1-4 Players
Designer: Shem Phillips
Artist: Sam Philips
Publisher: Garphil Games
About the Game
Garphil Games released an amazing game called Raiders of North Sea with two expansions and it’s still regarded as a modern classic. Then they went back on the system and released Raiders of Scythia. How does it fare against its predecessor and on its own?
Gameplay
The core premise remains: you start your turn with a single worker, you end with a single worker. One of your options is to work, where you will place your worker on one of the top locations and activate that to get or trade resources and cards, play crew or solve Quests. Then you pick up a worker from a different space and activate that too. Or you can raid, where you must have a number of crew members and spend provisions and Wagons to get all resources in one place and points depending how strong your crew is plus the dice from that region. However, the dice also place wounds on your crew, reducing their strength or even killing them.
Solo Gameplay
On the AI turn, they will block off one space, where you can’t place or pick workers from, and then proceed to try to raid. They check if there is an available spot on the right region, if they have enough provisions and enough strength from horses. If any of these are false, they either get a quest or more of whatever is missing. Otherwise, they clean up the spot and get a fixed amount of victory points.
Components
For the most part, the components are Garphil level quality. Great cards, great art, meaningful symbology. I love the Kumis and provision tokens, and the coins, specially on the Deluxe, are amazing.
There are some snags though. Unlike North Sea, all bag resources are hexes, just with different colors. However, the brown and black are hard to tell apart in some lights. This is specially jarring since brown ones (Wagons) are necessary to raid lower regions.
I also feels like the board is way too crowded. The art is great, but it is a busy background and can be visually overwhelming.
Comparing Raiders
Raiders of Scythia is basically Raiders of the North Sea with some of expansions integrated, but there are new things.
The heroes now are not one special type of crew, but your character that has an unique action that can be taken on the Town Centre without discarding a card. Also, gone is the armor and Valkyrie tracks (not big fans of Odin those Scythians). Instead, the damage from Fields of Fame are integrated on all raids. Also, you now can get horses and eagles to boost strength, provide victory points and add more actions to the Town Centre.
From Hall of Heroes, mead to strength up your attacks becomes Kumis, and the Quests are mixed with the chieftain tributes and are a single thing.
So, strictly speaking, do you need both? No, you don’t. There is plenty of overlap between them that having one makes you not miss out big on the other. But is there space for both? Absolutely. I own both and play them in different times for different reasons.
For me, if you want to pick one it boils down to if you will get just one box of each, or if you would get North Sea complete. As a base game, Scythia is more robust and interesting. But, when complete, I like the options of North Sea better. Also, visually I like North Sea way better.
Conclusion
What about on its own? Raiders of Scythia is absolutely fantastic. It gets a simple premise with simple rules, and transforms it into this game with an ebb and flow play style where every turn is a question of efficiency and opportunity. And it took its big brother and condensed into this fantastic amalgam that is truly bigger and better than all its parts.
It’s not without its faults, components being the biggest. But, in the grand scheme, those are fairly minor
Score:9/10
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