Stephens
Designed by: Costa,Rôla
Stephens is inspired by the English businessman William Stephens, who helped rebuild the Portuguese city of Lisbon by investing in the glassblowing industry. Beyond that, the game is essentially a puzzle, and what’s interesting about it is that while there is quite a lot going on, everything boils down to just two actions: assign a worker, or obtain glass. On any turn, you simply do one or the other.
Assigning a worker means taking a disc from your own player board and paying the cost in money or influence (-you begin the game with a little of both) to assign it to one of the six ‘factories’ on the board. Each factory creates glass, represented by little cubes, and when anyone takes the obtain glass action, every player with workers assigned to that factory may take the benefit for their workers there: it might be more cash, more influence, a glass cube of your choice, or something else.
There are two factories that don’t activate workers, but taking a cube from gets you either investments (-ways to generate more glass, or points) or contracts. A contract demands a certain number of things – for example, two pink glass and one green – and you’re able to both run investments and fulfil contracts during a Reset phase: there’s a reset whenever two of the factories are emptied. As well as giving everyone the chance to fulfil contracts, this is also a game-end trigger, as time slowly runs out as a marker – representing the French army, if we allow the slightly vague theme a bit of elbow room – descends down the score track. When it passes any player’s marker, the endgame is triggered.
There are a few ways to claim points during the game – mainly the investments – but at the end there are four main ways that everyone calculates points: the aforementioned contracts, which combine together as multipliers, and potentially anything (money, glass, influence, etc) you still have in your personal supply. The reason these are only ‘potential’ at the start of the game is that your own personal board contains markers that you place on your workers, and each of them gives you an ongoing power in the game – too many to list here – as well as the possibility of additional scoring at the end. After all these criteria are scored, the player with the most points wins.
Sam says
It may be partly how the rules are laid out, and it’s definitely in part due to those ongoing benefits (of which there are many you need to keep track of) but I found Stephens a difficult game to learn and a hard game to teach. But. What I didn’t find it was a hard game to play. It’s somewhat paradoxical but once I was past that befuddling first blush with all its rules-referencing I discovered Stephens became very fast-moving. The fact you can literally take just one of two options each turn kind of forces your brain to engage with what each one means in a more focused way than, say, if you had eight different possibilities. I like that, and I also like how players are forced to share spaces and activating a factory can benefit everyone. I like the time-running-out game end trigger of the French army and the tension of when those resets happen. But it’s also true to say this is definitely more a puzzle than an immersive theme or story, and the different ways to score all feel a bit mathy rather than tangibly related to glass, Portugal, or the Mr Stephens of the title. It will be a hit for a certain type of gamer – the tactician, perhaps, over the strategist – but for many this may feel like a clever cluster of mechanisms.
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Take That!
Nobody can chuck a brick into your glassworks, but there are shared elements such as the available professions, investments and contracts that may be nabbed by others.
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Fidget Factor!
Depends highly on the player speed rather than player number. Sometimes the game is more situational than others, and Plan B’s may be needed. But generally it ticks along nicely.
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Brain Burn!
Plenty to chew over.
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Again Again!
Huge variety here – you won’t see all the cards in a single game.
