Stephens

Stephens was nowhere on my radar, yet it turned out to be a pleasant surprise. Costa, as with the unfairly overlooked Yinzi, is willing to put a spicier idea into a euro; the theme has very little purchase, but the design is sufficiently peculiar that it never feels like another production exercise.

Its centre is worker placement in factories, except hiring is expensive and the return does not necessarily arrive when you place the worker. You wait for somebody to use that factory to take goods, which triggers the ability of your position. The interesting decision is that delay: you pay now for a privilege that another player's move must unlock.

Interaction, then, is not merely about blocking a space, but about controlling when other players' investments fire. There are clever scoring routes and several smaller wrinkles with real bite; yet, as in Yinzi, the separate systems do not always resolve into a single whole. In our game the contract market effectively collapsed, producing only crown contracts and leaving players who had made them their principal route to victory with nowhere to go.

It is not a failure, but neither is it the tightly integrated design promised by its excellent central mechanism. Worth investigating if you are a serious eurogamer weary of the usual formulas; everyone else may prefer a euro that is better at joining up its parts.