Stephens

Stephens was not even on my radar until BLTG’s procurement expert served it up at a casual board-game session. Fortunately, it was a pleasant surprise. Mr Costa is one of those designers willing to try something a little spicier and stranger — the unfairly overlooked Yinzi is already a relevant warning — and he follows the same kinky line here.

Rather than doing the usual Euro production thing, players hire workers and place them in factories, paying a fairly substantial recruitment cost to do so. The neat part is that you do not simply activate your position whenever it suits you: you wait for someone to use that factory to take goods, which triggers your position’s ability. Thematically, it gets a failing grade, but as a mechanism it has real bite and gives you a pleasing little burn.

There are also various scoring tricks and other goodies to pursue. Yet the interaction with the available contracts can become far more decisive than I would like: in our game, the contract market completely crashed and produced only Crown contracts. Players who had chosen those as their main route to victory simply got sunk, without it seeming as though they could do much about it.

By the end, as with Yinzi, I do not feel that everything comes together quite as well as its early cleverness promises. Still, it is interesting, and I would suggest looking at it if you are deep into Euros and bored of the classic recipes. Everyone else should probably not expect its oddness alone to make it a safe pick.