 30 of BGG’s rankings. Viticulture, along with Scythe and Wingspan, define the level of expectation in modern Euro games. Not the wooden cubes and muted colours of the classic German games, but rich, thematic experiences. Viticulture takes what could have been a very by-the-books worker-placement game, and adds layers of interest and fun.

It’s worth mentioning that this Essential Edition takes a lot of what people liked from the original Tuscany expansion, and adds it to the original Viticulture game. The Mamas & Papas cards especially, which give each player a random combination of starting bonuses. It might sound like a small addition, but these guys and girls often define the way you want to start developing your vineyard.

Viticulture: Essential Edition is a great game. Fans of worker-placement will love it, and its medium-weight complexity means it’s a very accessible game too. The only reason I could think of for someone not to enjoy it is that they really hate the theme. Honestly, if you’re someone new to the hobby who wants to build a collection of essential (coincidental naming) modern games, Viticulture: Essential Edition demands a place.

If you’re looking for something lighter and more portable, take a look at La Vina, and if you want to dial the complexity right up, cast your eyes over Vital Lacerda’s Vinhos Deluxe. For the rest of us, the value for money is like picking a yellow-label bottle of wine at Tesco that’s been reduced to £10. Much better than expected for the money.

Review copy kindly provided by Stonemaier Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Viticulture is available from our sponsor – Kienda. Sign-up using this link to get 5% off your first order over £60.

Viticulture: Essential Edition (2015)

Designers: Jamey Stegmaier, Alan Stone
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Art: Jacqui Davis, David Montgomery, Beth Sobel
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Viticulture: Essential Edition Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Unusually for a Euro game, there’s a pretty detailed backstory behind Pendulum. It’s a story of immortal kings, dragons, and a great iron clock. Whichever player exerts enough influence over the council will get crowned as the new timeless king, and usher in a new era. Exciting stuff, huh? All of this happens as the players literally have the sands of time, slipping away. Three sand timers govern the three distinct areas of the board, and actions can only take place when one of them is flipped next to your worker.

Tempus fugit

I had two big fears when going into Pendulum. Firstly, whether faster players would have an advantage over slower ones. Secondly, whether the real-time nature of the game, with simultaneous play and no turns, would turn it into a strangely unsociable experience.

Let’s start with the first worry – the relative speed of players. Euro games are about strategy, planning, taking your time and figuring out the next best move. My worry was that players who are prone to analysis-paralysis (AP) would be left thinking, while others took twice as many turns, if they could flip the timers fast enough. Having played Pendulum a few times now, I’m glad to be able to say that it’s really not a worry.

What I didn’t expect was how long each of the timers takes to trickle through. At 45, 120, and 180 seconds each, none of them is going to flipping back and forth like a slinky on an escalator. There’s plenty of time to plan and strategise, and that feeling is bolstered by the fact that you only start with two workers to place. Things get more frantic later in the game, when you get more workers, but there still isn’t the disparity I was worried about.

Coming up for air

So let’s touch on my second concern, the simultaneous turns. I say turns, I don’t actually mean turns, as there’s no turn structure as such. You can carry out as many actions as you can fit in the time before each Council phase is triggered. As a result, there’s this inherent, self-imposed pressure. You’re desperate to get as much done as you possibly can, to try to keep yourself on an even keel in comparison to the other players. It reminds me of swimming. You’ve got your head down, fully focused on what you need to do. It’s only the occasional break for a Council phase, or waiting for a timer to run out, when you’ll have the chance lift your head up, breathe, and to look at what the other players are up to.

I don’t really like this feeling. One of the things I really enjoy about a worker-placement game is seeing which strategies my opponents are trying, and seeing how – if at all – our plans might collide. In Pendulum, it’s very hard to play like this, and it can feel like you’re all playing your own game, just occasionally coming back together for the four Council phases, and seeing what happens at the end. It feels like playing in silos.

The only time it doesn’t really feel like this is in a two-player game, where you can instead seem to spend a lot of time twiddling your thumbs, waiting for a timer to finish. Pendulum isn’t at its best with two though, I think three or four players is where the game does best. It supports up to five, but five people all trying to move the same things around the same shared board is just too crowded. The solo mode, added by the ever-dependable Automa Factory, is excellent, and I prefer it to two player.

