This is a series of posts where I play 100 boardgames.
Game: Scythe
Designer: Jamey Stegmaier
Year: 2016
Country: U.S.A.
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
I’ve seen Scythe described as a worker-placement strategy game, and that feels accurate. The game is set in an alternate history 1920s after the end of the Great War, the setting driven by the artist Jakub Rozalski’s worldbuilding. It combines mechs with the melancholy happenstance of Eastern European life in the countryside. Rozalski’s approach brings to mind Sweden’s Simon Stålenhag, but where Stålenhag draws from the fading promises of social democratic utopianism in the Nordics, Rozalski’s frame of reference goes back to classic 18th and early 19th century painting.
At the center of Scythe’s board is the Factory, where weapons of war used to be manufactured. Now it represents a bounty for the different nations of the game’s world, each represented by a player. These include the Republic of Polania and the Saxony Empire. Faction choices are randomized, and each player gets a faction, including a character accompanied by an animal, and a player board, all of which are different.
The player board lays out the game’s four core actions. Each action has two parts, with the second costing resources. One of the early goals of the game is to gather enough resources to be able to start taking the lucrative and useful second actions. You can’t take the same action twice, and for me this meant that I had to have at least two tactics going on at all times, furthered on alternating turns.
The vibe and mood of melancholy reconstruction in Scythe is excellent, and the game mechanics have a lot of strategic depth. The basic round is very simple, with the players taking their actions each in turn until someone wins, but there’s a lot of complexity in the specifics of each action on the player board.
The game ends when one player has gained six stars, awarded for feats like assigning all of your workers onto the board. But gaining stars is not necessarily what wins the game, as victory points are gained in a multitude of ways. Playing the game for the first time, I made the mistake of putting too much focus into the stars, with a rather dreary result when it was time to tally the points.