Overview & How to Play

Scythe took Kickstarter by storm in 2016, with its amazing presentation. It has a cool setting, so many cool mechs, in what’s SUPPOSED to be a 4x.

Anyways, you’re all playing as eastern European factions, trying to get the most money (points) before the game ends. Points come from: every territory controlled, every 2 resources you have, a Structure bonus tile, and Star tokens. These Star tokens just mentioned are achievements, like getting 4 Mechs, having 8 Workers, or doing a Secret Objective dealt at the beginning of the game. Then, once you have 6 Star tokens, the game immediately ends, and you start counting up how many points everyone has.

To achieve these, everyone has 2 mats: a faction mat and an action mat. You put these stacked vertically, and then on your turn, you choose one column to activate, doing everything in that column, or just the top, or bottom. Top actions include things like moving on the map, or producing resources. Bottom actions include producing Mechs, or upgrading your faction. Big note: you’re not allowed to do any action, or column, twice in a row.

Oh and how fighting works is you move either a Mech or your character mini onto another player’s Mech or character, then you both secretly bid an amount of combat power and see who had more.

Pros

This game looks absolutely fantastic and is a real looker on the table- the board, wooden pieces, and plastic miniatures all scream quality. Even player boards are thick double layered mats to clearly see what’s up. There’s just tons of high quality art on absolutely everything.

Scythe also happens to be intuitive to pick up. All you have to do is worry a single column to activate, making it very clean to explain verbally. To get efficiency, you just want to first do a top action, then have enough resources to do the bottom action, since that would give you 2 actions in one go. None of the complexity is hidden in any secret cards or complex phases.

Resource management is also extremely tight. You’re looking to see if you can pay for improvements for your faction, all while making sure you have the appropriate Workers in the correct spaces on the map—too many Workers incurs a slight punishment for producing.

Scythe’s system is just 4 actions at the end of the day, but is prevented from feeling repetitive because of how you’re planning ahead for future actions, and those plans change depending on what actions and faction mats you have.

Of course, the Mechs, we gotta talk about them. Just by spawning more, you’re unlocking faction specific abilities, and Mechs will transport Workers, letting players easily move around the map. Fighting comes in to fight your opponents’ Mechs or characters to get a Star for winning, or you could chase away their Workers to deny territory and resources. Battle feels fair with the secret battle cards and power resource too.

There’s actually a very interesting stance on war here, where Mechs/characters tend to posture and set up for the act of war, but not necessarily duke it out all the time. This is not trying to be a game all about combat, rather the THREAT of combat that could happen leads to tensions.

Replayability is good with the multiple factions and mats, progression is exciting with building up your economy and unlocking more things, and positioning is tense come mid to late game to see who can close out the game. There’s different strategies to try, like putting down all your Workers as fast as you can, or raising your Popularity rating to get more points come late game, or playing around placing different buildings to use their abilities.

Cons & Nitpicks

But wait a second… Scythe says that it’s a 4x on its website, that is, its a game that has: expand, expand, exploit, and exterminate. This just doesn’t have exterminate, as units never die in this game, and there’s only two possible Stars for winning fights to limit warmongering. Fights usually only happen at the end of games, being small, opportunistic fights, rather than big epic ones.

The exploration in this game isn’t great either, where you only do it 2-3 times a game, and is often just an injection of resources to your faction. Please do not go into this game thinking it’ll be anywhere close to the 4x-ness you’d see in a game like Sid Meier’s Civilization. Scythe should be really named: “A 4x INSPIRED Euro”.

The Euroness can come under some fire with factions/action mats/objectives being unbalanced. There’s even two faction and mat combinations that are straight up BANNED, by the designer himself! This is especially brutal because Scythe is an extremely rigid game, meaning there’s low politics or very little emergent randomness.

While Scythe does have CHESS-like play with tons of tight positioning counterplay down the road, that needs to be designed very specifically, because balance issues hit harder in this design since outliers will always be stronger/weaker and can’t be checked by randomness or players ganging up on them.

Nitpicks come in with factions always spawning in the same place in a rigid board every time, allowing players to memorize openings. Then, there’s an ‘Enlist’ mechanic that has you constantly looking at other player’s actions that just is hard to keep track of, since players already mostly keep to themselves in solving the tight efficiency puzzle of the board.

Oh, and for player count, please play with 4-5 players, so expansion is more interesting, with earlier fights way more likely because there’s less distance to travel. At 1-2, you run into the vast openness of the board, making the game feel very much like a Mech farming simulator.