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Euthia: Torment of Resurrection is a one to four-player competitive/coop/solo strategic open world board game. It is designed by Markéta Bláhová & Tadeáš Spousta and published by DIEA Games via Kickstarter.
In Euthia, you will face off against three mighty dragons, face dangerous enemies and creatures, search for legendary artefacts, mine raw materials and fulfil various quests. Upgrade your hero, collect loot, trade and purchase better weapons, armour, potions and spells to make you stronger and ready to face off against your final foe.
About Euthia
Euthia, is an open world game featuring hexagonal grid movement, dice rolling, hand management, resource management and character customisation. In Euthia, you will move around a map, explore and complete various quests and encounters as you travel through the land.
On your turn, you have three dual-use action tokens that can be used to move or mine, trade or fight. As you perform these actions you will defeat enemies/creatures to gain loot that can be traded or sold. You may need to defeat certain creatures to fulfil quests and gain a reputation. At certain reputation markers, you can unlock additional skills and weapons to further enhance your character. You can purchase additional equipment from various traders, interact with elementals, mine natural resources and a whole host of other things.
The game is scenario-based with several different types of scenarios. The map tiles used for each scenario will vary as will what you need to do. Each scenario is a set number of rounds and at the end of the game, you score points for the various locations you have interacted with as well as scenario-specific objectives.
There is a whole host of rules for Euthia that I have not discussed but hopefully, the above explanation gives you a brief overview of the game. I will be giving my thoughts below from a solo perspective.
Final Thoughts
I will caveat everything that I say in this review that I am coming at this from a cooperative and solo perspective. There is a way to play this competitively, but most of my experience has been either solo or cooperative. A lot of what I say still stands but the combat works slightly differently in the competitive mode.
Euthia is a truly epic game. It comes in two massive boxes (at least the pledge that I received did), packed with content, cards, tiles, miniatures, tokens and map tiles. To give you an idea of the scale of the game, it took me over 2hrs to unbox, punch, sort and organise before my first play. But is a box full of content a good thing? Is the game bloated or over complicated? Well, read on to find out what I thought of it.
Content Overload
There is no denying that there is a lot of content in Euthia and it is somewhat of a table hog when it is all set up. But what this game gives me is that role-playing video game experience on my table. You start off with a basic character, a character that if it is not careful can get beaten down by a low-level monster.
Watch out for them killer bats! You need to explore, gain reputation and level up. Depending on your scenario there are quests to complete, these might be to slay a specific monster or mine certain minerals and bring them back to a specific person for a reward. The game has a very open sandbox feel to it and you are free to go and do what you want pretty much. I love the "free" nature of the game and the options that are open to you.
Action Planning
I really enjoy the way the action selection system works with the dual-use tokens. At the start of the round, you begin with three action tokens. A token can be used for one, two or three movements. However, each token also has a mine, trade, or combat action as well. You need to carefully plan and balance your movement actions with your other actions. You can interrupt your movement to perform other actions and you can even save one token for the next round.
Careful Combat
Combat can be pretty brutal early on, especially if you are not prepared. Combat is performed by dice rolling and comparing your result to your weapon to determine the amount of damage it causes. As with all dice rolling there is an element of luck involved and some good rolls for the enemy or bad rolls for you can be harsh early game.
There are Gaar tokens in the game to mitigate the luck of the dice. These can be used to force your opponents to reroll and also reduce the total die value by two or to reroll one of your die and increase your total die roll by two. So, there are options for mitigating that luck but if you are not careful you can run out of Gaar tokens early on.
The combat is handled slightly differently for a solo game with you drawing cards from a deck of cards to determine the opponent’s die value as well as how many Gaar tokens and Chaos tokens they will use. Gaar tokens are used to reroll their lowest value die and Chaos tokens are used to perform additional actions from the chaos deck. For the most part, the solo combat rules are actually pretty easy to manage. They took me some time to get used to but once I did, I felt it was easy enough to implement.
Power Ups
I think the way the levelling up/reputation system works is very well done. I enjoy unlocking the new abilities/weapons and spells as I gain more reputation and there are some interesting choices to be made as to how to develop your character. Add on to this the different armour types you can purchase from the shop and you can really tailor your character.
Without wanting to make this review too long, there are a bunch of things I have not talked about. Suffice to say, I love this game. I love the sense of exploration I get when I travel through the world of Euthia. I enjoy the different scenarios and how you can select a shorter or longer game.
After a few plays, the gameplay is actually "relatively" easy to grasp for the depth and scope of the game. The game looks great, especially at the end and there is so much content that you are not going to be seeing the same items, armour and quests game after game. Euthia really gives me the role-playing video game feeling.
I guess there is the argument of my play a board game RPG when I could just play a video RPG and I don't have the answer to that. I enjoy RPGs both digitally and in physical format. But Euthia hits all the right notes for me. It has quests, pick up and deliver, weapons, potions, spells, levelling up, character customisation and some badass monsters.
