Euphoria: Ignorance Is Bliss Review

INTRODUCTION

One of my absolute favourite board game mechanisms is dice placement, where players use the instruments governed by Lady Luck to perform various actions. There is something quite fascinating about the creative process of transforming the act of rolling a die into an integral strategic and tactical part of the core game design: from navigating the interstellar voyage of the spaceship Black Angel to managing your estate during 16th Century India in Rajas of the Ganges, if a board game includes clever use and manipulation of dice as a main mechanism then I am immediately interested to learn more.

Such is the case with Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia (henceforth Euphoria) from publisher Stonemaier Games. Designed by Jamey Stegmaier and Alan Stone in 2013, the game is considered by many to be a perennial classic in the dice placement subgenre of board games. For years, I cried into the night “Alas, if only the game could be played solitary!” whilst nurturing the fever dreams of a madman. So, imagine my surprise when it was announced that Ignorance Is Bliss, the first expansion to Euphoria would include not only a whole new set of recruits and markets but also an official solo mode courtesy of the talented designers over at the Automa Factory which proved enough incentive for me to take a closer look at this dystopian themed, dice based game design and its accompanying expansion.

COMPONENTS

Anyone who is interested in cinema, more specifically accumulating and curating a collection consisting of physical media, is undoubtedly aware of the Criterion Collection: a publisher dedicated to providing contemporary films and acclaimed masterpieces with the highest level of quality in terms of art and technical fidelity. Why do I bring this up? Because it is most definitely the case that when it comes to production quality, publisher Stonemaier Games is aspiring to become the board game equivalent of Criterion. This became clear to me the second I removed the lid of the Euphoria box and noticed that the game includes a custom moulded insert from the company Game Trayz which stores and organises not only the base game components but also the ones included in the Ignorance Is Bliss expansion. The insert even accommodates for sleeved cards, a nice touch which pleases me to no end.

*A selection of the new market tiles that are included in the expansion Euphoria: Ignorance Is Bliss. Photo: Fredrik Schulz*

As for the expansion, Ignorance Is Bliss includes several new component upgrades. No more will you have to make use of the chunky and somewhat wonky multiplier “cards”, as the expansions introduces new wooden tokens denoting larger quantities of commodities. Each player also receives an individual board which is used for storing resources and stars in addition to keeping track of your workers Morale and Knowledge levels. Rather than being made of cardboard, the player mats are printed on card stock which makes them look and feel a bit cheap which is a shame but they are nonetheless perfectly serviceable. The expansion also introduces a new, foldable separate board called the Antiques Bazaar where players will be able to acquire artefacts in exchange for commodities as opposed to the base game where you draw blindly from a deck of cards. Overall, publisher Stonemaier Games has put together a visually pleasing product as far as board game components goes.

OVERVIEW

“The world as we know it has ended, and in its place the city of Euphoria has risen. Believing that a new world order is needed to prevent another apocalypse, the Euphorian elite erect high walls around their golden city and promote intellectual equality above all else. Gone are personal freedoms; gone is knowledge of the past. All that matters is the future.”

In Euphoria, players take on the roles of “entrepreneurs” vying for control over a society plucked from the pages of Orson Welles dystopian literary masterpiece 1984. In order to achieve this grim and lofty goal, you will send out your workers to collect commodities and resources from one of the four main areas of the board. In the west the glistening city of Euphoria stands tall, casting a foreboding shadow over its ignorant population. To the east lies the Wasteland, inhabited by those who witnessed and remember the apocalypse first-hand and are now trying to create a society based on knowledge and farming. Deep beneath the surface of the scorched earth lies the hidden city known as Subterra, an underground network consisting of miners and radicals. Finally, look up to the sky and you might catch a glimpse of the zeppelins belonging to the mysterious Icarites who specialise in trading with the sedative drug known as Bliss.

*Dice represent players workforce that they will deploy in order to gather commodities and resources, construct markets or excavate for rare artefacts. Photo: Fredrik Schulz*

Your labourers are represented as dice, where the numerical value indicates the amount of knowledge a worker currently possesses. On a players turn they can choose to either place a worker on one of the available locations on the main board, alternatively they have the option to retrieve the dice back into their personal supply in order to perform additional actions on future turns of the game. What is interesting about this mechanism, is the fact that a higher-value die might not necessarily be the most optimal choice depending on your current strategy. Each of the four previously mentioned factions has an associated area for acquiring commodities like food, water, energy, or bliss. The amount a worker is able to collect from any given commodity area is dictated by their knowledge level i.e. pip-value of the die placed. Higher numerical values will reward you with larger quantities of goods, but also add to the risk of your labourers becoming a bit too aware of what is actually going on behind the curtains in this so called utopia. On the other hand, an ignorant worker is able to contribute to the advancement of the Allegiance track.