Like clockwork

Here is a good place to mention the untimed mode that’s included in the box. Playing with the untimed mode pretty much nullifies that entire previous section of the review. The timers are still on the board, but only to dictate which areas can be activated, and have workers placed and removed. When all players have taken their actions, consulted the rulebook, made a cup of tea, and opened the custard creams, the timers get flipped. Repeat, repeat, repeat, until you reach the end of the included timer track, then do the Council phase.

I have mixed feelings about the untimed mode. On the one hand, I enjoy it more than the timed mode. It feels like a sophisticated Euro game with a nice action activation gimmick. On the other hand, however, I can’t help feeling like I’m not playing the game the way it was intended. I really like the innovation of adding the timers, and I love that someone has done something fresh with worker-placement, but I can’t help wishing the timers weren’t in there.

If there had to be a gimmick, a something special to make the game stand out, I wish they’d added a big pendulum. There’s meant to be a grand iron clock, so put half the action spaces on one side of the pendulum, half on the other. Then use the untimed mode for the whole game, with the pendulum shifted from side to side, between turns. Good, eh?

I’m wasted here…

Final thoughts

Pendulum is a good game. It’s not an amazing game, but it’s better than average. I love what Travis Jones has done with the design, and the clever thematic link between the setting and the sand timers. I just don’t enjoy the game as much when I use them. It’s a clever novelty, but it just misses the target for me. I don’t know who signed-off the sand timer design, but having tapered bases, instead of flared ones, was a crazy choice. They get knocked over far too easily, even with a bump to the table.

The presentation throughout is great, and the ten playable characters (well, five, each with two variants) all with their own unique stratagem cards and player mats, all feel slightly different to play with. It’s not a difficult game to learn and play, so anyone happy with medium-weight games will be well away with it. The fact that the rulebook contains a section dedicated to what to do when you forget to do something, just reinforces the feeling that the real-time doesn’t quite work.

All of my grumbling aside, there are going to be people reading this whose game nights thrive on chaos, who love a bit a frantic action on a table. For those people, I’d have no hesitation in recommending Pendulum. Solo gamers might see the Automa Factory name on the box and be tempted, but personally I’d go for Tapestry or Gaia Project instead if you want one of their titles. I really like the untimed game, it makes for a solid Euro game, but I can’t escape the feeling that I’m not playing the game I was meant to be playing.

Review copy kindly provided by Stonemaier Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Pendulum is available from our sponsor – Kienda. Sign-up using this link to get 5% off your first order over £60.

Pendulum (2020)

Designer: Travis Jones
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Art: Robert Leask
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 60-90 mins

The post Pendulum Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Jamey Stegmaier conceived Rolling Realms during the Covid-19 pandemic, with a view to creating a game for any number of players, which can be played over video calls. Finding inspiration for the setting of a new game isn’t always easy, so Jamey leaned on the Stonemaier back-catalogue to come up with not one, but eleven settings.

Pick n mix

Rolling Realms is essentially a mixture of mini-games. The eleven mini-games are each based on one of Stonemaier’s existing games, so you’ll play something related to Scythe, Viticulture, Wingspan, Euphoria, Tapestry, and more. Each time you play, you’ll randomly choose nine of the eleven game cards. and play over three rounds, with three different cards in each round.

Roll dice, choose things to cross off, get resources and coins, and do stuff with them. The formula is tried and tested, and it works. Rolling Realms carries on in the same vein as something like Hadrian’s Wall or Cartographers, which means you get the same sweet little dopamine kick when combos start firing off, and a crossed box leads to another crossed box, and another, and another… When that feeling gets its hooks into you, it’s extremely satisfying.

As with pretty much every Jamey game, stars are the aim of the game. You get to cross stars off your cards for meeting certain conditions on them, and the skill of the game comes in combining the realms in play to maximise your scoring.

