Scythe review: The most-hyped board game of 2016 delivers

If you don’t pay attention to the world of modern board games, you’ve almost certainly never heard of Scythe. If you’re a diehard cardboard fan, though, it’s all you’ve been hearing about for months.

Scythe is arguably the most-hyped board game of 2016, and it’s certainly one of the biggest (Rob Daviau's upcoming Seafall is another contender). Scythe's Kickstarter campaign was a massive success, raising more than $1.8 million from 18,000 backers (disclosure: I backed the game at the $79 “Premium Edition” level). The game is making its official retail release at Gen Con next weekend, so you should be able to find a copy at your local game store or favorite online retailer soon.

No matter how you slice it, the game is a big deal. If you care about board gaming in 2016, you should know about Scythe. But its massive hype also brings with it the crushing weight of huge expectations from thousands of people who plunked down upwards of $100 (or more) for a single game. Add to that the cross-armed naysayers standing on the sidelines, ready to tear the game apart if it isn't something truly special.

Now that the thing is on the tables of Kickstarter backers across the world, is it worth all the bluster?

Mind your back

Scythe is a competitive game for one to five players that takes place in an alternate history “dieselpunk” 1920s Europe. An uneasy peace has settled over five once-warring nations, but things are heating up again after the closure of The Factory, a capitalistic city-state whose mysterious technologies are now up for grabs. Peace, it seems, wasn’t meant to be—it’s time to suit up in giant mechs, send your workers into the fields and mountains, and prepare to take control over the land of Eastern Europa once more.

Before we talk about the game itself, let’s talk components. There are a lot of them, they’re absolutely gorgeous, and they're all tied together through the stunning art of Jakub Rozalski. I’ll admit that I backed the Kickstarter based largely on the quality of the components (and, of course, the strength of Stegmaier’s previous designs Euphoria and Viticulture). I don’t think I was alone.

Walk by a group of people playing Scythe and you’ll see a gargantuan board, tons of plastic miniatures, countless wooden meeples and tokens, stacks and stacks of cards, two player boards per player, and plenty of other cardboard miscellany. (Kickstarter bonuses pile on more bling, including metal coins and resin resource tokens. The game’s board can be made even bigger with the Collector’s Edition board expansion piece; if you have a table the size of a small country, knock yourself out.) Be careful hefting the box onto the table—the damn thing weighs about 10 pounds.

“OK,” you might say as you survey the game, “I get it—it’s a wargame.” Plastic miniatures depicting mechs and warlike generals placed strategically on hexes, empires expanding across the board in a bid to conquer everyone and everything in their paths—the game looks like the sort of "dudes on a map" combat title that board game fans are familiar with.

But you’d be wrong. Scythe is more a game about the threat of war, or at least of violence, than all-out carnage. It has elements of a 4X game, but it’s really more of a 2.5X game (there’s no real “exploration,” and the goal is not to completely exterminate your foes). You'll be farming the land for resources, building stuff with those resources, and just generally trying to make your mark on the board.

It’s an area control game. It’s a resource management game. But over everything, Scythe is a puzzle—and it's a very good one.

Achievement unlocked

There are way too many rules to go over here (interested parties can grab the rulebook—or even better, check out the excellent Watch it Played overview on YouTube), but here’s the gist.

Each player starts with six wooden stars that they’ll place on the central board by completing certain goals. For example, you can build four mechs throughout the game. When you’ve built all four, you put a star on the board. Get all your workers on the board—that’s another star. Win a combat, get a star. There are nine ways to put stars on the board, and when someone places his or her final star, the game ends immediately. As in all good capitalist games, money equals points; whoever has the most money at the end of the game wins.

You’ll get some money through general play, but a big chunk of your fortune comes at the end of the game. And most of it will come from the stars you’ve placed on the board, the hexes you control, and the resources you’ve produced.

Through it all, you’ll need to keep an eye on your “popularity,” which represents how the people of Eastern Europa view your faction. In game terms, popularity acts as a score multiplier—the higher you are on the popularity track, the more points you’ll get for your stars, hexes, and resources. But boy, can you get some cool bonuses by being a jerk.

It's a lot to take in at first, and there are a multitude of things you need to keep in mind in order to do well. But in a game with so many complex, interlocking parts, it’s striking how simply the turn structure works. Everything that happens on the main board—every decision that you make in the game—begins with your strategic HQ, the personal player board.

Build your engine

Each player board has four spaces. Each space has two actions on it—one on the top and one on the bottom. On your turn, you put a wooden pawn on one of the four spaces, and then you do the top action, the bottom action, or both. And since you have to move your pawn to a new space each turn, practically the entire game consists of you choosing between three action spaces. That's it.

But “simple” doesn’t mean easy.

Doing top-row actions is pretty straightforward. You pay the cost indicated in any red boxes and get the benefit shown in any green boxes. One action lets you move some of your units around the board, another lets you trade a coin for resources, another lets you produce resources yourself, and another lets you boost your combat power. But the bottom row actions are a bit trickier. These actions cost you some of the game's four main resources—wood, metal, oil, and food—and let you bolster your faction by building things like mechs and buildings. One bottom row action even lets you “upgrade” your player board, reducing the costs and increasing the rewards of doing actions.

The trick is figuring out how to do both the top- and bottom-row actions on your turn, which requires you to think two or three (or even more) turns ahead. Scythe is a game about efficiency, and your player board is essentially an efficiency puzzle with results that play out on the main board. If you can plan ahead and consistently do two actions per turn while your opponents do only one, you will have a massive advantage. But making that happen is way harder than it sounds.

Each hex on the board is home to a certain resource, and you'll be able to produce on a hex as long as you have a worker there. But the resources go directly onto the board when produced, and you only control the resources when you control the space. Setting up your workers on the right spaces to produce the right resources is essential, and you'll twist your brain in knots trying to get everything to align perfectly.