Throughout the course of the game, by taking certain actions deemed advantageous by the four factions’ players will be able to gain favours in the form of special abilities provided that their recruit(s) are a member of the splinter group in question. At the start of a game of Euphoria, each player is dealt four Recruit cards of which they will choose two to keep and discard the others. These individuals represent devoted followers, people who strongly believe in your cause and support your plans to create a better dystopia for mankind. The zealot one of your followers will be represented face-up at the start of the game, swearing allegiance to you and in doing so providing you with their special ability right from turn one. The other recruit will remain face-down for the time being, indicating someone you have yet to fully convince until the corresponding token on the Allegiance track reaches the third tier which reveals hidden recruits belonging to that particular faction. Along the way these tracks also provide additional bonuses to faction recruits, like gaining additional commodities from the gathering areas on the main board or being able to discover more artefacts by excavating the underground network of mines.

*By advancing on the Allegiance track, you will earn the trust of the various factions which provides you with powerful bonuses. Photo: Fredrik Schulz*

In order to fulfil your dreams of becoming the future despot of Euphoria your labourers will need to be at the right level of sentient for them to be as productive as possible, whilst simultaneously feeling happy and content living in this rather bleak dystopian landscape. Because if your individual worker becomes too aware of what is really transpiring in terms of your ulterior motives, or starts to tell the other labourers under your rule, then there is a possibility that they will break free from the shackles of ignorance and flee. This idea of managing the consciousness of your workforce is represented through the implementation of a Knowledge check. Whenever a player retrieves a die from the main board, they will immediately roll the selected die and add the result to any available dice in their worker pool plus the numerical “penalty” dictated by the Knowledge track. If the sum of all these factors equals or exceeds 16, then your worker will experience the veil being lifted and escape the dystopian society. What this translates to in terms of game mechanisms is you having to forfeit one of your dice back to the main supply, a design choice which left me rather torn as to my personal feelings regarding the subject matter.

In theory, I fully understand this notion of workers needing to be at the right level of awareness in order to be efficient at performing manual labour, whilst not being too enlightened in order to prevent them from fleeing the dystopian society. I definitely get a sense for what Jamey Stegmaier and Alan Stone was going for, having the knowledge system providing a thematic hook whilst simultaneously acting as a way to slow down players or rather their workforce from becoming too powerful. But in practice, having your recently acquired labourer immediately returned to the main dice pool because you got unlucky when rolling the die is a very bitter pill to swallow to put it mildly. It may be that I am rubbish at playing Euphoria, but it nevertheless takes me between two to three turns to amass the amount of resources needed in order to acquire a new worker, running the risk of then immediately losing said labourer just feels wrong.

*The Ignorance Is Bliss expansion adds a whole new deck of recruit cards, including factionless specialists. Photo: Fredrik Schulz*

Surely then, it is in the interest of the player to make sure that they reduce the collective awareness of their labourers to gain a more favourable outcome when rolling the dice? While it is true that you need to manage your Knowledge level, the way you achieve this is primarily by visiting one of the four commodity areas on the main board. The problem though, is that the total sum of all dice present can only range between 5 and 8 in order for a player to be able to subtract one position on the knowledge track. And if one or several automated opponents already have their dice present on the location, well then you are unable to lower the threshold. There is also the option to reduce your knowledge level by two when acquiring a new worker, but that costs three resources which in Euphoria is no small amount. Compare that to Teotihuacan: City of Gods by designer Daniele Tascini, a board game that manages to beautifully convey the notion of your labourer becoming more experienced by automatically increasing the pip value by one until they “retire” and a new worker is introduced to your workforce. But then again, passing judgement on Euphoria in light of Teotihuacan is like comparing oranges with giraffes; they are two vastly different board game designs in terms of rules complexity and interlocking mechanisms.

So how does one go about becoming the board game equivalent of Big Brother? It is written in the stars. Literally, the way one wins a game of Euphoria is by being the first player to place their 10th star token, or authority tokens as they are described in the rule book, on any applicable area of the game board. Although there is more than one way to skin a cat, the main source of token distribution lies in constructing markets. At the start of the game, six markets are seeded at random face-down on the board. Depending on player count, a certain amount of resources and workers are needed to complete construction of a marketplace. Once the criteria have been fulfilled, the market tile in question is flipped face-up and all players who participated with their workers are rewarded with placing an authority token on the newly revealed location. What is interesting about this mechanism, is that not only does it provide an incentive to devote your precious workers and resources in the building process. It is also the case that the game introduces severe restrictions for those player(s) who do not have their authority token on a constructed market and believe me when I say that these constraints will definitely throw a monkey wrench into your plans. This part of the game design can lead to some pretty interesting situations, where players much like parasites are lying in wait for the right opportunity to profit of the toil provided by your rival’s labourers.