Breeding familiarity

Rolling Realms’ biggest draw is also potentially its biggest drawback too. If you’re familiar with Stonemaier’s games, playing this game is real fan service. It’s a lovely feeling when you’re playing on a realm based on a game you’ve played. I remember the first time I played the Scythe and Euphoria cards, I thought “ooh it’s just like those things in those games!”. It’s like getting a tub of Celebrations chocolates – little bites of things you love.

The problem comes when you don’t know the franchises. Between Two Castles means nothing to someone who doesn’t know the game. Viticulture is wine, sure, but there’s no context. It reminds me of trying to show my nine-year-old the cartoons I loved as a kid. He looks at me out of the corner of his eye saying “Sure dad, these are great…”.

I guess there’s an opportunity to make players familiar with Stonemaier games they’ve not played, but the mechanisms in Rolling Realms are so far removed from their source material that you couldn’t get a feeling for what the originating game is about. On the other hand, it’s a game begging for expansions and promos as more games join Jamey’s stable.

Balance enquiry

Rolling Realms is a perfectly good roll-and-write. The mini-games are god fun and offer up lots of different ways to approach each realm, and work out the best way to combine the ones in play. For a game whose genesis came from a want to create a quick game during lockdown, the balance is surprisingly good. With wildly different combinations of cards you can still expect similar scores whenever you play.

It’s a really easy game to teach, but the first few games can feel a bit stilted. It takes a turn or two to understand how each card works, but luckily the rulebook does a great job of explaining the mechanisms on each. I have no idea what’s going on with the dice, however. They’re gigantic, and a strange blue & green swirly pattern. On the one hand, it makes real sense for a game designed to be playable over a video call or game stream. Bigger = more visible. But the white pips on the different colours makes it hard to tell at first glance sometimes. It’s a small complaint, but it’s something that bothers me every time I open the box.

Final thoughts

Rolling Realms is a great game, and the smallest Stonemaier box I own. It sits in a funny space in my collection, somewhere between filler and main game. There’s a really nice solo version in the box, presented as mini-golf, where each hole is a challenge during play. As much fun as the solo mode is, the multiplayer is where the game comes to life.

It reminds me of playing Cartographers or Tiny Towns more than Ganz Schön Clever. Everyone starts in the same state, plays with the same cards, and uses the results on the same dice. I really like that in a game, there’s no bad luck to blame, it’s just your own choices which influence the outcome. It’s really interesting to see how different strategies play out when each round ends.

If you’re a roll-and-write fan and a fan of Stonemaier games, you really ought to get Rolling Realms. It’s cheaper at <£20 than a lot of the same sort of games which offer far less replayability. It’s still definitely worth buying if you just love this genre of game, just be prepared for the settings on the cards to leave you feeling a bit cold. A game with no theme is fine – Ganz for example – but when a game has a theme and you just don’t get it, it’s an odd experience.

Review copy kindly provided by Stonemaier Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Rolling Realms (2021)

Designer: Jamey Stegmaier
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Art: Miles Bensky, Marius Petrescu
Players: 1-6 (scalable to any number)
Playing time: 30 mins

The post Rolling Realms Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Ruffling feathers

If you’ve been around the board game scene in the last couple of years, there’s a good chance you’ve already been exposed to Wingspan. It caused huge ripples when it landed in our pond, like a less-than-graceful duck coming in for a landing. The stark change in theme for a big game was a part of it. No fantasy, sci-fi or city-building here, just pretty birds and little pastel eggs. A big part of the fuss was also having Elizabeth’s name front and center on the box too.

The fact that a best-selling game makes waves because it has a female designer shouldn’t matter, but it does matter. The board game world has a large lens cast on it at the moment, examining the dominance in the scene that straight, white males have. Diversity and inclusion are big issues, and Elizabeth’s game doing as well as it has was a watershed moment for many, and a bit of a wake-up call for everyone involved in the process of game design and publishing.

While that’s brilliant for our hobby as a whole, you’re probably here to find out if Wingspan is a good game or not, so let’s get into it.

Peacock posturing?

Each player in Wingspan has a board that represents their local environment. You need to collect food of different kinds in order to attract birds to nest on your board, and as the game progresses, the birds you collect form an engine. When you activate certain abilities, each of the birds in that row with a brown banner at the bottom get activated, and can combine in the most satisfying way to earn you big rewards.

