The digital port of mechs and economics 4x Scythe is now out of Steam Early Access and into a proper release. The full version of the game has a number of improvements, including a Hard difficulty setting for the game’s AI. We took a look at the game on its early access launch and called it slick and sharp—it’s a distillation of the 4x that many strategy fans are going to enjoy.

Scythe: Digital Edition is a port of Jamey Stegmaier’s board game, developed by The Knights of Unity, and published by Asmodee Digital. Scythe is well known for prominently featuring the 1920+ alternate universe of polish artist Jakub Rozalsk, a world also featured in upcoming RTS Iron Harvest. 

Here are the highlights of the release version changes: 

• Hard difficulty AI 
• Action Assist Display
• Camera Rotation 
• Stats for local games
• Steam Content (badges, Trading cards and backgrounds)
• Mac OSX support
• New languages supported: Japanese, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian.

The Knights of Unity also promise more updates in "the coming weeks and months," with some great tabletop-esque rules like bribing other players to take actions, as well as a spectator mode for online play. You can check out Scythe: Digital Edition on Steam. 

Not much has changed since the great war. Peasants tend fields, the Great Powers of Europa chase glory, and giant mechanized walkers crunch o’er the ashes. A game of expansion and harvest, Scythe Digital Edition steams the 4X down to its base appetites, turns you loose in its efficiency sandbox and lets you play two-thirds of a game in the time it takes to set up the tabletop version. 

After a slick tutorial, Scythe tucks you into a corner of its strategy map, presses a couple of coins in your hand and shouts 'Go!' Depending on which faction and player board you’ve been assigned, the strategy starts to set in: Do you build? Expand? Pillage? 

Unlike other 4Xes, there is only one victory in Scythe: Have the most money at the end. But money is analogous to points, with massive bonuses doled out at the end for completing various objectives. Deploy a squadron of mechs to stomp about the countryside? Points. Turn inward and focus on economic and technological development? Points. Become a beloved folk hero? Mongering warlord? Pointy pointy points. The challenge lies entirely in getting there faster than your opponents.

A turn in Scythe, whether you’re playing as migratory Polania or adaptable Crimea, goes only one way: Select one of four basic actions—move, trade, bolster power, or harvest—then pay an additional cost to perform a linked secondary action. It’s the latter that leads to victory, letting you upgrade your faction’s production lines or field new mechs, but doing so is costly and cumbersome, requiring you to delicately balance order of operations as you put off harvesting ‘til next round and trade for lumber instead, thus giving you a new armory in two moves rather than three.

It’s this calculus that lies at the heart of Scythe; for all its hex-based aesthetics, quirky encounters with the locals, and grand designs of mechanized glory, winning requires you to come to grips with the efficiency engine you’ve been lashed to, balance it against a few randomized point-scoring goals, then vault over the finish line before those bastards over there do.

For that reason, Scythe pushes refinement over creative adaptation, expertise over exploration—but just as in the board game, the achievements gently nudge players towards self-imposed unorthodoxy. Can you win with no structures? No mechs? The preset map size and layout means player count greatly affects the experience—two powers on opposite corners can play points chicken, revving their respective engines closer and closer to redline—while a five player game bestows the intimate tension of a knife fight in a phone booth.

But once you understand its mechanisms, Scythe will reward you with a feeling of deep cleverness. Your brain begins to intuit the harmonic interplay of its four twin-linked actions, how one flows into the next, and if you can just keep all the plates spinning for three more turns you can land a moonshot of an action sequence and feel like a 4X god. You’ll regularly have to map out ambitious plans; trade for wood to construct a mine to access the western oilfields before the Rusviets do, recruit some workers and get a mech in position to transport them over there… and have enough combat cards ready for when the bloody Saxons inevitably charge a pair of fifty ton walkers through the works.

Scythe’s roots as a board game mean this adaptation is light on things you might expect from a PC civ game: there are no combat animations or 3D terrain, your workers do not saunter ant-like from hex to hex. It does, however, retain all the charm and heart; from frolicking with bear cavalry in a random encounter to the little regionally-dressed workers. The soundtrack is stunning, in particular the hypnotic Crimean percussion and the fervent drums and chanting of the Nordic theme as the track slowly yields into plaintive strings and the squawking of distant crows. This is the first board game soundtrack I’ve found myself humming late into the night.

The AI is no slouch either: Even after two dozen games under my belt the intermediate bots are still a rough beat, meaning there’s plenty of longevity for you to stretch your strategic legs—but I found myself missing the tactility of slotting upgrade cubes into cut-out player boards, or being able to cajole and chat with my fellow players. Like most digital implementations, Scythe’s strength is in asynchronous multiplayer (coming next month, complete with ELO matchmaking), but a full replacement for the board game this isn’t, unless one foresees mainly solo outings.

