Why You Should Play Scythe

save is a game set in a beautiful vibrant unforgiving reimagining of 1920s Europe the Republic of Palau Mia is scrabbling to shore up its eastern border the Saxony empire is eyeing up the unclaimed territories hungry to expand the Russ Fiat union is mobilizing its entire army and intelligence network and all eyes are on the mysterious mech producing city-state known only as the factory it's an absolutely beautiful game with a phenomenal art style and a great theme but it's also a very big game with lots of tokens lots of different objectives a weird multi-tiered table that tells you how many points your points are actually worth at any given time and oh what's this is this this my player board it looks quite complicated and I'm now not sure I want to be doing this at all should we knock out machi Koro instead don't be discouraged the entire 1920s are yours for the taking and things are neither as bleak nor as difficult as they might seem here's why you should play scythe Scyther is a game that looks very complex but is actually surprisingly simple to pick up the board is a series of hexes with different terrain types resources and special icons which we'll be getting back to in a while each player has a base some starting territory a hero character and some little workers and on their go they pick an action from the little menu in front of them you can move your units around pay some money in exchange for resources you can produce to create more workers and then earn resources on the territories you control or you can bolster and increase your power which is handy for combat so you either move things or you get one of three different kinds of stuff simple on your next turn you then have to take a different action unless you're playing as the bloody Rus vietze and the whole thing goes round again eventually you'll be able to take some additional actions or bottom actions these let you do things like deploy a mech slap down a building or just generally improve what you have and it's here a lot of the strategy inside lies because for example slapping down all of your mechs or building all of your buildings will put a star on the board and Nagi that much closer to victory but the nice thing about it is by the time you're getting to these bottom row actions and aiming for your objectives you've already got the basic move set nailed so in other words there's an awful lot you can do in scythe but it eases you into the bottom gently as a perfect example look at this little bit of text the game has for first time players try something now try something new now trying to think about an objective and how you might get there and then keep doing that an aim for victory so while scythe is a big old game and yes it does have a lot of component parts you aren't expected to know absolutely everything from the off and all things considered it does a pretty good job of getting you started and the nice thing about that is while it's good to plan your terms carefully and follow a coherent strategy none of these actions are really bad for you for example if you decide to spend a turn moving your workers about rather than a trading for methyl well sure you may not be able to deploy a MEC that turn as a result of a bottom action but having more territory is a really important way of scoring points in the endgame and it's also good to have your meatballs in a good position when you next decide to produce some stuff you know worse off there's no outright wrong way to take your turn in other words which is handy because one of the lovely things about scythe is that there are many paths to victory you might prioritize upgrading your basic actions in order to make each turn more efficient before moving on to the other ones for example or maybe you want to rush out your mechs so you can establish Marshall dominance over the board you can start your bid for victory however you like in other words given each player faction and indeed each action board plays differently in fact it's good to experiment anyway that's a very rough outline of how size works at least in the first few turns and as an intelligent person who may I say is looking very nice today you've probably realized that with so many tactical options on offer very little in this game is left to chance there's pretty much just one thing that is left to chance actually and that's the encounter cards on the size board you'll find these little tokens dotted about the map if you pick one up you get to draw a card from the encounter deck these cards quite literally paint a picture for you showing you an encounter you're having somewhere in Europa and then giving you a few options on what you want to do and buy what you want to do I of course mean how horrible you want to be to the civilians so for example in this one you've got the player character going down a road their path is currently blocked by a civilian just herding some geese into a nearby pasture and you can either whistle while you wait for the geese to cross the road pay the girl for her pet geese or as you call them dinner or feed the geese to your animal and claim the farm as your own each option gives you something whether that's money resources or the chance to construct a building but choosing the horrible options will often cost you for example you might lose popularity so encounter cards are pretty great because they inject a bit of the expected into the game they reveal how nasty your friends are but crucially they also remind you that you're fighting to control a continent filled with living breathing people and that their fate is literally in your hands as I've said before I love the theme inside so of course I love these little snapshots especially when you're giving them a house rule excuse me for going on a slightly weird tangent but there's one group in particular I tend to play side with and they have this bizarre house rule whereby when you draw an encounter card no one's allowed to see it you have to describe the scene to everybody which is a lovely atmospheric way of sort of getting everyone into the mood apart from the fact you're not allowed to use the proper names for anything so for example in this one you've