Each bird’s card, in addition to having an absolutely gorgeous illustration, also tells you about its various attributes. The number of eggs it can house in its nest, the type of nest it builds, where it can build its nest, and the titular statistic – its wingspan. These facets matter, as shared scoring and individual scoring bonuses depend on them.

After four rounds have been played, the scores are tallied and the most birdmongous among you is declared the winner. In essence Wingspan is a drafting game of set collection and tableau building. It’s a good one too.

Golden goose

Wingspan is a really important game. It breaks down a lot of barriers and does something that so many games fail to do – it makes hobby gaming accessible. If I take my copy of Race for the Galaxy along to a family gathering, despite it being an amazing tableau-building game, like Wingspan, I know nobody will play. My parents and in-laws aren’t enthused by sci-fi, it leaves them cold. However, if I take ‘that bird game’, the theme, components and friendliness breaks down barriers, and people who wouldn’t ordinarily play a strategy game with me, will.

It’s a game that I’d probably place alongside The Quacks of Quedlinburg because of this, because it’s another of those games that offers a peek behind the curtain of the confusing world of hobby board games. It’s an introduction to mechanisms and concepts that are fundamental in game design, but with a welcoming, inviting theme. Think of it like someone smiling and taking your hand and saying “It’s okay, come and try it, it’s not as scary or difficult as you think”.

Breeding strategy

Wingspan faces one issue that other games with a large number of cards also do. It’s very difficult to cycle through the deck, and there are times you’re desperate for a certain type of card to come out, but it doesn’t. Terraforming Mars and Everdell are other examples of this, and for some players, that’s too frustrating. The thing to remember when you sit down to play Wingspan, is that it’s a game of reactive strategy.

I’m someone who likes to be able to form a strategy from very early in a game, knowing that if I plan well, I can make it happen. I can’t do that in Wingspan, because I’ve no idea what’s going to emerge. There are only three birds available in the market to choose from at any time, or one blind from the top of the deck, so you’ll never cycle through all 170(!) in one game.

Here’s something I think is really important. It doesn’t matter that you can’t form a grand strategy. This is a medium-weight game in every sense, and it’s a game that can, and should, be played by gamers and non-gamers alike. I love the look on someone’s face when you see the cogs fall into place, and they tell everyone at the table “look at this, if I play this bird here, and do this, I get all this cool stuff”. Those are the moments when board games get their hooks into peoples’ brains, and don’t let go.

Final thoughts

Wingspan can be quite divisive in my experience. Hardcore gamers get turned-off by the random chance the cards introduce, but if you join a Facebook group for board games, you’re going to see far more posts in praise of the game. For the vast majority of the people who play the game, it’s a real hit, and it’s a game that I’ve seen, first-hand, bring people into the hobby. The expansions which introduce birds from other parts of the world sold like hot cakes, and deservedly so.

I really enjoy playing it. I’ll never turn down a game of Wingspan. My eight-year-old son learned the game very quickly, and even beat me by employing a strategy of laying as many eggs as possible, and making sure he picked the blue ones. The egg colours don’t matter in the game at all, but it’s another little aesthetic choice that further increases the appeal.

There’s a reason Wingspan is in the top 20 games on BGG, and ranked number one for family games. It’s a great game. It’s fun, it’s easy to learn, it’s beautiful on the table, and the eggs and bird box dice tower are irresistibly tactile. If there’s a gap in your collection for a medium-weight game that you want to appeal to just about anyone, Wingspan is the way to go.

Review copy kindly provided by Stonemaier Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Wingspan is available from our sponsor – Kienda. Sign-up using this link to get 5% off your first order over £60.

Wingspan (2019)

Designer: Elizabeth Hargrave
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Art: Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo, Natalia Rojas, Beth Sobel
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 45-75 mins

The post Wingspan Review appeared first on Punchboard.

The artwork on the box by Jakub Rozalski is iconic now. The sight of dieselpunk mechs battling in fields, while workers tend their crops is really evocative, but it can set people up for a game that’s not entirely what they’re expecting. Rather than being a game about gigantic mechanical creatures duking it out on top of someone’s turnips, Scythe is a Euro game. It’s an area control game, a game of choosing routes to victory, and upgrading your abilities in order to get there.

