First Impressions of Scythe

It’s here. Only a demo copy, but it’s here. The Kickstarter sensation of 2015, Scythe! I’ve played a demo (meaning only a third of the full game) but that certainly allowed us to experience all the game’s mechanics, and begin to see the interactions and strategies out there… it also let us drool over the game’s ridiculously gorgeous artwork!

I mean I know everyone’s saying this but look. These are your secret objective cards.

Yours. Secret. These are your own private masterpieces, like little gifts designer and publisher Jamey Stegmaier is giving to each one of us that plays his game. The combat cards are ridiculous too, so much so that you catch your breath when you draw them before realising oh, I should probably look at how powerful these things are!

Then we’ve got the player boards and – Oh NO!

Someone’s spilt yellow blocks and iconography all over it! Urgh! This initial mess though is secretly rather clever, though it won’t make you feel that way when you first try and use it. Each of the 4 sections can be activated on your turn (without repeating the last turn’s action) and all that iconography indicates what you can do. Maybe moving troops, or bolstering your military strength or producing in the regions of the board you control. In addition, you can use the abilities on the bottom row if you pay the resource cost in red. This is where stuff get’s really interesting.

Take the upgrade action, this moves one of those yellow cubes from the top, revealing an extra thing you get when you activate that section, and putting it in one of the slots at the bottom, making actions cheaper to perform. This is lovely! The enlist action moves the wooden discs up to the second player board for a one shot bonus, plus a bonus that you get every time your neighbours use that action, like a coin every time your neighbour deploys a mech. Oh man! How have I not mentioned mechs yet!?

The sight of giant ironclad mechs striding through the fields of Eastern Europe sent Kickstarter backers rabid and now here they are in all their plastic glory… well sort of. The miniatures themselves are fine but nothing spectacular and if anything strangely small when put next to your generals. Of course your generals should stand out and this box is big enough but, well, the standard of components in Stonemaier Games’ releases has always been so ridiculously high that these feel a little lacking in comparison.

Building mechs unlocks abilities for all those mechs, which of course can be done in whatever order you like but an almost dead cert for first pic would be Riverwalker as this is almost the only way to cross rivers. For some reason bridges have not been invented in this world. This ability is also bizarrely restricted; each faction can only cross rivers into specific terrain types, which is a bit weird to my mind thematically. In my case at least it made my neighbouring spit of land completely inaccessible. It felt like a very clunky way of adding asymmetry, though I can imagine this is to discourage immediately assaulting your neighbour?

Each faction is designed to be different, with slightly varying rewards for different actions, and a unique ability, helping to direct you towards a particular strategy or two. After a single demo I can’t possibly say how different the factions feel, but I certainly saw each of us taking very different approaches, and there are a lot of approaches to take! The strategies are not immediately obvious, yet you can still do quite well by blundering about trying things and the game has certainly worked hard to try and help new players get an idea. The Quick Start suggestions are a fantastic inclusion.

As the demo drew to a close I could really start to feel the different elements of the game coming together, the combo-ing of actions, your preparations paying off. We played until one player had acquired two stars (awarded for completing certain objectives) but a full game plays up to 6, which would have really allowed those early actions to feed into longer-term strategies.

There really are so many elements to explore in this game that I can’t wait to play it more! The hype is real people. Check this out at the earliest opportunity!

Note: I did NOT back this on Kickstarter (though I really wish I had) and this was just a 1.5 hour demo, so do take my comments in context!