A real beast of a game

Have you played 🌾 Scythe 🌾❓️It is a real beast of a game. Sitting at a formidable 16th place on BGG, it offers an epic euro experience, camouflaged as a wargame. We have been excited about this game for a long time now, especially its 2-player aspect. 😁

My very first impression wasn’t as good as I had hoped. Somehow the whole game felt one-sided and loose. So we set up a new game and went again, this time more familiar with the gameplay, rules, and with more idea of a strategy. Luckily our second match immediately overrode this inferior experience. 👍
In this new match I got exactly what I have originally anticipated - an exciting, down to the wire, nail-biter game, where every decision mattered, and every combat was pretty high stakes. Up until the very end of the scoring it wasn’t clear who’d win. 

There is a lot to like in this game. A nice starting point is definitely the art - this is also the first thing everyone encounters when they notice the game in a store. The painting like pictures of simple eastern-european landscapes juxtaposed with menacing and hulking mechanized walkers are simply brilliant. 🤩 The whole alternate dystopian history theme works really well. 
The map is a bit noisy though, and takes some time getting used to.

💬 Our favorite part is the action selection. It is really clever - you activate a different action each round. You have to plan everything well in advance and ideally try to combo in a way so you can pay for and do the secondary action too. And of course you have to keep altering things in reaction to your opponents.

I also like the variability so far. Each faction has asymmetric abilities which all feel powerful, and their mechs also have different effects. On top of those you get a random action board at setup so the layout changes.

🤔 At 2p I do think some of the objective cards are too easy to achieve, because the whole board is there to use. We will need to do some more testing to get a good feel for the faction powers.

We are quite happy with Scythe and will do a deep-dive into its mechanics soon😊.