Scythe - Shut Up & Sit Down Review

hello oh yeah uh shut up and sit down need some more wood wood you know how we roll our demand forward is constant and ending sure i was wondering if you could sorry yeah i can get some wood hold on from like a thicket or something ah underbrush all right i've got some i got some wood you got some great uh just bring it back don't don't leave it there okay uh um bring it back i can't i can't ah i can't get over the water what ah i don't yes i know i just did ah why not i don't know why not help help help maybe i can cross that oh no nope scythe another kickstarter success arguably a kickstarter legend however when scythe was released it didn't just fulfill its kickstarter fulfillment obligations it was also available on general release for a while and you could just go and go pick it up from a shop except you couldn't because it sold out so quickly that the few remaining copies in the pacific northwest we're going for frown inducing prices like 150 and 250 dollars and i'm not making this up 300 that was not a pool that we were willing to paddle in however like the boys in the song scythe is now back in town and it's hanging out at dinos boys are back in town a song uh you know and i'm obviously this is dinos it's my place and i'm dino you've probably noticed by now that a lot of the very grandest kickstarters tend to have certain fundamental things in common one of those is miniatures preferably lots of miniatures the other thing is stuff lots and lots of stuff lots of stuff lots and lots lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots i can't even get this out and lots don't know what that is and lots of stuff kickstart audience is a particular kind of audience there are a lot of board game publishers who if you come to them with a design with a pitch they're going to ask you about testing they're going to ask you about balance they're going to ask you about mechanics and themes and there are definitely a lot of people in the general kickstarter audience who do care about those things as well but there are also a lot of people out there who are just ravenous and the main thing that they want is things and in addition to that stuff oh lovely little bits if there's something else that kickstarter people like it's just more and if nothing else scythe offers more it is a feast a feast for the eyes a four course banquet for the optic nerd and it just screams notice me look at me pay attention to me see how i've got five different sets of individually crafted mechs for all my factions have you noticed that look at my hundreds of wooden pieces look at my my scores of cards with with their wonderful art notice them won't you look at me when you pay attention to all my different individually designed economy boards or or all the player boards notice that i've got those i made those for you look at me look at my enormous main board that's colorful and incredibly clear at the same time very well designed just just spread all my things across it all of the hundreds of counters i have and and look i've got a woman with a bear and a gun when you when you look at me when you touch me when you caress me when you play me you can be alone with me and you could put a bear in the forest i'll let you do that paul this is a family show scythe is about economics don't make the mistake that i initially did and think that this is a game of stompy combat mechs who are muscling other people aside and bears who are muscling other people aside really scythe is about developing industry and infrastructure it does reward you for fighting and it encourages you to do this sometimes you will score better if you hit other players occasionally but you will also score well if you develop your population if you make more people if you make more things if you upgrade the facilities and the factories that you have you will even score better if you're nice if you're nice to people you'll get a better score if you're popular if you're pleasant not so nice that everyone else just sort of walks all over you but you know nice and firm like a scone scone scone everyone starts somewhere on the edge of the board according to whichever faction they might be whether that's bear people or tiger people or wolf people or bird people or whatever and from there you spill like hot mayonnaise from a cracked jar into the world hex by hex each hex producing one one of a particular special resource which could be something like wood or oil or metal and which your workers can step into and then start to harvest movement takes a little time and you only have a couple of these little worker folks to begin with anyway so you don't really actually spill like hot mayonnaise it's more like sort of chilly cold lumpy mayonnaise blobbing plodding from place to place initial progress inside is actually very slow in fact continued progress is slow careful methodical you will have to think very carefully about these first steps this is your economy board which at any point during the game actually provides you a rather clever breakdown of how your economy is doing the board is divided into four separate quarters which all conform to some sort of action or pair of actions that you can perform by paying the costs at the top and if you can afford it doing the extra bonus action at the bottom by paying the cost of that however unless you are the faction by the way who explicitly ignores this rule whatever you choose to do on your current turn you then cannot do on your next one you must pick something else meaning you are always always thinking about at least one turn ahead you cannot simply uh use movement to rush from hex to hex to hex to claim things and you cannot em just sit on resources and decide i'm gonna produce and produce and produce now this constant choosing planning thinking ahead makes things considered careful and depending on your personal particular taste arguably kind of plodding clearly you want to be producing that's movement clearly you want to be moving because that's how you spread around the board and gain access to more resources although you can only move a limited number of units every turn so that's a bit slow and plodding clearly this has produced clearly you want to be producing although you can only produce on a certain limited number of hexes of return so that's kind of plotting clearly you have to do that because that's how you get resources that let you do more stuff including stuff on the bottom half of your board clearly you want to be trading especially early on because trading is how you will get the resources that you can't otherwise get in the game it's how you'll say there's no oil anywhere near you at all this is how you get your oil this is how you make often any progress at all in the early game and obviously you'll want to bolster your army because sooner or later whether you like it or not you are going to get into a fight so it's good to be prepared more resources you have the more chance you have also using whatever action is at the bottom here which could be something like deploying a mech which actually also unlocks additional bonuses usually to do things like movement like you move a bit faster or you can now cross water better than you could before