I have to say the following as I’d hate to have ruined the campaign for anyone.
SPOILER ALERT! The following post contains spoilers for the Rise of Fenris campaign for Scythe. If you haven’t played the expansion and wish to avoid any spoilers you may want to avoid this post and join me in a future one.
The morning started off with Ben sending me a text saying he was unlikely to make our session later.
As per normal (well for me) I arrived early and started to set up.
I know folks might find this hard to believe, but I actually enjoy setting up Scythe! It’s a breeze.
We were due to have Lizzy and Mark join us for the campaign but you can guess from how I started the sentence they were unable to. While setting up Lizzy messaged me that Mark seemed to have whatever she had mid week.
I just had an image in my head that I was going to end up with no one coming, and be sitting there looking like Billy no mates in front of the footy fans watching the lunchtime match (Everton vs Man U), and mothers having a kid free beverage.
While waiting for the appointed time between drinking my latte, eating my ham roll, and bagging the game pieces in Cryptid. I was checking my phone regularly for messages from Jeff and Shane.
There was a big sigh of relief when Jeff turned up. Followed by Shane.
Refreshments is place. It was time for …
Episode 3
Our faction/player board match ups for this episode were as follows after randomly drawing the player boards.
- Saxony Empire/Agricultural (Black) – Jeff
- Nordic Kingdoms/Engineering (Blue) – Shane
- Rusviet Union/Innovative (Red) – Me
The factory deck and space were going to be different this episode.
For starters a character card for Vesna, daughter of Nicolas Tesla was added to the initial four cards. Then a further four cards were added, with the larger deck then being shuffled.
During this episode when we visited the factory tile we would get an encounter token. We would then shuffle the deck and reveal cards equal to the number of encounter tokens we had. If one of the cards was Vesna we’d keep the card. Otherwise if we didn’t have a factory card already we could keep one of the revealed cards.
It was the turn of the Rusviets to have an episode nerf. For this episode only (I’m assuming) the Township ability was replaced. I could no longer jump into the factory tile from a controlled village tile. However I could jump from a controlled village tile to an unoccupied one. Which was nearly as cool, and did allow me to get more than my share of encounter tokens.
Goals for the episode were to accumulate influence tokens, find Vesna, and win the game. I’m always forgetting to do that later one!
The story mission did have that “Save the cheerleader, save the world.” vibe to it.
I got off to a blazing start and had the objective for all my workers out on the map completed. It helped that my starting perk for this episode was an extra worker.
Then things slowed down for me, with Shane not long after also completing the same objective.
It transpired that using my faction ability to abuse the crap out of a factory card (damn game balancing errata) wasn’t our only miss play in the opening episodes. In episode 2 Jeff got most of his objective points from completing missions. He was drawing new ones, when he completed one. It had escaped me that he was doing this. I thought he was getting new ones from Encounter cards.
Shane queried his Engineering player board and it’s move action.
It looked like it did not have the slash between the move actions and the gain coins action. Shane was querying whether it should have one there. I said if it didn’t then it was a misprint. Otherwise that’d be an insanely power action.
As the photo of the Engineering player board above shows that it does indeed exist on the player board. It’s just very hard to see thanks to the gorgeous art work. A black line on a dark grey part of the image doesn’t make it the easiest thing to spot.
Naturally my three visits to the Factory failed to find Vesna. But it did get me three influence tokens, and a factory card. To add salt to the wound Jeff defeated my mech on the space, and then found Vesna on his first attempt.
I was too slow putting stars out. Although I did get the one for having the maximum bolster points. One I rarely get in games. I had been playing catch up on that front for most of the game.
So it came as little surprise Jeff triggered the end of the game. I was at least three maybe four turns away from being able to do the same. I’d only got four stars out.
The final scores were as follows:
As you can see Jeff won with a very comfortable margin.
So Jeff’s reward for finding Vesna was to change his faction! Saxony is no more. Jeff had the honour of opening box A to have the new plastic revealed to him. It looks pretty cool. However you will have to wait until we play episode 4 to see photos.
The rulebook very generously also allowed the rest of us to change our factions if we so wished. Shane and I both declined that offer.
We also got to draw more infrastructure mods. I bought the Construction mod. Which means I now have three mods to use each game. My other two being Cavalry and Automachines. Bloody shame I never used those two this episode. That might explain a little why I didn’t do as well. Failure to utilise all my resources.
The influence tokens also meant something this game other than card draw on the factory deck. For every two influence tokens (rounded up) you got to increase a setup bonus by one. I spent them wisely on popularity. So from now on I start each episode with an extra two popularity.
I ended this session with $16. Just enough to buy the perk at the start of episode four.
What a great game. Loved it. Loved the hunt for Vesna and the change to the factory deck. Wow! Getting the new faction. Can’t wait to see what that does in episode four.
