Scythe Review

It’s a time of unrest in modern day board gaming. The ashes from our greatest Kickstarter, Scythe, still darken the snow. The capitalistic city-state known simply as “Stonemaier Games”, which fuelled the frenzy with its beautiful plastic mechs, has closed its doors (to work on Charterstone!), drawing the attention of several nearby reviewers…

Let passive-aggressive battle commence.

Scythe box art

 

Players: 1-5

Time: 90-115

Ages: 14+

 

 

The gears of war are turning, and the hype machine is screaming

It is utterly impossible to review Scythe outside of the insane hype that exists around the game. Anyone active in the hobby have had their expectations set one way or another before they got this to the table, and even this dedicated reviewer will have had his experience of the game put in the light of this expectation.

Let’s start with some clarifications then. I did not back Scythe on Kickstarter, though I was sorely tempted. I do not own a copy of the game, but have had plenty of opportunities now to play other peoples. I was excited to play it, and you can read my first impressions from when I got chance to play a demo copy a few months ago. Since then the criticisms the game had been receiving from some quarters started to get to me, and I went in to my first full game almost looking for its flaws. The hype machine had, in some ways, put me in the mindset of “too good to be true”. So when I still enjoyed my first full game of this immensely, I was very happy!

Scythe Game

An ode to joy – everything I loved

Scythe pulls off the tremendous trick of compressing a whole lot of elements into an incredibly straight-forward rules set. On your turn you simply choose one of the segments of your player board to activate (that you didn’t activate last turn) and do what it says. While the player boards take a little bit of getting use to, and the plethora of options feels intimidating on your first play, within a few rounds you’ll be getting a feel for things, and in your second game you’ll be ready to hit the ground running. But what I love is how everything shows subtle innovations to draw you into the world.

The resource generation is the clearest example. Rather than taking stuff to your player board, those resources sit in the hexes where they were produced. It is bizarre that this hasn’t been done before! It makes perfect sense, and offers up those tempting targets for conquest. But invasion takes its toll on the populace, and driving out workers harms your faction’s popularity, that important victory determiner. While money as victory points feels arbitrary, it is no more arbitrary than any other system, and the popularity mechanic that acts as a sort of multiplier of your resources, territories and achievements for end game scoring does an excellent job of obfuscating who will win, and also reinforces the fact that you are here to win hearts and minds, not to conquer with fire. While being in the top bracket is huge, it is also a big investment and other players ending the game early can certainly take the win.

Scythe Popularity

That sudden death end game condition is an interesting one. As soon as someone places their 6th star on the board, earned basically by doing any one thing to completion, or winning a combat, the game immediately ends. It’s a race to do as much as possible before this occurs and while things generally ramp up one star at a time, it is possible for a player to achieve multiple stars on a single turn. Shocking if you weren’t prepared for it, but that seems a fair reward for the player who orchestrated that coup, no? I approve of having these hard to pull off manoeuvres in games!

Scythe is a game of efficiency. The top and bottom actions on your player board are challenge to be overcome every game, a challenge I relish! While you can always take the top action, you need the right combination of resources to take that bottom action and setting up your economy in such a way as to be able to do this in the best way is key. It is hugely rewarding when done right, but get disrupted and it can take a couple of turns to recover. This importance of doing things perfectly can mean the game bogs down a little at high player counts as players think things through, but experienced players can rattle through their turns at a healthy clip.

Scythe player board

But more importantly, this efficiency is fundamentally tied to the sprawling, beautiful landscape over which your forces march. Controlling your movements is as important a part of the game as managing your resources, especially as you’ll only have access to a subset of them from the start of the game. You’re forced out into the harsh wilderness to interact, and other elements of the game fit into that too. The encounters your hero can have are not only a lovely snippet of story telling and neat reward, their limited number and spatial location are driving force to get you moving. The incredible value of holding the factory due to its terrain bonus keeps it an interesting target in the late game, while it’s extra action card reward is an early game strategy worth chasing. Then there is always a reward card that encourages you build your buildings in particular, limited areas of the board, of which my only criticism is the reward is not quite enough to really get players competing over those spots.

And I still haven’t mentioned the wonderful upgrade action that both boosts a top action and makes a bottom action cheaper, all through the move of a cube. Or the excellent enlist action that has you trying to predict your neighbours for those lovely freebie rewards. There is so much to enjoy in Scythe and yet there are many criticisms that I have seen bandied about. Things that demand a closer look.

Scythe Combat

Combat mechanics – they know how to fix things quick

One common criticism of Scythe is the combat system. There is little to think about and that is a shame. Yes, you’re attempting to predict your opponent, you risk other attacks if you over commit, but the simple choice on offer, the amount of power and a combat card or two, are still not terribly interesting. Given how rare combat is in this game, I feel like it should be more climactic, more exciting, less of an open and obvious result in so many cases. But I do understand the benefits of this decision. Combat mechanics are always a tacked on element to a game, a mini-game in of themselves sometimes, and additional rules would have complicated matters. This streamlined system is at least easy to explain and moves players’ focus away from combat (for better or worse, more on this later). Much like the art that adorns Scythe’s tremendous box, combat is something that happens on distant plains, somewhere over the horizon. You see the fire and the death from a safe distant, then turn back to your crops.