There is strength in unity

The hex-based board and plastic mech and leader minis really belie the type of game Scythe is. Combat is a really small part of the game. Instead, the threat of combat is what drives the game. It’s about posturing and showing off what your military is packing. It’s a giant, mechanical dick-waving competition. Instead of conflict, the heart of the game lies in resource production and management.

Players are given a faction to control, each with its own unique powers and bonuses. Along with their factions – which include their unique mechs and leader mini – players are assigned player boards. The player boards hold buildings and upgrade cubes, and also control which actions you can carry out. The four different spaces on the board have both top and bottom actions, and the way those actions are paired vary from board to board. It ensures a really good variety in setup, and keeps experienced players on their toes.

The various actions get your workers moving from hex to hex, and exploiting the land’s natural resources for the good of the motherland. The mechs are there to offer support and protection. They can carry workers and resources around the map, keeping them safe from potential aggressors. Once in a while though, with so much titanium testosterone stomping around, things are bound to kick-off.

Scrap metal

Combat is a pretty low-key affair in Scythe. Each player gets a dial to represent their strength, and you can spend your accumulated power from your power track. You can also attach a face-down combat card which has a value to add to the strength. The dials get revealed, cards flipped, and to the victor (i.e. the person with the most power), the spoils. They keep whatever resources were on that space, and the loser sends all their units from the contested hex back to their home space, to lick their wounds. The winner also places a star on the triumph track, but more on that later.

Controlling the resources is the key to the game. It’s how you’ll build and deploy your mechs, and how you’ll add buildings to the board. Getting your buildings onto the board not only helps you control the map, it also unlocks whatever bonuses were lurking under them on your player board. I love getting two for the price of one.

The other really useful thing your hard-earned resources can do is upgrade your player boards. There are lots of cubes sitting in the socketed spots on your board (side note: I love a socketed board, and these ones are great), and upgrading moves a cube from on top of a green space – green gives you stuff – and places it into a red space. Red spaces are costs, so upgrades are a two-for-one – increase bonuses while decreasing costs. Yay for optimisation!

Star light, star bright

I mentioned stars above, and stars are the key to victory. Much like other Jamey Stegmaier game designs, Scythe doesn’t have a set number of rounds in the game, instead the game ends similarly to the way Euphoria did before it. Players are awarded stars for completing certain feats during the game, those stars go on the triumph track.

Once one player places their sixth star on the track, the game ends, and the exciting job of tallying the scores can start. It sounds like something that’s easy to keep track of, but it isn’t, as there are nine different categories of achievement that let you place stars. Nine!

Basically, you’ve got to have eyes in the back of your head playing Scythe. Or is it eyes on stalks? Whatever, you need extra eyes. As well as deciding on the way you want to play the game, you simultaneously need to keep an eye on what every other player is doing too. Once two or three players have got five stars on the board, the friendly chat stops, and everyone suddenly becomes hyper-vigilant. What sort of things are they collecting? Is that person moving troops closer to that space? How many structures have they got left to place? I SEE YOU!

I’m a big fan of this kind of end-game trigger. There’s nothing hidden from anyone; all of the information anyone needs is there on the table, sat between you all. It gives you opportunities to try to delay proceedings, in order to get those last few things you need. You’ll see players trying to influence each other, under the guise of fighting a collective enemy, but secretly with designs on their own victory. It’s absolutely delicious!

Final thoughts

There is so much I haven’t even touched on in this review. Popularity. Encounters. Objective cards. The mysterious factory in the middle of the board that everyone wants to get to. Digging tunnels to scoot around the map like mechanised moles. The strange fact that these factions can build enormous robots but can’t cross rivers easily… seriously, what’s that about? There is so much going on in a game of Scythe, that every time you play it, the game will be completely different to the time before.

Scythe is really daunting the first time you play it. It looks incredible set-up on the table, with all the different forces surrounding the map, ready to try to stake their claims. But when it comes down to it, it’s a medium-heavy Euro with some area control. That shouldn’t come across as a bad thing either, that’s a great thing in my books. It just means those first games are often jarring, time-consuming teaches. Especially if the players come to the game expecting hardcore mech-on-mech fisticuffs. You just need to guide your group through that first play.

