You know what the world needs? More mechs. But I don’t mean Japanese mecha, I mean old style giant-tin-cans-on-legs mechs. We’re talking about the old Mechwarrior from the nineties mechs, where it took forever to turn and your vehicle was huge, plodding and carrying the weight of something that would be thousands of pounds. Japanese mecha are cute but are basically samurai with guns.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

So over the past month, I got the privilege of playing a boardgame that fulfills this desperate gaping hole in our societal’s foundations: Scythe – a Stonemaier Games release designed by Jamey Stegmaier. For my friends who are super into boardgames – and let’s be clear, I am not super into boardgames – this was an exciting release. The art is gorgeous (though evidently mired in controversy) and the gameplay is pretty interesting. I wanted to give the game a shot, and a large part of that was the massive steam powered mechs set in a turn of the nineteenth century Europe struggling with a shift from agrarian society to an industrial one. But beyond the neat setting for the game, there’s a number of interesting gameplay mechanics that made the game standout.

Sadly, Derek and I never really got an opportunity to try the game together when it lauched. Derek played it a bunch, however, so when he invited Adam and I to a campaign for the final expansion release, I felt I was at a bit of a disadvantage. Scythe had already two substantial add-ons – Invaders from Afar and The Wind Gambit – and Rise of Fenris was billed as being its biggest addition yet. I had some catching up to do and I was essentially thrown at the wolves in order to do it.

Let’s begin with what I learned from my first game.

Scythe involves players choosing a faction which provides them with a lovely little hero figurine that depicts their character and their animal companion. I’m not certain why every character has a pet. From what I can tell, they never factor into the gameplay itself, but each seems to be designed carefully around matching the animal and character with their general culture on which they are styled. A faction is a fantasy version of an old turn-of-the-century nation state. Derek chose them randomly for our session and we had Saxony (Germany), Nordic Kingdom (Norway) and the Togawa Shogunate (Japan). We were then randomly assigned our factions with Adam on Germany, Derek on Norway and myself as Japan. Derek was excited since he got to play his favourite faction. I was fortunate since I was the only expansion faction and had additional rules to learn.

We then played our first game of the Rise of Fenris campaign.

Thankfully, Rise of Fenris is specifically designed for idiots like me. It introduces the elements of the game gradually, with only the campaign log sheet as the new element to juggle on the first match. This let me focus on learning the base of Scythe. Which, despite its appearance, isn’t as formidable as I initially felt.

Scythe is a rather misleading game that appears like it would be fantastical Risk on a strange board. Every faction starts in a predetermined location. The original five start on isolated islands with the two expansion factions (Scotland and Japan) taking up the distant corners of the map. The board is separated into hexagonal territories associated with a single resource. There are four resources on the board – wheat (or honeypots as we called them), iron, wood and oil. You need wheat, iron, wood and oil in order to enlist lieutenants, build your mechs, build your structures and upgrade your board actions respectively. Along with your faction board, every player is handed a random action board at the start of each match. These boards have the same actions split across four columns but the top actions are randomly paired with the bottom actions on each board. That was a confusing sentence.

Let’s break down the action board since it’s the meat of the game. If you are dealt, say, the Patriotic board, then you will have the Move action on the top of your first column and the upgrade on the bottom. On the other hand, the Industrial board has the Bolster action over the Upgrade action on the first column. The way your turns work is that you will select one column and then perform the top and bottom actions (if able). Some of the top actions have a cost associated with them but they’re usually pretty small like paying a coin. The bottom section, however, all have much higher costs. These costs, of course, are determined by your action board so those Industrial and Patriotic names aren’t just for show. They will generally steer your style of play with your faction.

It’s an interesting way to mix-up the game’s strategy. Each faction has a unique element that generally makes them strong at a portion of the game. Saxony may place any number of their accomplishment stars for winning battles despite the game’s win condition. This naturally pushes them towards war. Norway, however, can cross rivers with their workers prior to building the associated mech which grants that ability. Thus, Norway is pretty good at territory control. Japan drops traps and I have no idea how they work because expansion factions are weird. But while you may pick Saxony as your faction you might end up with the Agriculture board that makes your mechs cost four iron to build. That’s a lot of iron and may direct you towards a more peaceful approach to the game.