Multiplayer solitaire?

Ah yes. The war cry of the affronted ameritrash-lover: it’s just multiplayer solitaire! There’s not enough combat! I can sit on my island and do my own thing. Yes, you can do that, you might even win, but more often than not you need to be adapting to your opponents. Both times that I tried to ignore everyone I lost. You can certainly win the game without firing a shot, but the interaction in this game is so much more than just smashing the other players up.

Scythe Art

The wonderful artwork of this game shows a land haunted by the decaying (or not so decaying) remnants of the mechs. These vast machines dominate the landscape and so too do they dominate our experience of the game. The first constructed mech triggers a collective shudder around the table. Seeing an army building within striking distance of yourself or something you wanted forces you to adapt. Or perhaps you’ll only discover too late that you’ve failed. Board position matters, for future opportunities, for end game points, and for immediate resources. Enlist actions ask you to predict the behaviour of your neighbours. And everyone is racing for the encounter cards and their bonuses.

I’m sure the game could be played with everyone in their own corner building their engines, but the player that chooses to strike for and conquer the centre would almost certainly win under such circumstances. Scythe rewards you for doing what the other players are not doing. That is a form of interaction as important and valid as in your face combat. If you don’t enjoy this subtler form of interaction that is fair enough, but that doesn’t make this a lonely, predictable game.

Scythe Resources

An unbalanced mech might fall over…

I’ve seen numerous comments insinuating certain factions are inherently more or less powerful than the others. In particular, that red wins a disproportionate amount of time, while blue tends to struggle. I’m not so sure. In the games I’ve played red has won more often, but it is also an easier faction to use (being able to take the same action twice let’s you overcome your inefficiencies much faster) and so in a game with relatively new players, red will win more often. But I’ve certainly defeated them. Blue is much harder to use, their base faction ability (workers can cross rivers) is hard to really capitalise on. It’s a faction for the most experienced player at the table to play.

The real source of imbalance that I can see is how certain combinations of the faction and industry boards just work better together than other combinations. This is down to how accessible key resources are to those factions. A big part of the game is adapting to your combination, and perhaps it is just a question of challenge, but I’m not yet convinced by this.

Part of the reason for that is the objective cards are quantifiably unbalanced. For example, one objective demands you gather 9 resources on a tile. Another requires the same thing, but with the additional constraint that you have every type of resource represented in that pile. It is far from a game breaking issue, but it is something a frustrating oversight. And if this is the case for the objectives, it feels like it might be for the faction combinations. In the future I can imagine the introduction by competitive players of a bidding system similar to Terra Mystica for assignment of the faction combinations.
Scythe Hero

It’s a smoke belching, cannon firing metal behemoth! What did you expect?

The more I read about Scythe and the more I’ve played, I see that the discussion so often comes down expectations. For those whose expectations weren’t met in some way, they’ve focussed in on that failure, while for those who got what they wanted, this is the best game ever!

So what is Scythe?

Scythe is the game that wanted to be everything. It wanted to unify euro gamers and lovers of ameritrash. It wanted to tell stories, give us a world to explore. It wanted us to fight with mechs and farm with workers. Jamey Stegmaier gave us a game that dreamt of being all things to all people and it came so close to achieving that dream!

But Jamey is a designer with particular leanings and those leanings were reflected in this game. Scythe is a compelling, interesting euro game. It has, as I argued above, a lovely degree of interaction. It doesn’t have that solid combat focus that others wanted, though. The game falls just too far on the side of euro game, hence many voices of disappointment.

What this game has done, however, is to create a fascinating, vibrant world you want to explore. Not just through snippets of story delivered in those occasional encounter cards, but through the gameplay experiences associated with different factions and boards. I want to try out all these different combinations. But I want to do that in this world. I want to spend time in this world.

Those gameplay decisions some have railed against reflect so neatly the artwork that inspired the game too. The focus was never on the mechs, it was on the workers who must live in their shadow. But then maybe we as players shouldn’t have been given control of those mechs? As soon as we were, it became about them.

Scythe Art2

Scythe is the game we all wish was perfect, that we all wish reflected our dream for it. I do wish combat was a little more mechanically interesting. More, I wish that when the cannons fired from those towering mechs the world would shake, the land would burn and that you as a player could feel the devastation you’ve unleashed. I wish I could see more of the world than 2 or 3 encounter cards per game.

The fact that I and almost everyone else feels this way in one way or another highlights just how much of an achievement this game is. Never has a game come so close to unifying the disparate sides of our hobby. But as much as we might wish it, there can’t be a perfect Scythe for everybody and ultimately it could only reflect one person’s vision for what that unification would look like.

If you are the driven, competitive, dice-roll-loving gamer, Scythe isn’t quite your game; the interaction isn’t as interactive as you like and any perceived balance issues will likely get in the way of your enjoyment. For the euro, mechanic-loving gamer there’s so much here to enjoy: an elegant system, engine building and great resource management, with enough interaction to keep you on your toes and the game varied. But Scythe is really for the explorers, those who enjoy all the gameplay elements within the game but aren’t there for any one element in particular. Those for whom the idea of exploring all those factions and mastering the different board combinations is supremely exciting! Scythe is for you.

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