Raiders of Scythia - First Play!

17th August 2022

It's a Wednesday afternoon and we're round Simon's for some gaming goodness.

Become a raider in the world of antiquity and attack a bunch of ancient empires by placing meeples on a board!

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What's in a game?

• Game board: Raiders of Scythia features a big board that, for lack of a better term is divided into 5 different levels or 'slices'. Each one showing a different scene of a different area of the world with it's own colour palette.
  In the top level players can gain resources, while the 4 lower levels can be - as the name suggests - raided.
  Scythian Village: The top slice depicts the home settlement of the titular raiders.
  There are 8  'spaces' that allow players to perform certain actions.
  Each spot has a place to put 1 worker - some of these are coded to specific colours of workers, there are also places to put starter workers, more on this below.
  Civilisations: The 4 lower slices represent 4 different civilisations that can be raided by players. Each civilisation will have a number of locations that can be raided along with information pertinent to raiding, there are also spaces to place workers meeples and quest tiles.
• Player boards: Each player board is a long piece of card depicting a campsite in a wilderness setting. Each also contains some game information and places to put 6 cards - 1 hero card and 5 crew cards.
• Hero cards: There are 8 of these and as well as a illustration, each one provides some sort of special ability or bonus. I guess they are the leaders of your raiding parties.
• Crew cards: These can be recruited by players for a cost and are a bit similar to hero cards in that they provide a bonus for of the game's 2 actions.
  However, crew cards have hit points and strength and unlike hero card, crew cards can be killed.
• Animal cards: These cards all depict 2 animals, a eagle at the top and a horse at the bottom. Does that mean these are actually 'eagorse' cards or 'horgle' cards?
  Anyway, they can be assigned to crew cards to confer extra bonuses, these will differ if they are used as a eagle or a horse.
• Quest tiles: These square card tiles are double-sided. One side depicts some artwork and the other will show a quest that can be completed for VPs.
• Dice: The game uses six-siders, however as well as featuring numbers, they also contain icons that represent drops of blood. There are a total of 6 dice, 2 each in red, white and yellow.
• Tokens: Raiders of Scythia uses a large variety of tokens and I do mean large which are divided up into 3 types.
  • Workers: These are worker meeples and come in 3 colours, blue, grey and red.
  • Resources: There are 3 types of resource.
    Silver: Depicted by hexagonal card coins.
    Provisions: These brown tokens look a bit like chocolate muffins which I suppose is fairly appropriate.
    Kumis: These beige tokens are cups of kumis, which is apparently a type of alcohol derived from horse milk. However when I was told what the token represented, I misheard it as houmous! So forever from then on I will think of them as cups of houmous.
  • Plunder: There are 4 types of plunder, they are all represented by chunky hexagonal tokens in four colours.
    Black: Livestock.
    Brown: Wagons.
    Grey: Equipment, which is about vague as it gets, but what the hey!
    Yellow: Gold!
  • Wound tokens: Wait, there's a 5th type of token! Red blood droplet tokens used to represent and track wounds.
• Bag: Used to blind draw plunder tokens during setup.

Component quality is good throughout Raiders of Scythia, cards and tiles are exactly as you'd expect them to be.
The tokens are excellent, attention has gone into the creation of the provisions and houmous err... kumis and while the plunder tokens are more generic, they are also very chunky and tactile.

So, I think it looks like whoever owned the copy of Raiders of Scythia we played bought stickers that upgraded the tokens with artwork (As you can see from the photos.). I think that otherwise by default the tokens are plain.
This also means someone had to sit down and attach stickers to a lot of token, that would push me into the deep end!

Regardless of this, the game's art-style is excellent. I'm not an art expert but it uses a sort of line illustration with flat shading that shows a lot of detail and is used to great effect on the board as it shows various situations in the different situations without overly cluttering the board.

While there is a fair amount of iconography, it's mostly do with the tokens and is fairly apparent, I don't think that it will prove to be a problem.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Game board: Put out the game board and shuffle the quest tiles into a face-down stack. Place 2 tiles face-up in their allotted spots in the village part of the board.
  Also place quest tile face-down on to their allotted spaces on the other levels of the game board.
• Plunder: Put all the plunder tokens into the bag and give it a good shake. Then draw and place tokens on all the face-down quest tiles and board spaces as determined by the information for each spot.
• Workers: Raiders of Scythia begins with workers already on the board. Place worker meeples by their colours on to their allotted spaces on the game board.
• Player board: Give each player a board in their colour, along with 3 silver, 1 provision and 1 blue worker.
• Cards: Sort the cards by type and shuffle them into face down decks.
  Animal deck: Draw 3 cards and place them in a row adjacent to their deck.
  Hero deck: Draw a number of hero cards equal to the player count +1 and place them in a face-up row.
  Crew Deck: Also draw crew cards equal to the hero cards drawn and place them in a face-up row alongside the hero cards. Thus, creating pairs of hero and crew cards.
• Starting player: Determine the first player:
  Now in reverse order with who would be last, each player should choose a pair of 1 hero and 1 crew card and place them on their spaces on each player's board.
  The remaining hero cards should be discarded out of play and the remaining crew card should be put into the discard pile.
• Crew cards: Now deal 5 more crew cards to every player who should keep 3 of them and discard the other 2.
  Players should now have 1 hero and 4 crew cards on their player board.

