Ilya Repin: Barge Haulers on the Volga (1870-73)
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What sold me on Scythe immediately was Jakub Różalski's art on the cover. The image of farmers in a field, with giant mechs striding in the background, was like a steampunk Simon Stålenhag painting: beautiful and wonderfully evocative.
The contents of the box live up to the cover art. Basically everything is well-made: the player boards are pleasantly sturdy, all the art is absolutely lovely, and I really like some of the character and mech miniatures. The map is colorful and can be a little tough to get a handle on at first, but it works and is really quite pretty. This is just a quality product, and I'm very happy with it.
Scythe is set in a sort of dieselpunk alternative history 1920's Central Europe, where slightly hokily named factions like Polania and Rusviet vie for control of the land and resources around the mysterious Factory. Rusviet especially is just such a stupid name. Anyway each player gets a randomized faction and player board, resulting in a combination like Agricultural Saxony or Patriotic Nordic, which is what I ended up with. Below is a view of my boards, with my blue mechs on the left.
Each player starts with a character and two workers on the board, and several more workers and four mechs waiting to be deployed. Your workers produce resources and more workers, and the resources are used to deploy mechs and build stuff. Building mechs also unlocks abilities for your character and mechs, and the mechs can transport workers around. Your character can get into encounters and explore the factory, and of course your character and mechs can fight the other players' characters and mechs.
The objective of the game is to earn more coins than your opponents, which is done by completing various tasks and earning stars; once someone earns their sixth star, the game ends and everyone calculates how many coins they get, which is based on how much popularity their faction has accumulated. It feels a little unnecessarily complicated, but I guess the point is that it makes it difficult to figure out who's winning while the game is still going on.
This all leads to Scythe being sort of a halfway house between an engine-building game like Terraforming Mars and a more traditional strategy board game, and it does kinda work. It helps that mechs are inherently very cool. In our first game, I found it a little difficult to figure out what to do, but one clever thing that helps is that the actions you can take are all found on your player board - and you can't pick the same one twice in a row. You place a counter on the action you've picked, and on your next turn you have to move it to another action. It's good to reach the Factory as quickly as possible with your character, but to get there you need to cross a river. This requires deploying the mech that unlocks the riverwalk ability, which requires producing metal. So getting started is easy in that sense: you pretty much alternate between moving and producing until you get the mech deployed, and then it's a race to the Factory.
Our first game was mostly a matter of figuring out how everything works. I'll admit I didn't have much of a strategy beyond trying different things and trying to get to the Factory first, which I did get done. The Crimean player was somewhat aggressive and got into several fights, which was good because we got to try the combat system! Me and the Soviet player were a little more passive, and eventually Saxony won the game with a military offensive.
Our first Scythe experience was fun enough that we're definitely trying it again! Like I said, I kind of struggled to figure out what exactly to do, especially as it wasn't altogether clear how the game was really scored and what could be a succesful strategy, but I'm absolutely willing to give it another shot.
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I like the miniatures, but I have to admit that the grey character models do look a bit drab. The obvious thing to do is paint them! I've decided I will do this in the order that the factions win in; in other words, I'm painting Saxony first since they won our first game. The Saxon leader, Günther, is a fairly basic comedy German type with a greatcoat and spiky helmet, and since I have the relevant German military colors from the Vallejo range to hand, I think this will be a fairly simple undertaking. So I figured I might as well paint the mechs while I'm at it.
The first step was gluing some very tiny-grained sand from an ancient Woodland Scenics set to the bases, and spraypainting everything white. The mechs got a base coat of Gunmetal Grey, and a Black Glaze wash to bring out the crevices between the panels and dull the shine of the metal. I then painted the fighting compartment Medium Sea Grey, and made little German crosses with Off White and Black. I'm looking for a sort of combination of a military vehicle look and the dieselpunk style of the game art, and I think I've done okay.
As for Günther, I took my lead from Warlord's Finnish paint scheme, which I quite liked and which is, after all, based on German uniforms. So Günther's tunic is in Medium Sea Grey, the boots and Pickelhaube are black, and his belt and holster are Chocolate Brown. The inside of his overcoat is Dark Red, and the outside is German Fieldgrey; his face is Basic Skintone and the beard and hair are Light Grey with some Neutral Grey spots. Nacht got a coat of Black Grey, with some German Grey on his back, although I'm not sure it's possible to tell! His eyes are Silver Grey. As the least interesting character in the base game, Günther is very much the archetypical cruel German, and I've tried to capture that here.
Finally, I painted the bases Tan Earth, gave them a brown ink wash, and sprinkled some tiny flock over them. The edges were done in their faction color: black. Saxony is now ready to take the field again!
