Gùgōng

Gùgōng left me with the feeling of a euro that does not try to win you over with fanfare, but with how carefully it forces you to think. It is card drafting and worker placement with zero luck, and from the first play it is clear that it has something more distinctive to say than just being another familiar game in the genre.

Its core is the way you take your actions. That mechanism is genuinely clever, but also fairly involved: it is not one of those systems you immediately grasp and simply move on from. You need to understand how it works and, once you finally see it, there is a good chance your brain will need a brief cooling break.

Card drafting and worker placement provide the basic structure for your choices, while interaction mainly comes through the way everyone moves within the same action space. Despite the thought it demands, downtime stays low, and it plays nicely even with five players — something I absolutely do not take for granted in a euro of this kind.

I would not call it especially exciting, and it has runaway-leader issues that can spoil the picture a little when someone pulls ahead. I have heard that the expansion is supposed to address some of those problems, but I have not received it yet, so I cannot confirm that. Even so, if you want something different and cannot face yet another euro, Gùgōng is well worth a look.