IGNORANCE IS BLISS

In many ways, the first expansion to Euphoria is the best kind of extension to the core game design one could wish for: it provides plenty of new mechanisms and toys for the players to discover without burdening them with added cruft in the form of cumbersome rules. That is not to say that Ignorance Is Bliss is just a new coat of paint, there are several key revisions to the formula that makes Euphoria an even more enjoyable board game experience, starting with the Antiques Bazaar. Rather than having players draw artefacts cards blindly from the top of the deck, the expansion introduces a market system with four cards on display with varying costs of commodities. I cannot emphasise enough how much more enjoyable this aspect of Euphoria becomes, as artefact cards goes from being almost an afterthought to a key component of the game design. This is further evident by the selection of new market tiles, all of which require artefacts in addition to resources for players to be able to activate the associated action location. But perhaps the biggest addition is the new set of Recruit cards, as Ignorance Is Bliss introduces factionless specialists for you to recruit to your cause. Although these characters do not benefit from the bonuses associated with the allegiance track, their inherent special ability is more powerful than those belonging to normal recruits making them an interesting strategical alternative.

THE SOLO MODE

In addition to introducing several new variations to the core game mechanisms, the Ignorance Is Bliss expansion also provides you with the opportunity to play Euphoria solo, courtesy of the Automa Factory board game design team. Much like the company’s previous solitary iterations, the performed actions of the automated opponents in Ignorance Is Bliss are governed by a deck of cards. In this instance though, you will compete against not one but two artificial adversaries. Contrary to the human player, the Automas “have no morale, knowledge, or ethical dilemmas, which makes sense as they’re just stacks of cardboard” as described by the rather amusing preamble of the solo rulebook. They never have to pay resources or commodities for taking actions or constructing markets, keeping the upkeep to a minimum for the solitary player.

Each Automa card consists of two columns: Action and Support. As one might deduce, the former indicates what type of action the automated opponents are attempting to perform, whilst the latter determines where on the board the Automa will place one of its workers. When the automated opponents take their turn (they always do so in succession after the human player) the top card of the solo deck is revealed and positioned to the left of the Action card from the previous turn, which becomes the Support card for the current turn. When combined, the centre area created by the pairing of both cards indicate where the black and white Automa respectively will place their worker. As the game progresses, new cards which focus on constructing markets and visiting the artefact locations will be added to the solo deck. I really like this mechanism as it simulates the game progression of a human opponent, earlier turns of the game are more focused on resource gathering and this is represented in the solo mode by having the initial cards of the Automa deck to focus on this specific aspect of the game design.

*The solo cards are used in pair, dictating the actions the two automated opponents will perform on their turn. Photo: Fredrik Schulz*

Another positive aspect of the solo mode is the inclusion of not one but two automated opponents. This is actually the first time I have experienced a solitary board game design that features more than a single artificial player and I was somewhat surprised as to how much more it felt like playing a game in the company of friends. As the core mechanisms of Euphoria has players jockeying for the worker activation locations, the solo mode is designed to simulate this experience by allowing the two automated opponents to potentially target each other as opposed to simply ganging up on the human player. Having to be mindful of the actions performed by several automated opponents turned out to be a really pleasant experience without burdening the solo player with additional bookkeeping. There is however one aspect of the solo mode in the Ignorance Is Bliss expansion that I am less than keen on and that has to do with the way the rules are presented. For some reason, when sitting down to learn the game I had a really difficult time wrapping my head around how to accurately execute some of the Automas actions particularly those involving digging the tunnels. The way the solo rules are presented in terms of layout and the accompanying examples caused me to experience uncertainty rather than clarity. It is difficult for me to articulate or pinpoint the exact reason as to why these issues arises, based on several rules queries posted on the forums at Board Game Geek it seems that I am not alone in experiencing these ambiguities.

FINAL THOUGHTS

This review proved to be one of the more difficult ones to summarize, partly due to the fact that I am somewhat torn as to my feelings for both Euphoria and the Ignorance Is Bliss expansion. On the one hand, I truly feel there are several interesting game mechanisms on display, particularly the way the design provides players with rewards whether their worker i.e. die is a low-value or not. Having the advancement on the Allegiance being tied to lower ranking labourers is a clever to mitigate unlucky die rolls whilst providing the players with strategical considerations; should you wait for additional workers to pile up on the commodity areas in order to obtain larger quantities of goods for yourself, or do you deploy your low-ranking worker with the goal of obtaining grand favours from the various factions further down the line. And although I am personally not that fond of the way the knowledge check is implemented, the overall design of Euphoria is solid in the realm of dice placement board games.

If you have no previous experience with the genre, then I think Euphoria could prove to be an excellent jumping off point in exploring dice placement as a board game mechanism. If however you already own and enjoy the base game, then I am confident that the Ignorance Is Bliss expansion will prove to be your cup of tea. Would I recommend buying both Euphoria and Ignorance Is Bliss based solely on solitary play? No, for me it is too big of an investment compared to what the experience the solo mode delivers. Furthermore I feel that…oh, what is this? I am being handed a piece of paper from my supervisor:

“Big Brother Is Watching You”.