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In our next game, I was Agricultural Crimea, and I got off to a decent start.
I even got into it a bit with the Soviets at the Factory, kicking out their mech, and soon enough Saxony launched an all-out attack through the tunnels.
We withstood the blitz, but soon afterwards the Soviets won by grabbing the Factory.
Two games in, I feel like I'm still struggling with the pace of the game. I managed to score several stars, but then fell way behind and finished second to last. I think I have to try pursuing those stars a lot more aggressively in the future.
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So, next up, I'm painting the Soviets. I love the boxy mechs with their scythe arms, but I have to admit, I'm not looking forward to painting a Siberian tiger!
The mechs were easy enough to paint: I have some Camo Olive Green, which I think is the recommended color for Soviet tanks, so in keeping with what I did with the Saxons, I painted the fighting compartment in the appropriate tank color and the legs and guns in Gunmetal Grey. I decided to paint the scythes Brass and am very happy with the result. Finally, I added some big red stars.
Above, the tiger has a base coat of German Camo Orange Ochre on top and Off-white along the bottom. I thought Siberian tigers would be orange, or maybe white and grey like a snow leopard, but the Wikipedia page tells me they're more yellow or even red. Below I've done a light drybrush in Dark Sand and stripes in German Camo Black Brown. Olga is wearing a Basalt Grey fur hat and a Black Grey coat; the metal bits on the mechs have been given a wash of Black Glaze and Smoke.
Here's the finished product!
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With two factions painted, it's time to give some serious thought to how I'm going to store these miniatures. The plastic packaging that came with the game is great - as long as you don't paint the miniatures! A foam insert can also damage paintwork, and hell, I want to show these off. As it happens, we've got some transparent plastic chocolate boxes that are pretty much perfectly sized for two Scythe factions. So what I did is I cut out two sheets of cardboard to a size where they"ll fit on the bottom of the box. I then cut holes into one sheet for my Saxons' and Soviets' bases, and lined the holes with brown felt.
It sure ain't pretty! My original idea was that the models would go in the holes, but they're not quite big enough, so actually the bases are going to rest on the felt. This is fine, as it'll protect the edges of the bases from wear as well. Then I stuck another piece of cardboard on top and glued some ballast onto it.
It still ain't pretty! But with a paint job of Tan Earth and brown ink, it matches the bases of my painted models and holds them more or less in place, like so:
**
Finally, we tried another four-player game with a player new to our group, but who had played Scythe before. Nobody ended up getting Saxony, but at least my newly-painted Soviets would hit the board.
I found myself playing Engineering Poland, and decided to really go for those stars this time. Also I really like the white mechs!
Of course, everyone else was also going for it, and apart from the Crimeans, who ended up kind of bottled up in their starting territories, we played a surprisingly aggressive game! By which I mean there was just one single combat, but especially the Soviet player was quite assertive in taking over territory, and we all racked up quite a lot of stars. Incidentally, I thought Olga and the Soviet mechs looked great on the board!
Eventually, it was the Nordic player who got the sixth star, and the win. Even though we took a moment to go through the rules and didn't play with any particular sense of urgency, we still got through a complete four-player game where everybody got a lot done in under three hours!
So what this means is that I now have to paint a musk ox.
But that's one for next time!
**
A verdict, then. I like Scythe, although perhaps not as much as I might have expected to given how much it's been hyped up. It's paced a lot faster than most comparable games, I think, and that did throw me off quite a bit at first. But it also means that even though this is a fairly complex game, you can still easily get through it in an evening, and that's definitely a good thing!
I do kind of feel that there's some complexity for the sake of complexity here, or at least some features that could just be dropped from the game without really affecting it. The encounter cards don't really add a huge amount to the game, but I don't mind them at all because the art is simply gorgeous. But things like the structure bonus tile, which provides a triflingly small amount of coins for particular placements of buildings, barely seems worth the effort at all. I assume some of these things, like the slightly convoluted scoring system, are there to try to obscure who's winning, and it's decently succesful. But especially for new players, there's quite a lot to take in, and I'm not sure it's all actually worthwhile. There also isn't perhaps as much player interaction as I might have liked, because to an extent everyone is building their own resource engine; although this may well be different with higher player counts.
Having said all this, I'm pretty sure we're going to end up playing more Scythe! I think several other people in our little gaming group like it more than I do, and I'm quite happy to play it with them. It's just that I think I've had more fun painting the miniatures than I have playing the game! We'll definitely be trying the Invaders from Afar expansion, which raises the maximum player count to seven, because that's definitely something I want to experience. In the mean time, if you're at all into the idea of a very pretty engine-building strategy game with really nice miniatures, I think you'll find Scythe well worth your money.
Now I'm off to plan some 28mm mechs...
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