Scythe review: "This alt-history board game is still a gold standard for modern strategy"

Greetings, comrades. If you're checking out our Scythe review, I'll assume you're seeking a deeply strategic challenge to rival the best board games around. Designed by Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games, Scythe is a complex, competitive, asymmetric Eurogame for the ages. It pits up to five unique player factions against one another as they vie for control of resources and map areas in an alternate history 1920s scrap for superiority. With king-of-the-hill style area control mechanics, worker placement, press-your-luck combat, and peekaboo power building, it's an incredibly varied game with deep tactics and expansive strategies abounding.

But as much as Jakub Rozalski's glorious, dieselpunk artwork might scream 'wargame' to the uninitiated, Scythe can be a relatively peaceful experience… giant, armed mechs notwithstanding. That depends on the type and number of players around the table, with this economics-focussed engine builder quickly devolving into a card-based mech battler in the face of extreme scarcity.

Scythe features & design

• Score by doing literally anything ever, as long as the people like you
• Combo of asymmetric faction & player mat ups the complexity and replayability, but also minor imbalances
• Peekaboo powers give players room to improve

As a point-salad game, there are more ways to gather victory points in Scythe than than you could shake a sickle at. During play, you'll be filling the triumph track with stars as you unlock achievements (anything from completing personal objectives, to deploying all your mechs, to winning in combat). The second someone drops their 6th star on the Triumph Track, the game is over and scores are counted. The other major tracks are Power, which is spent in battle, and Popularity, which is lost by starting battles. For the latter, the tier you end on offers powerful multipliers to coins gained from the resources, territories, and stars that form your final score.

But before you can reap, you must first sew.

Players start with a random faction and player board combo. A few combinations are generally frowned upon by the community, so you may be asked to redraw if deemed too powerful. We'll get to that nugget in a moment.

All players get the same number of structure, mech, and worker meeples, along with an equal collection of technology cubes, recruit tokens, and stars. These all line up neatly on your faction and player mats, which have symbols to denote how much power and popularity – along with how many objective cards, combat cards, and coins – you start the game with. These will be different for everyone, and this is where it starts to get really asymmetric.

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Aside from each faction's unique abilities (unlocked by deploying mechs), your player mat will show different costs for each of the standard abilities, weighing each player mat entirely differently. Basically, you'll have a specialism.

The bulk of the game involves placing your action token on your player board to take (none, one, or both) actions in that column, paying the costs and reaping the benefits. That could mean improving your power score with the bolster action, moving your meeple around the board, or deploying your stash of mechs. Players are able to steal from, fight, and even bribe one another, or form alliances, so the potential for interaction is both high and broad. That's especially true in a 4–5 player game as avoiding conflict over minimal space becomes far more difficult.

Here's where it gets interesting: each row of meeple or cubes covers a track with hidden 'peekaboo' powers that will unlock through the game, some of which are detrimental. You'll reveal a higher cost every few times you produce workers, while taking the upgrade action means you can up the yield of one top row action while reducing the cost of any bottom row action.

Enlisting from any of your columns adds another layer to peekaboo powers, allowing you to piggyback off your neighbours with ongoing bonuses that trigger every time they take that bottom row action. Mech peekaboo powers are by far the most intriguing, since each faction has its own special powers that make the game more asymmetric as the gameplay shifts gears (heh).

Gameplay

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• Specialization is key, going broad will waste precious turns
• Imbalances are inevitable, but easy enough to work around
• Indeterminate mid-game scores & avoidable battles make it relatively chill

At its core, Scythe is not a game about mechs, but about the cultivation of ultimate efficiency. It's a heavily strategic romp that requires players to make the most of everything at their disposal quickly, or be left in the dust. Plans are swiftly thwarted as players attempt to plot several turns ahead, while anticipating the moves of both peaceful neighbours and potential aggressors alike.

There are evident attempts to level the field, including powerful factory cards, objectives, and encounters that can turn the tide for anyone, as well as player mats that offer higher track positions to account for expected lost turns, but a highly asymmetric game like this is always going to have a few imbalances. Ranked games allow players to bid for more highly valued faction and player board pairings, which is always an option as a house rule, but new and unaware players will be susceptible to overpowered combos storming the board.

My major gripe is that Scythe tends to end just as it's getting going. Stars start to drop fast after about six rounds, and if you're not on the brink of enacting some masterful chain of actions, the final star will send you reeling – you just spent a whole game prepping for nothing to actually pop off. But therein lies a portion of its brilliance: Scythe is a game that unlocks your will to tighten up your strategy and retry. One playthrough is, like many Eurogames before it, merely a taster of your economical potential.

Should you buy Scythe?

Scythe is a highly replayable board game for seekers of economical perfection. The sheer breadth of possible faction and player combinations affords (demands, even) differing playstyles for every run, and while the expansive nature of scoring can lead to an initially scattered approach, discovering techniques for building high-scoring engines is incredibly satisfying.

It takes time to tighten up your strategies, making skill and tactical prowess a huge factor against other veteran players, but procedural boons can offer newbies a powerful leg-up to keep the running close. It's well worth a look for fans of the Eurogame genre who are looking for more combat, or wargame fans in search of more economical depth.

Ratings

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

How we tested Scythe

Because the reviewer already owned Scythe, they played it multiple times with differing player counts and difficulty levels. For a better look at our process, check out how we test board games or the GamesRadar+ reviews policy.

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