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My Surreal Afternoon Spent Explaining Scythe to my Boss.

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19 Dec 2018 14:39 #288476 by cdennett

Sagrilarus wrote:

cdennett wrote: On paper I should like Scythe, but boy do I not... My Collector's Edition with lots of upgrades now resides with a friend of mine.


Dude, that's your worst-case scenario. You don't want a friend to own Scythe, because it will be set up and ready to go when you get to his house!

That won't be a problem. He knows my opinions on games, and likewise I know his. We are the most consistent members of my game night, and we almost never play the same games together. Hell, we were at BGG.Con together for 4 days and never once played a game together (which admittedly is easy with a group of 17). For our game nights, we always try to have a "Chris game" and a "Ken game" and the two have basically no overlap. I've known him for almost 20 years, he would not do that to me, nor I him.

Sagrilarus wrote: I'm simply amazed at the non-love this game gets here, in spite of me more or less thinking that it's tripe. It's the least-loved of the most-loved games.

Perhaps we're all bitter that it's not the game we thought it was going to be...
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19 Dec 2018 14:44 #288477 by Frohike
So, Scythe is becoming the Mouse Trap experience for the current generation? Seems like a proper fate.
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19 Dec 2018 15:08 #288478 by ChristopherMD
This is how it would have gone with me and similar conversations have happened at work.


Boss: "Have you heard of Scythe?"

Me: "That thing for harvesting crops?"

Boss: "No, the board game. You said you played board games as a hobby."

Me: "Just Monopoly."


Bullet dodged. I hate talking to non-gamers about games.
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19 Dec 2018 15:41 #288479 by southernman
This thread is why I have so much respect for the quality of opinions offered at this site ... (with the exception of the GW US VP Mikey Barnes).
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19 Dec 2018 15:44 #288480 by SaMoKo

Frohike wrote: So, Scythe is becoming the Mouse Trap experience for the current generation? Seems like a proper fate.


Except we are the bucket. And the game is the plastic boot that forever kicks us
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19 Dec 2018 18:18 #288482 by Cranberries
I just volunteered on Facebook to give someone game recommendations for their kid after they bought Codenames. Why? Why didn't I just put in all caps, I AM MILDLY AUTISTIC. THAT IS ALL.
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19 Dec 2018 18:29 #288483 by drewcula
I come to Foretress:AT for the OPs, but I stay for the comments!
Thanks everybody! I'll just keep admiring the Scythe box illustration and be done with it.
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19 Dec 2018 20:01 - 19 Dec 2018 20:02 #288489 by Jexik

drewcula wrote: I come to Foretress:AT for the OPs, but I stay for the comments!
Thanks everybody! I'll just keep admiring the Scythe box illustration and be done with it.


Too much Pokémon exposure has me picturing this:



But blowing something up or something.
Last edit: 19 Dec 2018 20:02 by Jexik.

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19 Dec 2018 20:37 #288491 by Shellhead
Whatever they paid the artist for Scythe, they didn't pay enough. That game would have been received as a typical seven at BGG if not for the art.
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19 Dec 2018 21:23 #288493 by san il defanso
Scythe is fine, but it's not nearly as cool as it looks from the box art. Actually, I think its key problem is that it doesn't have any sort of focus as a design, but it does all of that unfocused stuff in a very interlocked, efficient design. It does the thing it does really well without being very clear on what that thing actually is.

It does come off as a massive bait-and-switch though, especially for the average user on TWBG.
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19 Dec 2018 22:38 #288498 by mc
Is the box art that great?

Like.... is it just that there's mechs in it? If they weren't there, would people still go ga-ga over it? From what I understand, yes, the publishers owe the artist a great debt because it created loads of buzz etc etc.

But I often read how amazing it is and always have another look and still don't see it. I mean, it's more nicely rendered than a lot of other box art but...

I'm obviously not the target audience (insert "I know what I like" caveat obviously).

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19 Dec 2018 22:57 #288502 by Frohike
It was the combo of Brueghel and mechs that gave the initial shock value, yeah. I mean that combination is immediately evocative. Can't lie.
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19 Dec 2018 23:23 #288506 by Sagrilarus

san il defanso wrote: It does the thing it does really well without being very clear on what that thing actually is.


Uh, can you clue us in on what that thing is? As best I can tell Scythe tries to do frikkin' everything, all of it simultaneously. It's a kitchen-sink design. The only thing I think it's missing is a rondel.
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19 Dec 2018 23:56 #288507 by san il defanso

Sagrilarus wrote:

san il defanso wrote: It does the thing it does really well without being very clear on what that thing actually is.


Uh, can you clue us in on what that thing is? As best I can tell Scythe tries to do frikkin' everything, all of it simultaneously. It's a kitchen-sink design. The only thing I think it's missing is a rondel.


I'm sure I don't know. More what I mean is that all of the mechanical elements work really well with each other. It's a game of tumblers clunking into place, allowing more tumblers to turn. That's tough to do mechanically, but it's in service of a game that is absolutely all over the place. Is it an economic game? A conflict game? A game about victory points? A game about a post-apocolyptic world? It's none of those things very clearly and all of them at the same time. It's well-designed sound and fury, the game design equivalent of a nothingburger.

I say this as someone who would probably not turn down a game. It's runaway success has surprised me though.
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20 Dec 2018 08:07 #288514 by RobertB
Four of us where I work bought Scythe off of Kickstarter. Top-notch art + mechs + cool bits + 4X = sign me up for some of that. Hell, I almost pulled the trigger on the game art book. I liked what I got, but after a few plays I didn't love it, and it definitely wasn't quite what I was expecting.

The story behind it, if you GAS, is that this is a post-Great War environment. The mechs aren't fine-tuned war machines, but repurposed agricultural/industrial equipment. And fighting is frowned upon, because everyone's tired of fighting. IIRC, in Stonemeier's design notes he wants fighting allowed, but expensive. He wants to address the problem of 'I sat down at a Civilization game, and a game of Risk broke out.'

It's kind of like a really good Vegas buffet; there's a little bit of everything, and all done okay.
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