This will be a bit of a hybrid review of both the digital edition of Scythe and the board game.

Scythe takes place in an alternate timeline known as 1920+, though much of its canon was changed by the release of the next game, Iron Harvest. The main appeal remains the same: mechs instead of tanks (and other alt-techs, like airships instead of planes). It made numbers on Kickstarter, but today people are ambivalent to it, and either love it or hate it.

The video game was created to be like the board game, and when it was released a simulated version of the board game on Tabletop Simulator was permanently deleted. The main differences, aside from the occasional bug that makes a legal move impossible, are the way the game is organized visually and, more importantly, the relationship between the player and the scoring.

Reviewing the video game is going to make more sense if we start with the board game. So, let's start with the board game.

Scythe: The Board Game

Scythe successfully compresses the 4X experience down to an hour or two. You're definitely still doing all of the four X's, and there are many different win conditions you can pick and choose from depending on your circumstances.

That alone puts the game above many others. It is truly an achievement.

The game has a lot in common with chess, and in many ways it felt like a sequel with more lore and without all its flaws. For all of chess's beauty (though any Go player can tell you it's overrated), it's a paintbrush that doesn't fit comfortably in its hand. Scythe does.

The game's beginning is more varied than chess, like chess960. Unlike it, the variation is just small enough that it's still practical for players to study specific opening lines for specific situations, and so Scythe fails to avoid the problem of needing to study boring opening lines in chess (though Scythe's opening lines are much more intuitive and don't feel as arbitrary as chess).

So it's a more varied, more colorful chess with more mechanics, more players, it's more intuitive, and it has more lore. It's pretty good.

The lore is really nothing to write home about beyond the surface. "Cool, mechs!" is about the highest praise you'll find yourself giving the lore. The actual historical writing is nauseating and could be a whole rant-post unto its own.

Sometimes it gets racist and victim-blaming. For example, Usonia, this world's version of the United States, abolishes slavery much earlier. Why? The slaves fought harder in war, and everyone was so moved they abolished slavery right away. Riiight. If only those slaves weren't such lazy soldiers, amirite everyone? There's all kinds of shit like this.

But hey! Cool, mechs! Oh right, and airships! Guess it was wrong about mechs being all there is to praise.

Scythe also tries to solve two problems in interesting ways. One is the problem of people taking forever in strategy games to calculate the totally optimal move. Scythe tries to capture that element of earlier Eurogames like Catan where games went by fast as fuck because there was so much you couldn't know, while being deterministic. To solve this, Scythe makes it illegal to calculate everyone's score on your turn, so you just have to get a feel for everyone's relative strength and act accordingly even if sub-optimally.

Another problem is the problem of having to keep track of what everything does. Scythe takes intense care, far more than most board games, to set everything up so that it's very intuitive what everything does. Pieces cover up things you don't need, and the game works where the moment those things become needed, other things need to be covered up. It's gorgeous and satisfying.

Scythe: The Digital Edition

Both of those solutions are thrown out the window in Scythe: The Digital Edition. Everything else remains the same.

Because there's no need for it, all of the beautiful ways in which Scythe communicates to the player with the way the board is arranged is gone in the game. Everything just becomes a button that does a certain thing, and which leads to you needing to push other buttons.

That's fine, although you miss the elegance of the board game.

More importantly however is that scoring is now instantly computed. This completely changes the game. Seeing everyone's score puts everyone back in the position of taking longass turns, although the game is overall faster now so it's not so bad. Playing on a computer just speeds things up for some reason.

Speed is the least of your problems. It's just that the two games are now incredibly different experiences. In the board game, you often play intuitively. You intuit how strong everyone is, how strong your position is, and you act on principles like "whoever achieves all of their objectives first with the most area tends to be the winner" and the like.

But now, everyone has access to their precise score. And near the endgame, games slow way down. You're call calculating precisely how many points you'll end up with if this happens, or if that happens, or, ooh, what if that happened? And that can be fun, it can be challenging, it can also be a headache. Sometimes it's in the mood for it, sometimes it isn't. Very frequently, not that it's enforceable, its friend group will ban looking at the score so we can play it like the board game, for old time's sake.

They're such small changes but the two games are now just such different experiences. One is elegant and flows, the other is clunky and slows (even if it is overall faster). Both have their merits. Gun to its head though, it prefers Scythe the board game over Scythe the video game.

Conclusion

Scythe is...alright. It's a fun time, but of course, there's better games. It's also pretty racist and chauvinistic and liberal and shallow in its lore? So there's that.

When it moved from being a board game to a video game, it definitely lost something meaningful. It's still a fun time, but if you've only ever played the video game, try the board game out some time. Used to be, you could've done that on Tabletop Simulator, but to prevent competition they removed it.

And that's a damned shame. Because they're not the same. And we lost something worthwhile when The Digital Edition became the way to play online. It's alright. But it could've been, um, alrighter.

Definitely worth trying out and taking in all there is to appreciate about it, but you're probably not going to walk away with a burning passion for it.

So after eight years since VI's release, it decided to get into Civilization VI. People were often talking about how innovative this game was, and it knew the Civilization Players League had a ton of cool balancing tools to make the game really engaging.

And obviously, the fact that there's a league for competing at all means a lot of people have found a lot of meaning in competing in the game.

The main worry it had was that 4X games are often all about knowledge checks, and you can often win with next to no experience against people who've played the game for years by just looking up strategies that dominate the meta if they haven't already done so. For those who are used to competing with strategy board games that throw you into a new, random situation every game and understanding principles is more important than knowing all the knowledge checks, it can be very frustrating to play strategy video games that add a ton of complexity just to make it hard to know all the things you're "supposed" to know.

Unfortunately, despite all the talk of innovations, Civilization VI was not much different. Just like how you had to know to Radio->Ideology in Civilization V, or that Great Scientists, Engineers, and Merchants are pooled together and so Merchants harm your science and production, you have to "just know" all kinds of things in Civilization VI and it makes for a very unpleasant experience with friends, competing over who knows more specific facts rather than whose intuition is better calibrated to the game's underlying patterns.

Not every game needs to be almost entirely principled like Spirit Island, Sidereal Confluence, or Go, but as an example, you can make up for a lack of knowledge in games like Twilight Imperium in all kinds of ways. It's just a very frustrating experience to know that to get to that point of making clever decisions, you and your friends are going to have to commit to like a year of doing homework so that you're not just one-upping one another on the basis of who happened to find the best resource for understanding the game.

And then if you want to play competitively, the main competitive leagues harbor tons of abusers who regularly try and drive vulnerable members in the league out, and refuse to do anything about harassment campaigns against minorities in their community because "this is just for gaming, we won't pick political sides" or whatever.

After playing with friends for about six months and feeling like any victories were awarded to whoever found the better tutorial for how to play the game, like it was rarely a matter of who found the insight necessary at a critical point to win, it was hard to keep going. The innovations of Civilization VI didn't make a meaningful difference between its experience of VI and V.

If you don't like dealing with abusers who face no consequences in CPL while those who call them out get punished, if you want to very quickly get up to date on all of the mechanics of a game and how they tie together and start just seeing who can outpace who in terms of decision-making, then Civilization VI is largely going to be a big waste of time. Obviously there are plenty of people outside of that demographic.

But for it and its friends, well, back to trying out new strategy board games. Been meaning to try out Brass: Birmingham from six years back.