got a load of wild boar in the foreground they might become bacon dogs and there are some farmers here they might be agricultural meat sacks you get the idea it's dumb but it is fun but of course you might be sitting there thinking hold on that's a lot of imposing looking robots stomping about on the board and I know what my friends are like and we're just gonna spend several hours taking lumps out of each other until somebody inevitably crushes the competition absolutely not thank goodness scythe does a beautiful job of preventing any one player from being too warlike because in scythe war is exhausting and war is horrible see when one player attacks another in scythe they're each given a wheel they use this to secretly determine how many of their precious power points they're going to put into their attack or defense that's power pointers in points of power by the way not presentations just so you know in addition they can play cards which will boost that value further and then on the count of three they reveal their scores and the highest number wins the engagement now if you keep on attacking people you're going to run out of power very swiftly making you less effective in combat and ultimately vulnerable to counter-attack from others you have to be very careful not to spread yourself too thing and that's not the only way combat can go wrong for you either because where there's war there's war crimes cast your mind back to the workers I mentioned earlier these little meatballs tend to start littering the board pretty early on in the average game of scythe meaning if two players get into a fight there's a fairly high chance at least one worker will be in the firing line and when that happens the aggressor loses one point of popularity for every worker caught in the crossfire and that if you're planning on actually winning is enormous because popularity in size means prizes or more accurately points let's return to that weird multi-tiered table I mentioned at the very start of the video the one that tells you how many points your points are worth well the exact tier you fall into is determined by how far up the popularity tracker you are so invading someone else's territory and kicking their units back to the base square might be useful in the short term but if it knocks you down a level on the tracker and the game ends before you can win the hearts of the people background you could end up throwing the whole game away and yes having a tiered point system does mean at the end of a game of size typically involves a lot of counting in order to work out who's won rather than a big champagne finish where one person is instantly showered in glory but to be honest with you I don't think it's that big of an issue going through each of the scoring criteria is a chance to reflect on how you did over the course of the game whether you expanded enough whether all your objectives went as planned and of course whether you did better than everybody else hopefully by now you've got an idea of why I'm so fond of scythe it doesn't look very beginner friendly but it's actually fairly forgiving it's got a lot of constituent parts but while they do add some complexity they had a great deal more strategic depth and most importantly of all a game of scythe is just a good story because it's not just about how much you've got done it's how you did it you can have all of the completed objectives and all of the territory and all of resources in the world but if people are straight up don't like your faction you're not gonna win in other words it's a stonker of a base game and that's before we even get into the expansions invaders from afar adds to entirely new factions to the game although admittedly one of them is rubbish the wind gambit adds mumping great airships and rise of femoris introduces a replayable persistent campaign turning something you already own into a legacy game and if you really want to go the extra mile you can buy additional encounter cards you can get metal versions of the cardboard coins that come as standard and get this the scythe board is actually double sided and on the reverse is basically it's two-thirds of the board with massive versions of all of the hexes so if you want to you can pay good money to buy the final third of the board connect it up and make an absolutely massive board kind of like buying a large print edition of a book and sure that seems a bit weird and let's face it both of these things are surprisingly expensive give me what they really are but to be honest I quite liked them the metal coins sound good they have a nice heft to them and having giant versions of the hexes is actually quite useful when there are loads of mechs and workers and resources flying about the place and look if you're not remotely convinced that you'd even like to try a game of scythe at this point well firstly thank you for watching this video this far that's actually very generous of you and secondly I'm really not sure I made enough of the fact that you can play as a Polish lady whose best friend is our bear with saddlebags or you can play as a German who likes to hang out with a wolf or you can play is a Norwegian man who's just riding a bison as you do I think it's pretty great anyway but what about you were you tempted to dive into your Roper and make your bid for supremacy or is it not quite your cup of tea why not tell us in the comments below hopefully you enjoyed this video if you did there are loads more from dice breaker for you to what some of them should be on the screen now so please do give one of those a click do like subscribe or ring the bell icon and please all your friends about us because we're only just getting started and there's a lot of good stuff to come most importantly though I'd like to say thank you very much for watching and have a lovely day [Music]

Channel: Dicebreaker

Views: 71,354

Keywords: scythe, scythe board game, scythe board game explain, how to play scythe, scythe board game review, scythe board game dicebreaker, dicebreaker johnny, johnny chiodini, best board games, good board games, stonemaier games

Id: qfc6bwSSqYg

Length: 12min 47sec (767 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 22 2019