New Game Round-up: Bruges and More from Z-Man Games, Another Visit to The Red Dragon Inn & Bitter Euphoria

Deck #1 contains all of the cards from the new edition of Pandemic: 48 City cards, 48 Infection cards, 7 Role cards (including the two new roles: Contingency Planner and Quarantine Specialist), 6 Epidemic Cards, 5 Event cards, 4 Reference cards. It will be available to purchase when the new edition of On the Brink is released in late June/early July. It will be sold ONLY on the Z-Man Games website and will cost $10 + shipping.

Deck #2 contains all of the cards from the new edition of Pandemic: On the Brink: 8 Event cards, 8 Virulent Strain Epidemic cards, 7 Role cards, 4 blank cards, 3 Mutation Event cards, 2 Mutation Cards, 1 Epidemic Card, 1 Reference card. It will be available to purchase when Pandemic: In The Lab is released in August 2013. It will be sold ONLY on the Z-Man Games website and will cost $5 + shipping.

You find yourself in a dystopian cityscape with a few workers at your disposal to make your mark on the world. Like most people in dystopian fiction, your workers are oblivious to their situation. This world is all they've ever known, and you may use them at your whim.

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 necessary to prevent another apocalypse, the Euphorian elite not only erect physical walls around the city, but also metaphysical walls around the minds of the citizens. Gone are personal freedoms; gone is knowledge of the past. All that matters is the future – but for every Euphorian, there is a citizen who fled underground when the old world ended. These are the Subterrans, who have patched together a second layer to the city of pipes and sewers, of steam and gears, of hidden passages and secret stairways, of duct tape and gumption.

Those who dare to venture outside of the city walls will find themselves among the Wastelanders, those who experienced the apocalypse firsthand and have the memories, scars, and mutations to prove it. Above them hovers Icarus, their zeppelin syndicate blocking out the sun. No one knows from where the Icarites came, but the more they infiltrate the hearts and minds of men with their addictive bliss, the less anyone questions their presence.

In Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia, you lead a team of workers (dice) and recruits (cards) to claim ownership of the dystopian world. You will generate commodities, dig tunnels to infiltrate opposing areas, construct markets, collect artifacts, strengthen allegiances, and fulfill secret agendas.

Euphoria is a worker-placement game in which dice are your workers. The number on each die represents a worker's knowledge – that is, his level of awareness that he's in a dystopia. Worker knowledge enables various bonuses and impacts player interaction. If the collective knowledge of all of your workers gets too high, one of them might desert you. You also have two elite recruit cards at your disposal; one has pledged allegiance to you, but the other needs some convincing. You can reveal and use the reticent recruit by reaching certain milestones in the game...or by letting other players unwittingly reach those milestones for you.

Your path to victory is paved with the sweat of your workers, the strength of your allegiances, and the tunnels you dig to infiltrate other areas of the world, but the destination is a land grab in the form of area control. You accomplish this by constructing markets that impose harsh restrictions of personal freedoms upon other players, changing the face of the game and opening new paths to victory. You can also focus on gathering artifacts from the old world, objects of leisure that are extremely rare in this utilitarian society. The dystopian elite covet these artifacts – especially matching pairs – and are willing to give you tracts of land in exchange for them.

What are you willing to sacrifice to make the future better than the past? Will you plan ahead or try to optimize every short-term opportunity? Will the city you develop be a utopia...or a dystopia?