water crossing rules are a bit weird upgrade here pay the upgrade costs and you can move a cube which cube am i going to move i'm going to move the movement cube from here down here so this action has suddenly become a little bit cheaper the next time i want to do it i can now move three instead of two it's a bit less plotting whoops or i could build a building and this is particularly helpful a lot of gravity in canada today um buildings uh again i'm not oh my god special bonuses uh revealed you know you take it off the board you get to see what the special bonus is by the way everything here is actually a cost that's a cost but otherwise you get a special additional bonus when you start building and deploying stuff um buildings allow you access to the game's tunnel network or a monument makes you slightly more popular or the windmill which is my favorite lets you produce somewhere where you don't have a worker it's like having automation where did everything go not only are these boards cleverly designed cleverly laid out in a way that makes them actually fairly easy to understand even though there's quite a bit of information here they're also all different everything has a certain particular unique cost and also a certain particular unique combination this top board you can move and upgrade the board below it you could trade an upgrade you could be the person trading and upgrading but also whichever faction you have that has its own unique powers isn't tied to a board either you can play these randomly combining the two or if you prefer having certain combinations that you feel make the game better play it in that way every time you play scythe you can play a unique faction that has a unique special combination of certain factors that nobody else has that allows you to do certain things in a certain way starting on a certain part of the board that gives you certain access do i sound certain there's a lot of certainty on shut up and sit down today shut up and be certain always be certain that's what alec baldwin said in glengarry glen ross he said always be certain liz lemon i think you see what i mean though what i mean is that is one of the most interesting aspects of the game so let's move from that to talking about what i think is probably the least interesting aspect which is combat combat begins as soon as any military unit enters a hex with another military unit military units are basically your leaders and your mechs and it's determined the victory is determined by whoever has a higher score now you have uh hopefully you have been collecting combat cards throughout the game let's start with a couple they all have a value between like two and five on them and you can play one of these cards for each military unit that you have in the hex you can also spend the other punch points or whatever they're called i don't know that you've gradually hopefully been amassing throughout the game as well you select how many points you're going to spend on your secret dial which is you hide this under the table like by your grinder wherever you like to hide your secret dials then both players reveal and you add everything up and you're like oh i've got ten points you've got nine aren't you lost and whoever loses uh ding ding they get a free ride on the sad bus all the way home nobody dies and arguably this is worse everybody returns to their point of origin remember how i was saying it takes a while to sort of move units every turn and there's really only a certain amount of units you can turn this is is kind of horrible actually this is nasty and you can look at this retreat and think well i'm am i ever going to get back to where i was at the start of the game you don't want to lose you want to spend as many punch points as you can but spending more points only makes you weaker and invites attacks from other players which is a tactical consideration but also quite punishing and nasty meaning that you're not necessarily winning you're winning a battle but you know you could be losing the war you could just be opening yourself up to a different vulnerability later on for most of the factions there is also a penalty for the winner because if they have sent any of these workers home which is not at all uncommon they become less popular it turns out that war's bad war makes people sad makes you uh less popular which affects your score at the end of the game the penalties are severe and the rewards don't always feel fantastic so you want to pick your fights very very carefully but it's kind of a good idea to have one or two of them you really should because they're one of the achievements that you have to unlock to gradually score points make progress in the game bring it to a close you have to do things you have to achieve things but that's fine right that's what life is all about that's certainly what scythe is all about and the things that you have to do are very specific they are things like winning a fight that is a thing that you did that's an achievement unlocked uh deploying all of your buildings is an achievement unlocked doing a special quest as an achievement unlocked maybe you max out the popularity track that's an achievement unlocked your heart has risen to the top once you've done six specific things you are the achievementist and you bring the game to a close and it's at this point you cross reference how popular you are with the various things you've done also how much money you have to see who is who is who is the scythiast hopefully it's you i mean you wouldn't bring the game to a close suddenly if you weren't confident about winning right all of this takes time now i've called this i think at least twice already i've called this plotting i've used the word plotting in the review and that's a fitting description of the mix in the game but it also just suits how everything feels as you push through wait i'm not suggesting that this is a slow game once you understand what your actions are what the options are available to you you can get a grip on things very quickly and play moves around the table pretty speedily no it's the everything takes so long it has such a solid kind of turgid heavy feel as you very slowly carefully move a few more units into the next hex and produce a little more stuff and then after maybe five or six rounds of play you can move an upgrade cube and you can say look at me mummy it now cost me slightly less wood to do a thing cy there's a game of increments it is extremely important that you keep a close eye on everybody's territorial expansion including your own rushing to control resources or plotting out to control resources is a big deal and you want to try and do that as soon as you can early on because controlling a diverse amount of resources makes you independent it makes you much more able to just do whatever you need to do similarly if you can get to the center of the board where there is a factory that is a sort of mcguffin of the game you get to draw a special factory card which is a new option a new turn choice that you can pick with your special turn choice pawn that lets you do a thing that you could never do before and that no one else will be able to do and they are all good they are all helpful similarly if you can move