The production is top-notch, the artwork throughout is absolutely beautiful, and there’s a huge amount of game in the box for the money. Despite so much variety in factions, objectives and player boards, the game is wonderfully balanced. I haven’t found a combination yet of faction and board that feels overpowered (certain combinations are named and banned in the rulebook), and that’s over the course of a lot of plays of the physical and digital versions of the game. If you do get tired of the base game, there’s plenty in the form of expansions, and a modular board to keep things fresh.

Scythe is five years old now, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s been superseded by something better. It hasn’t. If you’re looking for a medium-heavy Euro with a solid solo mode (by Automa Factory), oodles of replayability, and one that’s absolutely dripping with theme, you really can’t do any better than Scythe. It’s a modern masterpiece, and one that everyone should own and play.

Review copy kindly provided by Stonemaier Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Scythe is available from our sponsor – Kienda. Sign-up using this link to get 5% off your first order over £60.

Scythe (2016)

Designer: Jamey Stegmaier
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Art: Jakub Rozalski
Players: 1-5
Playing time: 90-120 mins

The post Scythe Review appeared first on Punchboard.

Designer: Jamey Stegmaier, Alan Stone
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Art: Jacqui Davis
Players: 1-6
Playing time: 60-75minutes

Introduction

Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia is a game that pretty much defines itself. Through placing workers, players build their faction’s influence in this crazy world-gone-to-poop, trying to be the first to completely stamp their authority.

I mostly write about more recent games here, but the chance to take a look at Euphoria, combined with its expansion was one I couldn’t pass up. When the base game was released eight years ago, it found a lot of fans. Its quirky styling and sense of humour, and the unique way it used dice as workers were fresh and interesting. It’s also still one of the only worker-placement games I’ve played that’ll accommodate up to six players.

So how do you make it better? Well, there were a lot of variants and house rules being posted in places like BoardGameGeek which players found balanced the game better, and so some of those have been implemented into the base game rules with the expansion. It also brought a whole raft of new market tiles to the game, along with a load of new recruits, to keep the original game fresh. There’s also a new market mechanism for claiming artifact cards, and some player mats.

The other huge thing the expansion did, however, was to add a solo mode. Morten Monrad Pedersen’s Automa Factory came back to work with Stonemaier Games, and to give us a whole new way to play.

What’s In The Box

I’ve got the third printing of the base game, and it has the lovely, lovely insert and token holders from Game Trayz (the same people who made the insert I loved in PARKS). If there’s a better insert system for a game, I don’t know what it is, I haven’t seen anything better. It also had the added bonus of letting me add all the now-redundant baggies to my baggie box (don’t pretend you don’t have one).

The components in this game are pretty top-notch. There are custom dice in all six player colours, and a full set of individual components. Resources are all custom wooden tokens in the shape of oranges, lightning bolts, green ‘bliss’ clouds and more. The market tiles are all really solid, nicely-finished cardstock, and the cards themselves are the usual Stonemaier high quality you’d expect by now. Everything feels really nice in-hand.

Another nice bonus of the insert is that it was designed with the expansion in mind. You can easily get the base game and every part of the expansion into the box, with everything separate to make setup simple. The expansion also comes with some stickers to place on the mine tracks on the main board, which give new starting places based on player count. This is another of the quality of life improvements.

I want to give a special mention to the theme and aesthetic. The tongue-in-cheek dystopia you’re building is really nicely illustrated, and really funny too, the name of some of the market tiles made me laugh out loud – The Lounge of Opulent Frugality for example.

How Does It Play?

At its heart, Euphoria is a worker-placement game, using dice as workers, in a similar way to Teotihuacan. There isn’t a set number of rounds before the game ends, instead it’s a race to get your authority markers (stars) off your player board and onto the main board. In a way that we later saw in Scythe, the first one to place all their stars, wins.