So how do you win?

Each player has six star tokens to track their progress against twelve or so tasks. These tasks range from winning a battle, building all your mechs or maxing out the power tracker on the game board. The first player to place all six stars immediately ends the game. But this doesn’t necessarily mean they win. Factions are then scored on the number of territories they control, the amount of gold they have accumulated and the number of stars that they have placed. How high your score is on these three factors is further influenced by your popularity with the people. It’s possible (and happened twice!) that you could trigger the end of the game and still lose the match – much to Adam’s chagrin. From what I can gather, reputation is king and you want to get as high as you can on that track so that all your other objectives will push you ahead of your opponents. There’s a bit of a wrinkle with this reputation tracker, however. Whenever you battle an opponent and win, you force that opponent to retreat his units back to his starting territory. If some of those units are workers, then you lose reputation equal to the number of workers that were forced to retreat.

So despite the initial appearance of trying to dominate the board and scoop up all the resources, there’s a real cost to just rampaging which will be reflected in the people’s dislike of you as a war tyrant.

In fact, I did very well during the campaign by minimizing my combat engagement. I mostly adopted a strategy of trying to pump my popularity as high as I could while constantly improving my action board and building the little buildings. There are the four different actions on your action board, after all, and mechs only really contribute to combat. Buildings provide four different bonuses. They’re pretty small and mostly improve your action economy when taking the top action on your board. Your monument, for example, can improve your popularity by one every time you take a bolster action. The windmill allows you to produce an additional resource on the tile that it’s built. Your mine allows greater movement between certain tiles on the map and the armoury improves your power on the power tracker.

There’s a lot of moving parts to Scythe and while the game mechanics are fairly simple, knowing what to do is pretty complicated. I made a goal of trying to reach the factory for my first couple of games. The factory space is located in the centre of the board and when you arrive you may look at the top two cards of the factory deck and choose one to keep. This gives you access to an additional action that you may take. The value of this action, however, varies wildly between what your goals are and the card you draw. I saw a lot of factory cards throughout the campaign and can confirm that they are not all built equally. Sadly, controlling the factory also counts as three territories at the end of the game scoring. I say sadly because I never was able to maintain it throughout the campaign due to the presence of far stronger military factions that could chase me out whenever they wanted. But it does mean that the factory always holds strategic value and a point of interest even after you scoop up that factory card.

So that’s regular Scythe in a nutshell. It’s meaty enough that even after a couple of runs through the regular game, I still don’t know what’s the best way to address it. But as the campaign progressed, a regular game quickly became a fleeting thing.

See, Scythe: Rise of Fenris adds a whole slew of wrinkles to this formula. I believe there was a new mechanic pretty much every game. And there were eight matches to be played throughout Fenris. A lot of these new elements were mostly to add variance to basic aspects of a regular Scythe game. For example, later on in the campaign you can randomly select the tasks that you place your stars on. The expansion also included mech and infrastructure mods. These are powerful tokens that can really change the nature of your faction. Mech mods allow you to customize the abilities your mechs provide. Oh! I didn’t talk about mech abilities (because there’s so much of the darn game to cover). When you build a mech, it provides a new bonus that applies to your character and all your mechs for the rest of the game. Some of these are simple things like giving you an extra movement when you take a move action. Others give you greater advantages in combat like if you are fighting alone or if you’re defending. Some let you enter the lake tiles or move from lake to lake. Since you can’t take the same action twice, these little changes can give you an advantage whenever you take your movement action. The mech mods allow you to further customize and specialize your faction for a specific game plan.

Infrastructure mods, however, are the real bees knees. Most of these give you a free use of a bottom action board action. This is really valuable in the early game when you’re unlikely to have four iron to build your first mech which could take upwards of four turns or more to achieve. All three of us immediately latched onto grabbing as many infrastructure mods as possible and I’m uncertain about their value outside of a campaign game. It did make the campaign feel a bit manageable since it shrank the length of the games (and we had to squeeze three games in each time we played). I could see infrastructure mods being an excellent way to introduce a handicap for a mixed-skill play group, however. Give your beginning players a free infrastructure mod or two while the more experienced players get nothing. It’s a little advantage that can give the beginner something to be more competitive and a pretty simple addition that doesn’t require a lot of explanation.

