Scythe remixes many Eurogame elements in its own particular package. There's resource gathering, area control, engine building -- all the staples you'd expect to see in a game so widely loved. Add to that some hefty and detailed miniatures I'm sure many people have had fun painting, and I start to get the acclaim.
But after experiencing the game for myself, I have a few doubts. One is more a matter of personal taste, the role that direct player conflict takes in the game. Resources you gather remain on the board in the space where they were gathered. If you let them accumulate for too long without spending them, you run the risk that an opponent will attack you to take control of an area and the resources stockpiled there. It's an interesting idea, certainly, but it feels more appropriate to a game more expressly about conquering terrain -- a more elaborate war game than this.
Another doubt I had was about the player count. Scythe takes up to 5 players, which is how many were involved in the first game I played. But that felt to me like at least one too many, maybe two. There's a lot of down time between turns as people contemplate their options, and even more wait time when battles break out between two opponents as you sit idly by.
I was also skeptical of the scoring system, a powerful multiplicative system that reminded me a fair amount of Concordia without being as cleverly integrated. Like Concordia, the way the multipliers stack up seems to really blindside some first-time players when counting score at the end. Sure, there's something to be said for obscuring the scores in a way that trailing players don't believe they're out of the race. But it's pretty rough for a player to suddenly realize, only at the end, that they never were prioritizing the right things, and can hand an easy victory to someone who grasped it all much earlier. Like Concordia, it seems to me like Scythe players need to be closely matched in skill for the game to shine.
One system in Scythe that did fascinate me, though, was the way that eight different game actions were arranged in four pairs. (And in different pairings for each player.) You'd essentially choose a "pair" for each of your turns, and do both actions. The core of the game was learning to maximize this, trying to get as many two-for-one deals as you could managing and trying never to do one action without at least getting something out of its pair.
There was also a fascinating way of upgrading the power of certain actions. On each player's personal action board, four actions begin the game partially covered with wooden cubes. Uncovering the cubes, one by one, makes an action more powerful and efficient -- and you get to choose where you'll upgrade first. At the same time, the other four game actions improve as they're progressively covered up. Every time you upgrade one action by uncovering a cube, you place that cube on one of your other actions, upgrading it too. Again, it's your choice, making every improvement a dual-pronged decision moment with fascinating ramifications.
But as intriguing as Scythe was in moments, I really don't see myself ever preferring it over other games that, for me anyway, scratch a similar itch. (Concordia, for example, has only grown in my esteem since I first blogged about it years ago.) I can certainly imagine it would have some fans, and I'd say it's not a bad game. Yet top 10 on BoardGameGeek? That, I'm having trouble seeing.
If someone suggests a game of Scythe to me, I would join in to see if there's more there than I could see at first. But if Scythe fails to come out on game night again, bowled over as we continually try new things, I doubt I'll miss it that much either. I'd grade it a B. Perhaps it was simply overhyped for me.
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