The postapocalyptic flower game
🌷 Revive is another big box euro that got a lot of buzz before SPIEL 22. We were quite interested in what it’s like, and now after trying it we wanted to share our first impressions.
In Revive you lead a tribe 5000 years after the world was destroyed, coming out of your shelter just as the earth is starting to thaw out. You explore, recruit survivors, populate ancient cities and build factories, to be the leading tribe. 🏆
On your turn you can do 2 actions, like playing cards, exploring new territories and placing meeples or buildings on the board. You play until every major artifact is taken from the board, which you can get by reaching certain milestones on the tracks.
🃏 Cards are multi-use. They have a top and a bottom effect which are activated depending on which slot of your player board you play them in. There are also modules you can add to your slots that will be activated by cards of the same color.
⚙️ There is a lot of progression in the game: you get new cards to use, unlock unique abilities of your tech tree as you place down meeples, and get powerful machines you can activate as you move trackers on your player board. There are also several other tracks that give you rewards as you reach certain spaces.
💬 I feel that Revive provides a lot of freedom in your strategy and there are many fun decisions to be made. You can also often map out 2-3 turns in advance and anxiously wait your turn to do what you need. There are many systems in the game and I love that. It all seems to work very well and gives opportunities for combos! 🤩 I can’t wait for additional plays!
There is one thing about the gameplay which might be misleading if you are looking for player interaction. I was expecting more of it based on the exploration, the building mechanisms and the board but actually it is not that prominent - you only block the spaces where you build, that’s it.
Component quality is great! I have to mention the art though: cards have white borders and the illustrations themselves leave much to be desired. 😕 Especially because there are only 3 pictures repeated on 63 cards!