We’re Off To See The Wizard

Key in Euphoria are two different tracks that each player uses; morale and intelligence. They’re represented in the game by a heart and a head/brain respectively. Morale is important, as the number you have dictates the numbers of cards you can have in your hand, and you can also spend it in one of two methods to retrieve your workers from the board.

Intelligence brings a nice touch of push-your-luck to the game. If the value of your intelligence track, combined with the values of your freshly-rolled workers is 16 or higher, your highest value worker is taken from you, to be earned again later. Ouch. It’s not the end of the world, but now you might be working with two workers when your opponents have three or four, and when a game is a race – like this is – that’s bad news.

So, keep your workers happy and stupid – see what I meant about the humour?

Factions and Actions

There are four factions in the game, each represented by a distinct area on the board, the recruits that players draw at the start of the game, and four advancement tracks. Each area has a unique set of commodities and resources, which you can earn by placing workers in certain worker spots. The commodities can be spent on various things, including moving miners along a track in three of the four areas. The Icarites in their zeppelins at the top of the board don’t have a mine, as they spend their days floating above the world.

As you advance through the mines you dig out resources, which you can then spend on the construction of market spaces. Once enough workers are placed next to a market space, the tile gets flipped and a new worker spot is available. Anyone who helped build it gets to place a star on it (this is good, this is what we’re trying to do, remember?), but anyone who didn’t suffers the penalty written on the tile.

Some actions help advance the markers along the respective faction tracks, which give compound bonuses. If you manage to get one of these markers all the way to the end, anyone with an active recruit of that type gets to place a star next to it. Yay, another star gone.

Sorry Mate, I Didn’t See You There

On your turn, most of the time you’re placing a worker. You can only do that if you’ve got a worker, obviously, but how do you get your workers back from the board? Well, you can use a turn to withdraw some or all of your workers, but there’s also another nice mechanism at play in Euphoria.

In most worker-placement games, if someone claims a spot for one worker, no-one else can go there until they remove their worker. In this game, however, if the space has a dashed line around it (which most of them do), you can just place your worker there and bump the other worker off the spot. As with most things though it’s a case of swings and roundabouts. You can go pretty much wherever you want, whenever you want, which is good. But on the flipside, your opponent just got a worker back for free.

On Your Marks, Get Set…

As you might have guessed by now, what we’re trying to do in Euphoria is get those stars on the board as soon as possible. There are lots of ways to do it, but there’s the ever-present threat of your opponents doing the same. Luckily, there are a lot of places to put your stars down. In addition to the advancement tracks I mentioned before, and the markets, each area has its own territory. There are as many spaces in the territory as there are players in the game, but there’s no limit on how many each player can claim.

To claim these territory spaces, you need to use that faction’s artifact market. Trade in three cards (or two matching cards) and you can pop a star on the territory. I haven’t really mentioned the artifact cards yet, but they’re great, and make me laugh. They’re meant to be artifacts from the old times, and they’re things like baseball bats, broken spectacles, a knackered old teddy bear – that sort of thing. Junk right now, but ancient treasures in the future.

The final way to place a star is to resolve your ethical dilemma card. Each player gets one in secret at the start of the game, and by trading in artifacts on your turn you can flip the card and choose one of the two options. They represent things like getting married, for example; do you choose to marry your true love, or the person the state has chosen for you? Regardless of the dilemma, the results are the same. Choose to be a good drone and do what you’re told, and you get to place a star on the card. Follow your heart instead, and you get to draw two recruit cards and keep one of them.

Recruitment Drive

Recruit cards are the last piece of the puzzle. Everyone draws four at the start of the game and keeps two. One is face-up and represents the faction they’ll most likely try to advance, and the other is a big secret! Shhhhh. When a certain spot on the mine track or faction advancement track is reached, players with a matching secret faction card can flip them and gain their benefits too.

The benefits on the recruit cards do things like grant extra resources in certain places, let you pay fewer cards for some placements, things like that. I find they add an interesting dimension, because when they get flipped, all of a sudden players might suddenly have another faction they’re getting benefits from. Maybe even yours! The cads!

The game moves at a fair lick, and ends immediately when someone places their last star. No final rounds, none of that stuff, just bam! Game over. That player wins, everyone else doesn’t, and retires to lick their wounds and blame bad luck, or their horoscope, or the weather or something.

