Scythe rules refresher

Read the refresher

You are trying to finish with the most coins. You get there mainly by placing stars on the Triumph Track, controlling territories and resources, and pushing your popularity up, since popularity multiplies everything you score at the end.

A quick setup reminder. Shuffle the objective, encounter and combat decks onto their board spaces. For the Factory cards, shuffle and place face down a number equal to the player count plus one, and return the rest to the box unseen. Draw one structure bonus tile face up at the bottom of the Popularity Track, and put an encounter token on each of the eleven encounter spaces. Deal a random faction mat and player mat to each player, but Rusviet with Industrial and Crimea with Patriotic are banned combinations. Your character starts on your home base, and you place one worker on each of the two land-adjoined territories next to it. Your four mechs sit on the four mech ability spaces of the faction mat, six stars beside them, and you take the power, combat cards, popularity, objective cards and coins shown on the right of your two mats. On the player mat, six technology cubes go on the green boxes with a black square, four structures on their boxes, four recruit tokens on the circular spaces, six workers on the rectangles above Produce, and your action token beside the mat. The player with the lowest numbered player mat starts, then clockwise.

There are no rounds or phases. On your turn you move your action token to a section of your player mat different from the one you used last turn. Then you may take that section's top-row action, and then its bottom-row action, in that order. You may take one, both, or neither, but you must still move the token, and you may not repeat an action within a turn. Costs are the exposed red boxes and you must pay the full cost before taking the benefit, and you may take as much or as little of the benefit as you like. Resources gained from the top row can pay for the bottom row. Play passes clockwise until someone places their sixth star, which ends the game immediately.

The top-row actions are Move, Bolster, Trade and Produce, in a different order on each mat. Move lets you move up to two different units one territory each, or instead gain one coin. Any unit can carry any number of resources, and mechs can also pick up and drop off any number of your workers, which does not count as movement for those workers. By default nobody crosses rivers or enters lakes, and all tunnel territories count as adjacent to each other. If your character or mech enters a territory held only by opponent workers, your movement ends, their workers retreat to their home base leaving resources behind, and you lose one popularity per worker forced back. Your workers cannot move on their own into territories controlled by opponent units. If your character or mech enters a territory with an opponent's character or mechs, your movement ends there, and combat resolves after all your movement is finished.

Bolster costs one coin and gives either two power or one combat card. Trade costs one coin and gives either any two resource tokens placed on a territory you control containing a worker, or one popularity. You cannot trade for resources if all your workers are on your home base. Produce costs whatever is showing on the exposed red rectangles, which grows as you produce more workers, and lets you choose up to two different territories you control where every worker may produce one token: metal on mountains, food on farms, oil on tundra, wood on forests, and a new worker on villages, taken from the leftmost space of your mat.

The bottom-row actions are Upgrade paid in oil, Deploy paid in metal, Build paid in wood, and Enlist paid in food. Most of them also hand you a coin or two, so take those first. Upgrade moves one technology cube from a green box to any empty red box with bracketed borders. Deploy places a mech from your faction mat onto a territory you control with a worker on it, never a lake, and unlocks the ability printed underneath for your character and all your mechs. Build places a structure on a territory you control with a worker, one structure per territory ever, never on a lake or home base, and reveals an ongoing bonus that applies to the top-row action directly above it. Enlist moves a recruit token to an open one-time bonus space on your faction mat and you immediately gain that bonus, and from then on, whenever you or the player to your immediate left or right takes the bottom-row action that recruit came from, you gain the ongoing bonus in the green circle. Factory card actions and top-row actions never trigger recruit bonuses. Each faction mat also has its own special ability in the top right corner.

Combat happens at the end of a Move action, before any bottom-row action, wherever your character or mechs share a territory with an opponent's character or mechs. Both players secretly set a power dial, up to seven and never more than you have on the Power Track, and may tuck behind it one combat card per character or mech in that fight. Reveal simultaneously. Highest total wins and the attacker wins ties. Both players pay the power they dialed and discard any cards used. The winner takes the territory and all resources on it and places a combat star, up to two per game. If the winner was the attacker, they lose one popularity for each worker they forced to retreat. The loser sends every unit from that territory back to their home base, leaving resources behind, and gains one combat card if they revealed at least one power on the dial or through cards.

A few other things you will hit. If your character ends its movement on a territory with an encounter token, its movement stops, and once combats are resolved you discard the token, draw an encounter card, show the art, read the text aloud, and choose one option you can pay for, placing anything you gain on that territory. If your character finishes a Move action on the Factory for the first time, look through the remaining Factory cards, keep exactly one permanently, and return the rest. That card acts as a fifth section of your player mat, its bottom row lets one unit move up to twice, and it gives no coins, structure bonuses or recruit bonuses. You may reveal one completed objective card on your turn for a star, then discard your other objective. Stars come from six upgrades, four mechs, four structures, four recruits, eight workers on the board, one revealed objective, two combat victories, eighteen popularity, and sixteen power, and once placed a star can never be lost.

The game ends the instant someone places their sixth star. Add the coins you already hold to your end-game earnings. For each star placed, each territory controlled, and each pair of resources you control, you earn coins at a rate set by your spot on the Popularity Track, with three bands: the lowest band pays three, two and one, the middle band pays four, three and two, and the top band pays five, four and three. The Factory counts as three territories for whoever controls it. Then add coins from the structure bonus tile, which you score even on territories you do not control. Most coins wins. Ties are broken in this order: number of workers, mechs and structures, then power, then popularity, then resource tokens controlled, then territories controlled, then stars placed.

A turn, played out

You used the Trade section last turn, so your action token must go somewhere else. You slide it onto the section with Produce on top and Deploy below. You hold 1 metal, 5 coins and 4 power. Three of your mechs are already out, so one mech sits on your faction mat. You pay everything showing on Produce's exposed red rectangles in full before you get anything. You have workers in three territories: 2 on a mountain, 1 on a village and 1 on a forest. Produce only reaches 2 different territories, so the forest sits idle this turn. Each of the 2 workers on the mountain makes 1 metal, so 2 metal tokens go down there. The worker on the village makes a new worker, taken from the leftmost space on your mat and placed on that village. You now have 3 metal, enough to cover the exposed cost under Deploy. Metal gained from the top row can pay for the bottom row. First you take the coins Deploy hands you. Then you pay the metal and place your last mech on the mountain. That is allowed because you control it and have workers there, and it is not a lake. The ability printed under that mech space is uncovered, and it now works for your character and all 4 mechs. Deploying your fourth mech earns a star, so a star goes onto the Triumph Track. That star can never be lost. The player to your left has a recruit that came from Deploy, and you are their immediate neighbour. They collect the ongoing bonus in that green circle. Play passes to them. Next turn your token must leave this section again.