Scythe

Jamey Stegmaier. Art by Jakub Rozalski. Stonemaier Games, 2016.

1-5 Players | 115 Minutes | Age 14+

Jamie Stegmaier’s Scythe is an engine-building game in which players take control of nations struggling to survive in 1920s ‘Europa’, a place riven by unrest caused by the Great War. The city-state known simply as “The Factory”, whose territory occupies the centre of the board, has fueled the war with the production of heavily armored mechs. The game opens when the Factory has closed its doors, drawing the attention of nearby armies keen to get hold of technology to improve their lot.

Scythe is an engine-building game set in an alternate-history 1920s Europe. Each player represents a character from one of five factions of Europe who are attempting to earn their fortune and claim their faction’s stake in the land around the Factory. Players conquer territory, enlist new recruits, reap resources, gain villagers, build structures, and activate mechs to earn victory points and end the game. Scythe favours gameplay skill over luck. Other than each player’s individual hidden objective card, the only elements of random variability are encounter cards that players will draw as they interact with newly explored territories. Combat is also driven by player choice, not luck. Scythe uses a streamlined action-selection mechanism (no rounds or phases) to keep gameplay moving at a brisk pace and reduce downtime between turns. While there is plenty of direct conflict for players who seek it, there is no player elimination. It has been described as a hybrid game, combining elements of the Ameritrash genre with eurogame resource management and strategy.

It is theme rather than the mechanics that earn Scythe its place in this ludography. Set in an alternate-history 1920s Eastern Europe, it is a game of farming and war in which powerful nation states vye for land and resources. While the game’s setting is described as alternate-history, Scythe might be equally well described exploring a speculative future characterised by aggressive competition for resources. There are many possible examples of games that imagine pessimistic futures brought on by the climate catastrophe. Other examples include Frostpunk: The Board Game (Glass Cannon Unplugged, 2022), a game set in the aftermath of an ice storm of apocalyptic proportions and Jeff and Carla Horger’s Mad Max style racing game Apocalypse Road (GMT, 2020) in which the absence of story leaves players space to ask themselves just why it might be that they find themselves racing cars at the end of the world? Rolling coal springs to mind.

The potential value of such games is in the way that they allow plates to explore potential futures and the possibility of conflict for limited resources shaping human social interactions and politics. Similar climate imaginaries should be expected to emerge in game-based discussions of the climate crisis. Indeed in our hacking workshops with young people games such as Catan and Forbidden Island have rapidly been reskinned as nightmarish games of collective disaster in exuberant displays of what has been described as ‘dark play’, a mode of play that exploits tension between order and chaos, evokes subversive or otherwise deviant themes, and deceives players such that the boundary between play and not play becomes porous (Schecher 2002; Linderoth and Mortensen 2015: 5; Germaine Buckley 2020: 363). Such dark play is expressed in both the narrative and mechanics of Scythe, with players able to choose encounter options that sabotage citizens’ recovery efforts through theft or violent intimidation, though such choices always come with a cost to popularity, which is the games’ victory points multiplier stat. Unpopular factions will find it hard to win victory at the close of gameplay.