Scythe is a board game from the engine builder genre. Is a rather complicated game as there are different types of entities and actions around. It is about collecting resources, deploying the hero, workers, mechs and buildings, moving them around, fighting with others, accomplishing achievements. In the end one obtains a score based on the number of achievements, controlled hexes and resources as well as left-over money and some bonus points.
The player will pick a random player mat, the following shows the innovative mat (German version):

Every turn one picks a new column and performs the top, bottom or both actions. There are certain patterns that lead to successful game play. Most importantly one should strive to do both the top and bottom action in order to get the most done each turn. With the innovative board, the bolster action is combined with the build action. Therefore one should have some wood ready when picking this to perform both actions. But wood is collected either through the trade or produce top-row actions, which have their own bottom-row actions. Different player mats have different arrangements, therefore the cycles that one goes through are also different. After playing this game a couple of times, one gets better at building a good engine.
Whenever I play such games, I see a game graph in my head. Abstract models seem to be more present than the beautiful artwork of the game. So I spend a whole rainy Saturday actually implementing a subset of the game and let if figure out good ways to build that engine. In this blog post I want to share the code, explain my approach and share some results. There is so much more to be done, but there is only so much one can do in one sitting.
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