I’d say the biggest mechanic the Rise of Fenris adds that would get the most play are the two new factions. These are pretty advanced when compared to the original factions released. And, as luck would have it, Adam and I both ended piloting them in our games. I was in control of the Vesna faction which is all about variance. Vesna’s mechs actually start with two blank abilities and her other two mechs have very underwhelming abilities. However, she has a pile of her own mech mods that she picks six randomly at the start of each game. You then tailor your mechs to the mods you chose and the goal of that match. For a more experienced player, I can see how this would be very valuable. I mostly just picked random ones because I had no idea how to use my mechs. Her other ability, however, I really enjoyed. At the beginning of the game, after setup, she gets to draw three factory cards that she has access to from the very start of the match! This is extremely powerful but comes with a significant downside. Once she uses a factory card, she must discard it. This applies to the factory card she picks up from reaching the middle of the board as well. However, early access to these cards seemed very powerful and I think Vesna is a strong early game faction meant to rush out an early advantage then close the game before her enemies can catch up.

The Fenris faction, however, is almost the exact opposite. Led by Rasputin, Fenris is all about war. They have a stack of eighteen influence tokens. Whenever Rasputin moves, he can drop these tokens on the board – one on his square and one anywhere else. Later, with a mech ability, Rasputin and his mechs can jump to influence tokens. This gives Fenris unprecedented mobility but there is a cost. Each influence token held at the end of the game counts as a negative victory point! Thus, Rasputin begins with a massive deficit in victory points that he’s trying to offload. A further wrinkle, however, is that enemy players may move onto influence tokens. Doing so claims the token but also results in negative victory points at the end of the game. Rasputin also has a unique board in that he naturally has less and gains less popularity. No one likes weird Russian mysticism. It’s hard for me to evaluate the strength of Fenris, especially since Adam came into it so late in the campaign and accidentally had a perfect setup to play them (since he was initially Saxony, all his infrastructure mods were for pumping out fast mechs which is Fenris’ goal). Even worse, Adam was able to leverage his superior mobility (and our low player count) to secure Tesla for the final match of the campaign.

Tesla I think may be the least useful element of Rise of Fenris. I didn’t like him and I’m not saying that just because he made me lose or that he’s ridiculously broken in the Fenris faction. Tesla operates as a second hero for your faction, with all the abilities of that hero. Only one player can control Tesla but when it means that Adam can toss influence tokens at twice the rate, it really negates the negative of Fenris while also making it near impossible for us to counter him. I was able to eke out a victory in the final map, but as it turns out, final scoring basically assured Adam the win after his run as Saxony. Seriously, if you want to win the Fenris campaign, grab Saxony. Their ability to complete multiple quests per game and get as many stars as battles they win is silly since you can claim those victories as any goal during the final scoring. More than half your final score is determined by how many rows and columns you complete on your campaign log and Saxony ensures that, no matter what random board or victory condition you pull, you will always be able to fulfill your missing requirements for those rows.

Granted, Derek did teach us the game wrong so we were all playing with one victory condition near impossible to complete. That might have skewed things a little as well.

Overall, I think I liked the Rise of Fenris expansion. It adds quite a lot to the Scythe experience but its greatest strength is providing more variance so you can breathe new challenges and strategies into matches if you’ve played it enough to turn the base game stale. There’s far too many fiddly components in it, however, so I think you’ll only ever end up playing with one or two different components in any given match. At the very least, Vesna and Rasputin should give a lot of exciting games on their own with their very strong faction abilities.

And I don’t want to brag too much, but for having never played the game before, I ended up winning five of the eight matches. Maybe I was given an unfair advantage between having Japan and turning their start location into the incredibly mobile Vesna.

Or maybe I’m just a Scythe savant. Though it’s more likely that I’m an idiot savant.