LogFAQs > #934275407

34. Scythe (2016)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Resource management, dudes on a map, point salad
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 5
Game length: 75-105 minutes
Experience: 4-5 plays over 4-5 sessions (2016-2018) with 4-5 players
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), 25/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player commands workers and mechs on a pastoral, steampunk 1920s hybrid, in charge of a nation with variable player powers. On each turn you take a top- and/or bottom-row action on your player mat. The top actions let you move on the map, generating resources, and bolstering your strength. The resources you get let you take the bottom-row actions, which boost your action efficiency, piggyback neighbors' actions, deploy mechs, and build structures. You get stars for going all the way up on any track, winning battles, and achieving objectives on cards, and you get victory points for stars, territories controlled, structures, coins, and leftover resources.

Design - There's no single thing at which Scythe excels, other than production value. The art is beautiful, the meeples and resources are solid and clear, and (best of all) the player mat is double-layered, with amazing indentations for the various pieces of wood which sit on it.

I enjoy moving around the map in Scythe all right - it's bit of an ancillary thing to do, but eventually you can pick fights and go to the factory and so on and so forth. But that player-board is really the lifeblood of Scythe, and it functions largely solitarily. You can't take the same action twice in a row in general, but you can chain together moves. Figuring out how to spread out (or consolidate!) your dudes so you can max out each production item, so you can maximize your efficiency to take the right top-row actions to get the most possible bottom-row benefits feels so good. Produce oil and food on turn 1, then spend oil on turn 1 to upgrade your enlist feature... then turn 2, move but enlist, and your movement and enlist features are both upgraded to move more pieces and enlist at cheaper cost, respectively. IT FEELS GOOD.

You can actually accomplish all six stars without ever fighting by building a fast-spreading engine with your personal board, and honestly, that's probably the part of Scythe that feels the best. The map, again, is very pretty. You probably do want to get some encounter cards. But other than dope art, the theme is comically thin, and the only real reason you're getting those encounter cards is so you can get resources and improve your engine. Same deal with the factory; you get area control points at the factory and you get to spread out, but in reality it's all about the dope action you can take, which feeds even more efficiency.

There's nothing really wrong with a solitaire efficiency game. And there's nothing wrong with incredibly nice components. These . That said, Scythe is hilariously overproduced for what the gameplay is - it looks like an epic wargame, and in fact it's a solitary euro where at the end, you might have a conflict or two to spread out and hope your guys stay spread out.

Experience - My first play of Scythe was long and miserable as everyone was trying to learn the game and I was boxed in, but since then, I've had several nice experiences, especially once the second-row actions were cleanly integrated into people's strategies. Again, it feels weirdly dissonant to be staring at your player board the whole game instead of the gorgeous map, but it works for what it is.

Future - I'm not exactly craving Scythe, but just remembering its smoothness and table presence makes me happy about hte prospect of it coming back to the table.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness