About Scythe
The last few years I have been extremely interested in tabletop games- how they work, why they work, and environments they can cultivate. And no game has managed to raise more questions and excitement for me than Scythe.
Scythe is a complex resource management and territory control game, where players occupy 5 countries in a war-torn dieselpunk reimagining of 1920’s Europe. The gameplay involves very little luck and an immense amount of strategy and planning. While I wont go into detail here about how to play, I will give a brief explanation of the board and pieces below.
The board features a large number of moving parts. These include resource pieces, player characters, mech suits, meeples, player cards, action cards, event cards, factory cards, buildings, territory tokens, combat power, reputation, combat boosters, hidden role cards, and achievement markers. In short- its a lot to handle.
But the part of the game that has been so fascinating to me, is that you never need to pay attention to all of it. Rather, it is up to each player in their own time to decide which of these pieces they will choose to interact with, as well as how and when. Its for this reason that I am brought to my next point.
Gameplay And The Design Process
First I’d like to offer a definition for gameplay. Gameplay, in my own words, would be setting yourself a goal, a means to achieve it, and participating in a number of decisions to ultimately attempt to meat that goal. And when I think hard about that, it is nearly the exact process I have when I approach a fresh design task. I ask myself: “What is my goal? What are the steps to get there? How can I be efficient in this process?”.
It’s because of this that I often find myself turning games into design thinking, but also turning design thinking into games. Should I focus first on gathering resources, or pushing into new territory? Should I be sketching first, or going straight into 3D? There are always advantages to every path and every type of progress, and gamifying it has helped me in making what I think are the correct choices.
Where Does Multitasking Come Into All of This?
Multitasking is a crucial skill for designers. Managing our efforts in multiple projects is one thing, but even in one design we work on many things at once. Research, ideation, and teamwork are crucial to well made design, but all of them would suffer if we didn’t do them all at the same time to some degree. Along the same lines, in a game like Scythe, if you can’t focus on your own plans while keeping track of your allies and enemies, your state in the game will suffer. I feel that participating in both of these processes have helped me with developing a good sense of balance in my multitasking, and I continue to improve at it in both respects.
An excellent review of Scythe that inspired this text: https://www.pudgycatgames.com/post/scythe-game-review
