Scythe is an engine-building game set in an alternate-history 1920s period where dieselpunk mech rampages across Europe and countries wage war against each other to harness the secret of The Factory. Funnily enough, the final goal is to amass enough money, infrastructure, and army to score victory points and belittle your friends along the way.
The first game we played took a while due to the complex setup we had to do. There are recourse tokens, encounter cards, discovery cards, upgrade tokens, heroes, and more. Subsequent playthroughs became faster as we got better at setup.
The game is an engine builder and needs 1 to 5 players with games taking an hour or two depending on the player count. We had a two-player game that lasted for around 2-3 hours. The game functions on an asymmetric mix of worker placement, territory control, engine building, and exploration, with players taking only one or two actions each turn depending on their available resources. This leads to quick and faster-than-expected gameplay where players anticipate each other’s moves. You get an upgrade perk when you do the enlist action by spending food. This gives you a bonus every time other players take the same action as you do, so there are many strategic layers to consider. You also need to spend resources to produce and manage your upgrades to unlock appropriate abilities to expand.
The game also limits your expansion by limiting your movement so your initial area of operation is suboptimal and you will lack one critical resource depending on your starting location. The tokens you get are also of good construction, you have plastic mech and character minis, wooden buildings, and meeples, all of which have unique designs for each of the factions.