Currently chugging through its Early Access period, Scythe’s future patch notes are a sunny shopping list of niceties: a Mac version, spectator mode, camera customisation. A major update which released mid-way through this review has made the learning curve less opaque, leading to fewer 'how the heck did I lose' moments, and plans are afoot for the first expansion, adding on the Albion and Togawa factions. (While yet unannounced, hopes are they’ll also implement the airship and narrative campaign.) 

Scythe Digital Edition is available now on Steam Early Access, with a full release and first expansion due in August. The host of usability tweaks put in since we last looked at it in May have transformed it, and everything they’ve posted on their Roadmap seems gravy. Evocative, clever, and rewarding, Scythe Digital Edition is starting to look like one of the finest board games on PC. 

Retro-futurist mecha game Scythe has finally come to wide release on Steam, entering Early Access yesterday. An adaptation of one of the most popular board games of the last few years, Scythe is a 4x that sees players vying over the fictional landscape of eastern Europa in the 1920s. A highly strategic game that focuses on encouraging players to adapt their overall tactics to the board as it develops, Scythe is beloved by many board gamers for its combination of unique visuals and thematic gameplay. It won a slew of awards, from 2016's Golden Geeks to the Origins Award. 

Scythe is a five-player game that can accommodate as few as two, but does best with three or more. While it does have conflict, it focuses more on controlling territory and exploiting resources to meet your secret and public objectives. Unlike many other 4x games, fighting is only one of the paths to victory and scaring off your opponents with strength is just as legitimate. The developers anticipate Scythe being in Early Access for two to four months, and plan on tweaking the AI and interface in that time among other elements. 

If you're interested you may benefit from reading the proper tabletop rulebook in addition to playing the current tutorials. 

Scythe is right here on Steam.

Scythe was one of the real standout board games of 2016, marrying a strong strategy game engine with Jakub Rozalski’s beautiful and fascinating world of 1920+. It’s the kind of strategy game you can get wargamers and more abstract strategists to play, with an emphasis on not just map control and conflict, but also on strategic economics.  Unfortunately, the now-available closed beta of Scythe on PC doesn’t look so good. While it preserves the original game’s mechanics in full, a number of user interface and presentation errors make it hard to recommend right now. 

The bones of tabletop Scythe are here in full. You’re a ripped-from-alt-history power like Polania or Rusviet vying for control in the fictional region of Eastern Europa at the end of a great war. In this world, an advanced city-state called The Factory fueled the war with mechs and advanced technology, but now lies silent at the heart of Eastern Europa. Each turn, you choose to take a series of actions such as moving units and then constructing buildings, or harvesting resources and then deploying a mech. These actions come in sets with costs based on a random specialization like industrial or agrarian—the second half of your player identity behind faction. Much of the overall strategy is optimizing these actions for an effective economy, ensuring that you can both move and have the resources to build a building so that none of your turn’s potential is wasted.

Discarding the very readable player mats used in the tabletop game, the digital edition opts for simplified action icons without text labels, meaning you have to click on one to read its text if you forget precisely what it is or how it operates. There are no tooltips to shorten the process, either. Checking yours or your opponents’ resources, including how close you are to victory, is equally annoying. You need multiple clicks to expand a large menu that blocks the top of the screen. The user interface fits awkwardly in the vast majority of PC aspect ratios, wasting valuable screen real estate everywhere. It reads like a design for mobile that was simply scaled up in size for PC.

That’s not to say all the design is bad. Your faction powers, secret objectives, and victory information are tucked away in convenient buttons in the top right—neatly out of the way for normal play, conveniently accessible if you forget what you’re up to or need a refresher.

There are other, less egregious user experience flaws, but they’re all still worrisome for a game that claims to be releasing this quarter. The UI lacks prompts or warnings, happily allowing you to skip your action or part of your turn entirely. It’s a bane for new players, who, under-tutorialized, can simply charge ahead with the “next action” button and do nothing because they didn’t know they had to go click two tiny tech buttons or go to the map and resources there to spend them.

Right now, the best way to learn to play this version of Scythe is to read the tabletop rulebook. Yet most players come to a digital edition either brand new or hoping for something that will remember and enforce the game’s rules for them. I can happily play Scythe by myself on the tabletop—it has great single-player modes—if I want to do all the work.  

The AI is also not quite up to snuff, miserably inefficient and seemingly incapable of grasping the basic strategy. It wastes its combat power on battles, hoards resources it doesn’t need, and expands its population unsustainably. (Now that I put it in writing, that’s actually much like a real human civilization.)

Scythe: Digital Edition is still in beta, and though there isn't much time before release, hopefully all this is cleared up before it launches this quarter. It’d be a shame if a great board game were ruined for PC players by a bad port.