Euphoria is one of my favourite games, and certainly one of my most photogenic. It's a bit of a tough one to teach, though. I kind of had a good spiel (this is a funny pun for boardgamers) down for it but I also haven't had much opportunity to practice it on anyone since this whole rigamarole so. Pallas and Michelle both enjoy it though. Last night I played it solo which is something I don't mind doing occasionally.  

Stonemaier games almost always come with a solo variant using something they call Automatically Factory, which I have tried for Euphoria but honestly, with worker placement games I am almost always just as happy to just play two different colours and see what happens. I guess that takes away from the competitiveness of it, which is kind of the point of playing games, but I honestly just like the feeling of helping to build up this utopia.

Euphoria's tagline is "Build a Better Utopia" but one of the things I love about the game is that's sort of disingenuous, as you come to realize when you look at all the fluff text that really you're kind of a force for not good in this world. It's a dystopia and you are trying to be in charge of it, sort of. It's subtle and perhaps a touch unclear which is partly why it is difficult to teach. Ultimately you're just trying to be the first to place your ten stars, which is just game speak for accomplish any ten things that score. 

Broadly speaking there's four different factions on the board, three ground based and one up in the clouds. Each offers certain resources and commodities which you collect and trade in whatever ways you see fit to help you get closer to victory. Maybe you want to collect some gold bars (the gold bar resources you get are beautiful heavy bricks) to help build a market. That gets you a star, and if someone else didn't help, they don't get a star, and also they have now a penalty that applies to them until they can find a way to place a star.

And you do all this not with worker meeples as in many other games (that happy fellow above is a miner meeple not controlled by any single player) but with dice. Dice are your workers, and their different values determine what they can do for you. And if the total value of your dice is too high, that means your workers are too smart and one of them runs away. Lol. I'm not trying to teach you the game, just give you some flavour for it. Anyways it's all interconnected and strategic. And so fun! Michelle beats me every time. One reason why I like playing against myself, but even there last night I lost against myself. But I also won I guess.