Final Thoughts

While I was waiting for the game to arrive, I started my usual overthinking. “What if it shows its age? What if I’ve played something else that does it all better? Why don’t more people rave about it?” It turns out that I needn’t have worried, Euphoria is great.

Regular readers will know that I love worker-placement, and I really like dice too. I’ve played a few dice-as-workers games, all newer than this one, but I’ve not played one that does things the same way. And I can’t remember the last reasonably heavy game I played that felt like an honest-to-goodness race.

Theme

Theme isn’t that big a deal to me, I love a dry, beige game. But Euphoria has tons of theme, and everything in the game both uses and enhances that theme, The feeling of this dystopia that’s almost comical in its absurdity, is great. Keep your workers happy, but keep them stupid, or the cleverest one does a runner – that’s clever, not just functional.

The art really lends to the feel too, and because everything feels so nice to touch, it really adds to the overall experience and table presence. The black humour throughout lends to the dystopian feel. Maybe that theme doesn’t sing to everyone, but it’s a nice change to the usual barrage of historical cityscapes and deep space we get in most Euro games.

Off To The Races

My favourite thing about Euphoria is the feeling of being in a race. I know it’s there in some games, but it feels so pronounced here. Everything starts nice and slow; get a few resources, do a thing, maybe get a star or two. But then suddenly things start accelerating, and then game starts careening like a train out of control. You end up with one eye on your board, and one on each of your opponents stars. You find yourself making sure you always knowing how many the other players have left. For those last few stars you’ll find yourself doing some fast mental maths, as turns go by really quickly.

On top of that,there’s the surprise as you move into the last third of the game and hidden recruits get revealed. All of a sudden, that person sat next to you has a reason to start using all the places you want, and they get a discount for using your artifact market? They can definitely get their own drink for the rest of games night.

Then people start taking risks. You might have three workers all out on the board, and you really want them all back, because the game is balanced on a knife-edge. Your intelligence track is on 3, and you know if you take them all back, you have to roll them all. The mental maths starts again – “So I can’t go over thirteen on this roll, or I lose a worker. I can roll under thirteen on three dice, right? Right??” You take the risk, roll the dice, and the collective table holds its breath… It’s moments like that, that really make Euphoria stand out.

Expanding Horizons

I think the Ignorance is Bliss expansion is a must, if you’re considering Euphoria. The game balance fixes are great, and it includes as many new market tiles and recruit cards as were already in the base game. The player mats, they aren’t essential maybe, but being able to track your morale and intelligence on your own board, instead of reaching across the board to the shared track, is another small win. The artifact market adds another nice little twist to keep things fresh after 20 or 30 plays.

The real star of the show in that small, green box though, is the automa deck. It works the same as all Automa Factory AI systems seem to: a two cards decide the action and the target for that action. Because the automa don’t take or spend resources, their turns are quick and smooth, and the iconography is really clear and simple. Interestingly, this automa has you running two opponents – black and white, but that shouldn’t be a red flag, it’s very simple. It’s also a big hint that this is a game meant to be played with more than two players.

Should I Buy This Game?

If the theme doesn’t turn you off, and you want a worker-placement game that does things a little differently, then yes – you should buy Euphoria. I find it’s all too easy to get swept up in the Cult Of The New and dismiss anything older than a year, but there are still a lot of incredible games that would be old enough to be in school now. Euphoria: Build a Better Utopia is one such game.

Having said that, I’ll still caveat it by saying I think the Ignorance is Bliss expansion is essential. Not just because the fixes make the game feel more balanced, but because a) the solo mode is very good, and b) because the automa deck lets you play a 4-player game with two people. The reason I mention that specifically, is because although it’s a good game with two with 3+ it really comes alive. The competition for spaces, the tension of the race, it’s just so much more pronounced with more players, and that’s what makes this game shine for me. The first game is a learning one, but every game after that is great fun, and that’s exactly what this game delivers – fun.

If you want to try it out before you buy it, you can play it right now over on Tabletopia.

Review copy provided by Stonemaier Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

The post Euphoria + Expansion Review appeared first on Punchboard.