First off, link to bgg so you can check the ton of pictures and information they have there if you want.
Now, I've played this game several times at a friend's place, and this time I managed to take a couple of pictures and get the willpower to write a short article about it. So, sorry this review is not as detailed as others, but as I said I don't own the game, so I can't take photos of all the components separately and all that. I also won't be getting into a lot of detail in some things because I don't want to give false information if I remember them wrong, and I can't double check.
Anyways, Scythe is a strategy game for up to 5 players (7 if you own the expansion). I think it's playable alone with some automata rules, but I don't really know those. Playing with people, in my experience, it works best with 4 or more. It can be fun with less, but the map feels a bit empty and there's usually less interaction between the players.
The goal of the players is to score as many points as possible before the game ends. Scoring points is done in three way, from highest to lowest amount of points:
Additionally, you have three tiers of scoring, and you will get more points per each thing if you're on a higher tier, which is achieved by increasing your popularity, which is basically another type of "currency" you can get.
Now, about the objectives, there are ten of them, and the first player to get six done causes the game to end. Each of them corresponds to a game mechanic or something you can build, for instance you have one for building all buildings, another for all robots, another for winning battles, etc.
Each player plays a faction, and has an actions board. The faction and the actions are independant and usually randomly selected, so even if you play the same faction twice, your strategy can (and will have to) change a lot depending on the actions board you get. More on this in a bit.
The faction determines your initial combat cards and points, your initial position, a special skill, and what kind of skills your leader and robots can get. You can see my faction card in the right side of the picture.
To the left you can see the actions board. Everyone has the same eight actions, but the board you get will determine how much each of them cost, and how they are paired. You have 4 actions on the top side, and 4 on the bottom side. Each turn you choose a block, and you can do first the top action, and then the bottom one, so how they are combined is quite important. It also determines what kind of "improvements" you can do. Improving basically means changing little blocks in the board that reduce costs and improve rewards for certain actions.
Player turns are usually fast. Each turn you choose a block from the action board, and resolve the actions on it. Actions on the top side are usually cheap and allow you to either get some kind of resources or move your units around, while actions on the bottom side cost resources and let you build things, buy improvements or deploy mechs. Since everything you need to know is laid out in the board in front of you, and you have a limited set of actions to pick from, the game is quite easy to learn and play, even if it can seem a bit overwhelming when reading about it or trying to explain everything.
Scythe is a really fun strategy game, with lots of layers and little variants that make it hard to master, but well explained and easy to leaarn. I would say a typical game can take around two hours, although it can depend a lot on how fast you play your turns and how much conflict you get between the players.
Even if it may seem like a war game with all the mechs and whatnot, the mechanics don't really encourage being super agressive, and I would like to point out that it feels a lot more like a resource managment game with a combat happening now and then. For instance, we had just one combat in the last game we played, and the main use for our mechs was disuading the enemy from attacking and making clear where our border was.
All in all I would recommend the game for anyone that likes this kind of resource managment, strategy and territory based games. Oh! And don't forget to check the art style and miniatures, since they're just awesome.
About the expansions
I won't go into detail here but just to give a little comment. My friend owns two expansions, one that adds two new factions (being able to play with up to 7 players), and another that adds airships and some cards to modify or add some scoring rules. I feel like the first one is a must have if you have more than 5 players (kind of obvious I know XD), and a really nice to have otherwise, because just having more variety is great, and I really like the new races.
The airships one feels kind of not as good to me. The new rules and modifications add nice little twists to the game, but the airships feel kind of useless most of the time and don't seem to add a lot, in my opinion. It's also possible that we have just not figured out how to use them properly yet, so don't take my word for it and read about it in more places if you're interested on it :) and of course let me know if you've tried it and think otherwise.
Aaand here's a close up of my side of the map that I took and I didn't know where to put in the article XD.
That's all! Thanks for reading and as always, all feedback is welcome :D
