Scythe

What it is

Scythe is a development-and-expansion euro game with miniatures, set in an alternate 1920s Eastern Europe where, after the war, factories built huge fighting machines, the mechs. Everyone leads a faction, each with its own power, and tries to make it grow more than the others.

You produce resources, move workers between farmland, forests and villages, put up buildings and deploy mechs. Each faction has an action board split into four sections, and upgrading it makes every move more efficient: that’s where your economic engine starts.

The goal is to earn stars, one for each milestone you reach, while combat can give you two. When someone places their sixth, the game ends and you count your coins, which are the points. Interaction comes mainly from your neighbours on the map, who you compete with for territory and whose actions trigger bonuses for you. There are battles, but not many.

How it plays

Anyone sitting down for the first time usually expects a war, but war is the secondary part. You can count the battles on one hand, one or two each, when you need them for a star. Everything else is management: you build, you produce, you move your workers to where they make the resources you actually need.

Two things make the difference. The first is your faction’s power, which you should always use. Just like in Clans of Caledonia and any asymmetric game, whoever ignores theirs plays at a disadvantage against whoever exploits it. The second is the upgrades on your board and the bonuses that trigger when your neighbours take certain actions. The sooner you get them going, the sooner you start earning for the whole game, even on other people’s turns.

The nugget

Scythe’s world existed before the game. Jakub Różalski, a Polish illustrator, painted peasants in the countryside with mechs in the background, inspired by the Polish-Soviet war of 1919, and called that world "1920+". Jamey Stegmaier built Scythe around those paintings, and there are more than a hundred of them in the box, across cards and boards.

At our table

Hex map, mechs, miniatures: lots of people mistake it for an American-style game, and played that way it doesn’t work. To me it’s a pure euro.

How long does Scythe take?

The box says 90–115 minutes. At our table: 80 minutes at three, 110 minutes at four.

The box

Italian edition

Ghenos Games

Text in the game

On the cards

On BoardGameGeek

Scythe, 2016

Video tutorial

Also on the table

ChronocrittersDelicious GamesCamargueABACUSSPIELE