Between Two Cities Review

So, as you may have noticed, I haven't really written many reviews recently.  Yet, after trying Between Two Cities, I decided that I wanted to explore the game some more - including fleshing out my thoughts in writing.  (So, here we are!)

In Between Two Cities, you create two (4x4) cities - one with the player on your left, and another with the player on your right.  The game is played in three rounds - the first and third round are drafting, and the middle round is simply picking a (larger) tile.  Each time that you select a tile, you select two tiles, and everyone reveals their tiles at the same time.  Once revealed, you can place either of your tiles in either one of your cities (but one tile must go in each city).  Each type of tile has certain ways of maximizing its score, and at the end of the game, your total score is the point value of your lower scoring city.  So, the challenge of the game is to balance your two cities so that they both do well - even if it means preventing one of your cities from becoming amazing, in order to allow them both to be great.

The first thing that I like about Between Two Cities is the partnership element of the game.  It really has a very unique feel in that you are working with other players all game.  (You don't have your own city.)  However, this is a double-edged sword.  Because, though you're working with two people, each of those players is also working with someone else, and there will be times when they will make a decision that hurts your city, because they feel like it is more important to help their other city.  This causes a very strange balance in the game - especially since you are drafting tiles and passing the remaining tiles to one of your partners.  Since you know what they are receiving, you can select and place accordingly.  But, just because they take the tile that you want them to draft does not mean that they'll actually place it in the city that you both share!

Placement in the second round is a bit more constrained

The next pro that I've found for Between Two Cities is that the simultaneous play keeps the game very engaging.  Many games scale linearly in time with the number of players - which often translates into sitting around waiting while other players take their turns.  However, in Between Two Cities, you are selecting and placing your tiles at the same time.  Yes, there will be times when one player takes longer than the others, but ultimately, there is very little down time in the game.  You truly feel like you're participating the entire time.

The third thing that I really enjoyed about Between Two Cities was eluded to earlier - I like that when drafting, you are passing your unselected tiles to one of your partners.  This knowledge (and foreknowledge) of what tiles are available and can be selected really makes the decision of what to select a bit more intriguing.  Obviously, this is still only limited knowledge, in that you don't know what you will draw in future rounds, or what tiles will be passed to you.  Yet, this small bit of additional knowledge makes the game feel more strategic.

One thing that I will point out about Between Two Cities that's a bit different from other drafting games is that there isn't really any "hate drafting."  What I mean is that there aren't really opportunities to select tiles simply to prevent other people from getting them.  There are a couple reasons for this.  First, everything that you draft has to go in your city; so if you draft something that's not useful, you're hurting yourself more than your opponent.  Secondly, you only select three times in each of the drafting rounds, so the tiles simply don't go that far around the table.  It is drafting, but is a much more abbreviated draft than in a game like 7 Wonders.

Factories make you want more factories!

The main "con" that I have for Between Two Cities I go back and forth with my feelings on.  What's the con?  It's really annoying when I can't draw what I want!  As an example, one tile type, factories, is worth a lot of points if you have the most of them - and worth far less if you don't have the most.  So, if you're drafting factories, you want to draft a lot of factories.  If you draft a bunch of factories in round one and then don't draw any factories in round three, it can be quite annoying, and make the game feel a bit luck oriented.  Yet, I've never seen a "perfect" city be built (I calculated up that I think 69 is the top possible score).  What instead tends to happen is that each city has one specific type of tile that it scores most of its points with.  And so, what you are able to do with your backup tiles tends to be the difference between winning and losing in the game.  So, with all that said, it is still frustrating to not draw what you want - and there is admittedly an element of luck in the tiles drawn; yet there is still strategy involved in how to handle these situations (as with all drafting games).

Overall, I give Between Two Cities a 9.0/10.  I have enjoyed the games of it that I've played so far, and I expect that I'll be playing it many more times.  With the speed of setup, explanation, and play - along with the nice 3-7 player count - I see it being easy to get to the table.

I would like to thank Stonemaier Games for providing me with a review copy of Between Two Cities.

Euphoria Review

After really enjoying the first game by Stonemaier Games, I was privileged to have an opportunity to check out their second title - Euphoria.

In Euphoria, you are attempting to build the best dystopia.  In order to build and maintain your dystopia, you have to keep your workers dumb and happy as they mine for resources, build markets, and tunnel into neighboring cities.  In game terms, each turn you will either place a worker (or multiple workers, if they show the same number of pips on the dice that represent workers), or you can pull any number of your workers back.  When placing workers, they can collect resources, contribute to building markets, get you victory points, etc.  When retrieving workers, you must either pay a resource and gain some morale, or sacrifice a morale.  Additionally, when you retrieve your workers, you immediately re-roll all of them and add the total of all your available workers to your score on the knowledge track.  If this total is too high, then one of your workers runs away.  The game progresses in this fashion of placing and retrieving workers until one player has successfully scored their 10th victory point - at which point they are the king of the grumpy, unhappy land!

