Revisiting Revive

Let’s continue with our #RoadToEssen series, where we re-evaluate games from SPIEL22 to see how many lived through the cult-of-the-new stage and remained fun after the hype wore off. This time it’s Revive by @aportagames , which only recently got released in retail, but was available at SPIEL in a smaller quantity - we went full FOMO greed mode and got it at SPIEL. 😅
I think this is without a doubt one of the best games of the show. Such a satisfying free-flowing comboey experience! 🥰

Revive has resource and hand management with action cards and some deck-building, many unlockable bonuses, asymmetric abilities and incredible engine-building. A lot of things that make playing immensely fun, yet somehow the rules overhead is relatively low! 👌

I like how there aren’t any rounds - you just either take a turn of 2 actions or hibernate to recover. So there are no clumsy cleanup phases breaking up the flow of the game.
The actions are all super interesting too:

🃏 You can play a card to your action slots - to the top of your board for its top effect, or the bottom for the bottom effect, plus you could activate modules that you placed in the slot during the game, if the color matches with the card 🤯
🗺️ Explore a tile on the map, while also gaining a new action card for your deck
♟️ Place down a meeple on the map, while also unlocking a new ongoing ability from your tribe board
🏠 Place down a building on the map, gaining adjacent resources or effects
🎚️ Flip your switch, gaining resources or copying an opponent's card

The engine building is super fun, as you gather new cards, put modules into your card slots and uncover machines you can use as a free action. You can really hand-tailor your strategy for each game, which makes subsequent plays always interesting, especially as there are asymmetric tribes with quite interesting abilities.

The only negative I can’t really forgive is the abysmal card art. I don’t think I have ever seen worse. 🙈😅

The expansion “Call of the Abyss” that will be released now is an instant buy for sure!
Even more factions, new mechanics and more fun - who could say no to that? 😁