Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / 4 Things I like about Revive
Transcript
- Untitled - July 10, 2025 00:00:00 Speaker: Welcome to pick up and Deliver, the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step out for a walk and deliver an episode to you while I stroll around. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good morning, listeners. It's a beautiful day here in suburban Chicago. The heat finally broke and it's temperate, and you can tell it's going to be a warm day today, but not an unbearably hot day. Not even a grueling day. Just a warm day. So that's a nice twist. So I'm going out for a walk. I'm going to record two episodes while I'm out this morning, so this episode will be followed by the next board game Espresso episode. Actually, these two should go in a row as I'm looking at my planning and they're going to be up later this week, so this one isn't too far ahead of of our discussion. We'll see how I can do navigating the streets, because there are garbage trucks out this morning, so they're going to be in my way, getting annoying my recording. Well, I had a really fun play of revive recently, which isn't the wasn't probably the most isn't as testament to my skills so much as I was playing my 17th game with a couple people who'd never played before, so the scores ended up being pretty lopsided. Uh, it felt good. Uh, if nothing else, because this is a group of people with whom I usually am in third place when we play the three of us. So I think Ray listens to the podcast sometimes. Hey, Ray, if you're listening, I'm sure the next time we play, I'll barely be in the running. In 3 or 4 games in, I'll be in third place like I usually am. But to start off anyway, it was a fun game. Um, but it made me think about the fact that I have in fact logged 17 plays of the game revive. And so perhaps it's time for a message from the deep about this game. I was looking at my podcast log and I see I actually have tagged it in several episodes. So this is not a game you haven't heard about before if you're a regular listener, but it's also a game I haven't discussed in great detail since I did my board game Espresso episode. And I guess I suppose the call from the abyss expansion episode, which I've only played a couple times. It is on board Game Arena, but I haven't. I haven't explored it that deeply yet. I think it's probably time to do so. So I thought today I would talk about four things I like about revive. So to start off with, in case you're unfamiliar with it, revive is a game from 2023 or 20 2022, uh, designed by Helge Meissner, Kristian Ostby, Eilif Svensson and Anna Wermland. Ostby and Svensson are a pair of designers. They were the ones who sort of attracted me to it, but we shouldn't forget the name. Helge Meissner is first on that list, and I suppose those are alphabetical by last name, so it's possible that they really do see it as an even spread. Sometimes in a situation like this where you have a very experienced design team and some newer designers are less well known designers. It's that, like perhaps Meisner and Wermland brought the game to a porta, and then it was heavily developed by OSP and Svensson, or with Osby and Svensson such that a co-design credit seemed reasonable. I have no idea about the inner workings of the the group. I do know that, uh, Helga meisner is very active on the board game geek forums. If you post questions about revive there, he will answer them, which is great. I love that the art is done by German born Martin Mottet and Dan Roth and Jesse Topfer Martin Mottet. I noticed that person's name because they also did the art for the game Evenfall, which I'll be talking about shortly. The theme of revive is that it's 5000 years after the fall of human civilization, and everything went to hell. Human beings retreated underground. The ones who survived hid underground, and they emerged to find the earth frozen over. And it was as it was starting to thaw, human beings re-emerged and started capitalizing on what they found. In the game, you play a leader or a group of of explorers from one of the factions that has been hiding, that is re-emerging. Now. The game comes with six different factions, and those six factions all have two forms. If you think about like seven wonders, each civilization you can be has an A form and a B form, or a night and a day. Revive is the same way. There's a night form and a day form for each civilization, so you get plenty of opportunity to try out different, uh, features. And then the expansion introduces four more civilizations which only have one form each. They don't have an A and a B, so there are seven, 14, 20, 18 different factions you can play. If you think of the the ones, the two sided ones as two different factions. The game is a combo building and, uh, resource management game, in which you have a board that has a bunch of different potential actions on it, and you are managing a set of resources to try to explore this region as quickly as you can and earn points in a variety of ways. The main gameplay loop, if, uh, is centered around playing cards, you have several. You start the game with six cards, you have three in hand, and you have three in hibernation. The game has this nice loop where when you use a card, it then goes into hibernation, and then you have to wait around to get it back out. Which as an aside, is something I had in the very first game that I designed myself. I had a loop where you would use a card, and then it would go into a sleep for a round before you got it back, which it's fun to see that pop up somewhere else. And I've seen that in other places too. But this one, it works very similar to the way I originally did it in my game, which is fun to see that really smart