The first pro that I have for Euphoria is that I enjoy the strategy involved in attempting to get your workers "bumped" as much as possible.  In the game, there are three different types of locations for your workers - one can hold any number of workers, one can hold a single worker that can't be displaced, and the final type of location holds a single worker which will be "bumped" if another worker accesses the location.  When you get a worker "bumped," he immediately is re-rolled and returned to your active worker pool.  This is a wonderful thing for the owner of that worker, as they suddenly have another worker that can be placed, and they didn't have to spend a turn pulling the worker back.  Thus, determining where you think your opponents might want to place their workers and taking advantage of those locations first is a great strategy.

Another thing that I have found interesting in Euphoria is balancing your morale.  Initially, I thought that you could basically neglect morale early in the game and wait until the game has started to blossom.  After all, that way you don't have to waste resources early on in the game when pulling back your workers.  But, if you do this, then you will have a hand size of one when holding artifacts.  (I haven't mentioned artifacts.  Essentially, they are cards that you can turn in to get victory points.  You will need at least three of them or two that match.  Plus, you'll have an artifact that is special to you each game.)  Since you can turn in three artifacts for a victory point (or two matching ones), you really don't want to throw them away!  And, the earlier you increase your morale, the earlier you can start trying to match these cards (and not grow angry as you have to throw away the second card of a pair because you neglected morale).  I found the importance of morale in the early game to be interesting.

Nice artwork for the board

Now, before moving on to the cons, there are several things I just want to mention about Euphoria - not good or bad things, but things I want you to be aware of.  First, "60 minutes" is.... optimistic.  None of the games that I have played have really come close to that mark.  I think that it is possible, especially if playing with about 3 people, all of which are experienced.  However, I really don't recommend playing your first game with 6 people.  Start smaller.

The second thing that I will point out is that there are a couple facets of the game that can make it a bit swingy.  First, if you roll doubles on your workers, you get to place multiple workers on the same turn (which is a very good thing for you). Also, if you roll really high numbers on your workers when you pull them off the board, you might lose them, even if your knowledge is not very high.  Both of these die rolling elements can turn the tide of a game - either towards you or away.  In one of my games, I saw someone with a moderately high knowledge (4 on a track that goes from 1-6) lose two workers on almost back to back turns, because they rolled too high.  This made them go from having three workers to place on the board to having a single worker.  Needless to say, they did not come back.  Some players will enjoy this element of the game, whereas it will leave a bitter taste in the mouths of others.

Now that you're feeling great about Euphoria, it's time to list some cons.  After all - this is a game about dystopias, right?  My first con is that there are four tracks relating to each specific allegiance.  Each player has a couple of recruits, and as the tracks that correspond to his recruits advance, he will get bonuses - and, in fact, one of his recruits will not even be available until the corresponding track goes a certain distance.  This sounds cool, right?  It allows for some uneasy alliances, where you are helping other players because it is ultimately in your own best interests.  However, in practice, it feels like these tracks basically just move as the game goes along.  I don't know if the recruits have been too well distributed in all of my games, but in my experience, the tracks have all stayed very close together throughout the game, and players are too often forced to advance a track that they care nothing about in order to get a bonus that they do want.  So, instead of this being a neat feature of the game, it turns out to be a really cool sounding non-factor.

Another action shot - I was purple this time (and I won!)

The next con that I have for Euphoria is that I thought that the tunnels should be scaled based on the number of players.  In the game, there are tunnels that lead from one part of the city to another - so that the Wastelanders can steal resources from the Euphorians, etc.  Realistically, players place workers on the tunnels to transform commodities into resources and/or artifacts.  As they do this, the miner moves along the track, and once he reaches certain places, recruits become flipped, and eventually a new place is opened up on the board.  However, the miner has to go the same distance no matter how many people are playing.  Thus, in a six player game, you have a new spot open up and more recruits available.  But in a smaller game (possibly even four player!), you have these same tunnels, but they might never be completed.  This is especially true since the resources that are provided from digging are scaled, as there are less resources needed to build each market in a smaller game.

My final con for the game is that it felt.  Disjointed?  I'm not sure what term to use.  It felt like I was placing workers for the sake of placing workers.  There is strategy involved and there is a theme, but they didn't mesh together overly well for me.  The flow of beginning, buildup, and climax also seemed a bit missing.  It was hard (at least for me) to envision how what I was going to do this turn was going to help me in the long run.  It felt more like, "well, I guess I can do this - I don't have any of this resource type."  There were occasionally long pauses of people thinking - but it wasn't because they were overwhelmed with choices.  It was more that they were trying to figure out how this turn would lead towards anything later in the game.  I don't think that I captured this con well, but it just felt like each turn only leads to the next 1-2 turns instead of the game building upon itself throughout.

Overall, I give Euphoria a 7.0/10.  There are some neat elements to the game, but overall the game left me a bit disappointed - though this is quite possibly because I expected a bit more based on how much I enjoyed Stonemaier's first game (Viticulture).  I would play Euphoria in the future if my friends were interested in it, but it won't be something that I regularly seek out.

If Euphoria sounds interesting, you might also check out Android: Netrunner, Kingdom of Solomon, and Alien Frontiers.

I would like to thank Stonemaier Games for providing me with a review copy of Euphoria.

Edit: It has been pointed out to me that I got a rule slightly wrong.  Originally, I had stated that when your workers are bumped, they did not have to make a knowledge check.  That was incorrect - sorry.  I still think that getting your workers bumped is far better than having to pull them back on your own, but I wanted to make sure to clarify this in case I had made anyone second guess themselves.