On to play
In Raiders of Scythia, players will vying to gain resources which will allow them in turn to raid and pillage which earn VPs, consequently also acquiring plunder which can be used to complete quest tiles which also earn VPs.
Play follows the usual paradigm of the active player taking an action before play progresses to the player on the left.
Broadly speaking, the active player has a choice of 1 of 2 actions each turn.

• Work: The active player may put their worker on to a spot in the Scythian Village, there's a bit more to it than that though.
  • ​Place worker: The active player may put their meeple on a available spot in the home settlement part of the board provided the meeple's colour matches the colour requirement of that spot. Most spots require a blue meeple but some require a grey one. Then the player can resolve that spot's action.
  • Take worker: The active player now takes a worker of their choice from a home settlement space and resolves that space's action. The worker that the player takes can be of a different colour and this is a way to get one.
  • Actions: The are a number of actions that can be performed, sometimes these also have costs. Actions include:
    Gaining any of the resources types.
    Gaining a crew or animal card into your hand.
    Playing a card to the player board from your hand.
    Using a hero card's special ability.
    Completing a quest.
• Raid: This is the second action the active player can perform and takes place in the 4 lower parts of the board. Like the Work action, the active player will place a worker, resolve it, then take another worker. However, there are some notable differences.
  • Requirements: The active player must meet the requirements to initiate the raid, this includes:
    Worker: The active must have an appropriately coloured meeple.
    Crew: The active player must have a big enough crew.
    Resources: The active player must have the required resources to initiate the raid.
  • Place worker: The active player may put their on a space they would like to raid. Unlike the home settlement, meeples placed in a raid can never be taken again.
  • Resources: The active player must discard wagon and provision resources equal to the cost as part of the raid.
  • Strength: The active player must calculate their strength; this is done by totting the strength scores of their crew cards, rolling a number of dice as determined by the civilisation they are raiding and how much gold their target has and adding the results to their crew's strength.
    Additionally, the active player may spend Kumis to increase the strength of their raid.
    The final combined strength is then compared to values displayed for that  location which will determine what VPs the active player gains. Generally, the higher the strength, the more VPs are earned.
  • Wounds: According the result of the dice roll and the location attacked, the active player must distribute any wounds they received by adding wound tokens to their crew cards.
    This can be done as the player sees fit. A crew card is only 'killed' if it reaches -1 wounds. Additionally, each wound lowers a crew card's strength by 1.
  • Plunder: The player can take all the plunder tokens from the location they raided.
  • Take meeple: While the meeple placed by the active player cannot be taken, one that was put there during set up can be taken.
    Quest tile: If the location had a quest tile, it should be flipped to it's other side revealing what cost is required to complete the quest and the reward for doing so.
    ​This quest is now available for any player to complete by carrying out the appropriate action in the Scythian Village area of the board.
• Next player: Once the active player has completed their action, play moves on to the player on the left.

​Endgame
Play continues until only to raid spaces or quest tiles remain on the board. After this, all player get 1 more turn and it goes to scoring.
VPs can come from several sources.

• Crew and animal cards may provide VPs.
• Quest tiles will provide VPs.
• Plunder tokens a player has accumulated will also provide VPs.

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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Overall
​I'm going to start by saying the idea 'of a worker placement game with each player only having only 1 worker' sounds crazy but it works perfectly well in Raiders of Scythia.

There's a clever mechanic at play with the colours of the meeples. E.g., when using the blue meeples to raid, they can't be taken again and players will be taking grey and red meeples instead by by the time player's are doing that, they won't need the blue meeples anymore. Players are never put in a position where they can't use a meeple because of its colour.

Anyway, on to the game.
Players will need to use the village in order to gain resources to raid the civilisation to gain plunder and reveal quest tiles which can then be bought with whatever resources and plunder the player has acquired. Phew!
It's something of a race to do this since once a spot has been raided, that's it, no one can raid that spot again. Action optimisation is important.
Something similar can apply when placing meeples in the village. There can only ever 1 worker on a space and there's some high level play that can be utilised by blocking another player and putting a meeple of your own in spot they want to use first. The same applies when taking a meeple, players can choose not to take a certain meeple just to leave the space blocked.  

Players will also need to take into consideration their crew, not only is it vital in undertaking raids, it also provides players some engine building capacity to their actions.

Finally, the game also provides some opportunities for risk/reward actions during raids as dice rolls are unpredictable.
While it's not possible to fail a raid (Players just gain less or 0 VPs for a bad roll), it's possible to squander resources and kumis for a poor roll. Players will be faced with the choice of raiding earlier with a weaker crew or risk losing a raid to another player by taking the time to increase the strength of their crew.
Furthermore, wounds are also unpredictable, a player's crew cards may take 0 wounds or may take 6 depending on the dice roll, adding the element of risk.

For me, Raiders of Scythia is a good worker placement game. Because players essentially only ever 2 actions per, they need to think about the best way to make use of them, they need to make every decision count. In other words, their decisions are meaningful, which is always a good thing.
I found the game to be a fun experience with a unique mechanic for a worker placement game.