your hero figure and to hexes that have little special tokens on you get to draw new random events that again no one else will get to benefit from these are one time only and they are all helpful also if you happen to have a particular player board and maybe a particular starting position you might find getting certain resources or combinations of resources a little bit easier similarly as you build more mechs you unlock more movement options that get you around the board quicker which is initially actually a huge obstacle because everything is walled off by rivers or maybe if you're quick enough to uh be able to build an addition to the tunnel network your own personal tunnel then you can get around the board faster as well and the thing i'm trying to get at here is a lot of these things are dependent and when you throw in random events and these also random secret objective cards that are dished out and randomly giving out different economy boards to players sometimes you end up in a starting position that can be better than anyone else's and if your first couple of turns happen to go very nicely for you you snowball all of those random event cards by the way are illustrated with some excellent art from the artist jacob rozelski i hope i'm saying that correctly i think i am whose images are just splashed all across the game everywhere and that combined with some very intelligent some very sensible visual design choices make this an extremely good looking experience probably one of the best presented board games in at least recent times scythe sells itself very well it is the ideal kickstarter pitch it's very good looking it has a lot of sort of neat little tricks and and canny little ideas in there but i have concerns about more fundamental things like its balance or the pace of its play and as i say i i don't mean how long it takes to play the game i mean the fact that progress is so you inch your way through this game and you're constantly under pressure to poop out more resources to gather those resources and then use them to slightly improve what you have so that you're a bit better at things than you were before it's interesting or engrossing but it's not necessarily exciting i don't think this is thematically supposed to be in the game but there's something to be said here about hard work and grind and picking yourself back up after you've fallen down which is maybe a life lesson but that's not what i want from a board game with mex and a bear i want to take a very brief digression now diversion away from the path and talk about player negotiation there are lots of games out there that feature player negotiation that have some player negotiation mechanics or maybe player negotiation as a fundamental theme a core element of what they are and scythe says you can also have player negotiation you can talk to each other about things and make deals and gives you absolutely no framework for it and my experience of games that do that that say you can have a chatty thing however you like is uh the players just just don't they don't negotiate they don't talk to each other about stuff like that maybe that'll be different with you i don't know maybe you and your friends will be the group of people playing aside who will be like let's make a deal if i don't go there you don't go there and i'll do this if you do that if you do that i have a feeling that this 115 minute suggested play time which by the way has already boarded the magical mystery tour bus and has gone off to collect its medicinal marijuana and tell people stories about how elvis presley is living as an alien dragon spirit on mars i have a feeling that's just going to get bigger and that's going to get longer don't know if it's going to get that much more interesting though i have been engrossed by scythe multiple times now with multiple different player counts i haven't regretted any of it it is moderately enjoyable but it is not a game that makes my blood rush red hot wing insert whatever you like there you know what i am glad that scythe exists i think it is a good ambassador for the hobby it is my voice is going it is interesting it is different it is very well presented and for the amount of stuff that's actually going on in the game it is surprisingly accessible that said if you are crazy about stompy mex and steampunkish things and farmers and places that look a bit like the austro-hungarian empire then this is probably aimed right at you and let's be honest you're a huge demographic right but otherwise i can't quite step forward to recommend it as being good enough if you are really keen on building infrastructure over hexes and putting little wooden buildings down and spreading out i would say try something like terra mystica first or if you really really want to have lots of resources and food and lovely little bits and some interesting sort of semi-co-op stuff i say try archipelago first or if you want more political things as you spread out try and control territory and deals with people i'd say try rex first or if you want a game that is better balanced where people who are on the back foot can flip things around with a couple of very clever plays i would try play i would say try play inish first do you see what i'm saying there's more out there if you want to just have a gun and a bear i would say try joining the polish army in world war ii or maybe today if you have tried all of those things and if you tried the ladder i'd be very interested to hear from you and you still want to play cy then it appeals then you can make worse choices and it is nothing if not good value for money for the amount of stuff you get in the box but sometimes less is more and by the way speaking of this i hinted at an expansion there is an expansion where you have a couple more factions there's the purple people who are purple and the green people who are green uh the purple people can make traps which in particular i feel is a bit imbalanced but that just brings me around to a few of my biggest problems with this you know what if there was an expansion for psy that did something to the game i'd rather it was about less than more we don't always need more stuff except i need more stuff now because my voice is about to crack so i'm going to make some specialty thank you for watching if you enjoy this video don't forget to like and subscribe in fact we have dozen scores hundreds of videos about board games now we've been doing this for a while so there is so much more out there that you can seek out if you really really really enjoyed this then head over to our site shut up and sitdown.com and maybe just give us a dollar just donate us a dollar because we rely really mainly on your support thank you so much again and hopefully if we can get enough of that support and get out of the forest where i now live hello hello nope he doesn't like me okay [Music] you

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 800,992

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Shut Up Show, Shut Up, Sit Down, Board Games, Board Gaming, Family Games, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Paul Dean, Matt Lees, Scythe

Id: Gbakt8dfV9w

Length: 24min 0sec (1440 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 25 2017