designers are using something that I also thought of. Uh, of course they're doing it. Well anyway, so you have and then you have this player board that has this tech grid in the middle with these little moving tokens. And part of how the game goes is that when you play your cards, you put them into slots. There are four slots around your tech board. There's actually five. And when you put your card in, you slot it in either on the top or the bottom, and you get the bonus related to the materials that are on the top or the bottom of that card. So that's one thing you can do is put a card into onto your tableau and get the materials that are related there in each slot. There are also these spots for modules, and the modules are tokens that you put in that when you slide the card in, the cards come in one of three colors green, yellow, and gray. And when you slide your card in, it activates the modules in that slot. If they share the color and the modules are all 1 or 2 colors. So there's. I don't think there's any three color modules, so there's a bit of combo building as well. Or engine building where if you get a module of the right color and you get a bunch of cards of that color, then you can kind of stack those bonuses as you play your cards. And the cards are mostly about gathering resources. Uh, and then, um, in the middle of your player board, there is this tech tree where every time you slot a card in, you're going to advance one of the little tech tokens. And the advancing those tech tokens gets you, gets you additional technologies, machines they're called, which you can then use to get more bonuses. So that's kind of the way you get resources is by connecting all of those pieces together so that you can gain bonuses as you go along. So what are you doing with these resources? Well, there is a central board on that central board are these big territories that are covered in ice. And then there's a whole bunch of different spaces. And the idea is that you are building and exploring different cities and spreading out on this exploration board. You get points for putting out your cities, you get points for exploring the dead cities of the past, and you get points for exploring the icy regions that had been covered before. So uncovering new territory as you're spreading out, you also are trying to reach these 3 or 4 big corner spaces, which give you end game bonus stuff. And the fun thing about the corner spaces is that they amplify points you're already getting. So if you are able to sort of focus and be in the game, you can often get to an end game bonus point thing, amplifying your own points as well and building up the technologies that you're getting. One of the big factors in the game is the more technologies that you get, the more points that you're earning and also the wider ability you get to then complete more things on your turn, because you only ever get two actions on your turn. But you're often able to do a lot of things as you gain energy. I don't think there's much more I can explain without having you seeing the board in front of you. So I want to explain why I like this game. I've got five things that I that I think are particularly interesting or fun about this game. One of them I talked about is the different factions. I like that the factions in this game are really meaningful. You get a set of distinct powers that are really interesting. So you start with one power that you get to use right at the beginning. And then as the game goes along, the more explorers you put out, the more powers you unlock. So there's this developing sense of individuality and individual power in the game that works really well. I like that a lot. And each each one is different. And some of them, it's really valuable to lean into what they can do. Some of them, it's better to have it just be an interesting side bit, but not spend a ton of energy on the individual powers. The second thing I like is the way the game fosters some interaction. There's not a ton. This is not a very interactive game. It's. But in classic Euro style, it's interactive by your competition for what other people are doing. Like I said, you're putting stuff on the central board, and one of the things you can do in the in the central board round is open up new territory. Well, when you open up new territory, you're opening that up for other people to explore, so an ill timed move can open up a benefit for someone else to grab, which feels bad when it happens to you, but feels good when you do it to someone else. And, uh, one of the nuances of the game is sort of learning to manage that timing I've discovered. But you also get to interact with the other players. There is this thing in the game called a switch. It is an action you can take, and once you take it, it's like deactivated. And you don't take it again until you've reset your board. Uh, and in the base game, the switch just gets you one resource. But the base, the. Once you've unlocked the full rules for the game, I shouldn't say base game. I should say starter game, because the game comes with slightly simplified rules so that you can learn the nuances before it adds in the extra stuff. So in those nuances, those simplified rules, the trigger, the switch that I just mentioned gets you one resource of your choice, which is fine, but not great. Instead, I really like the way the switch works in the full game, which is you can get a resource of your choice, or you can activate the resources on an opponent's card. But then you put that card into their hibernation, which can be really good for them because it opens up the slot for them to play that slot again. And you don't get the bonuses for the slot. So there is a downside to activating it. But it's interesting. You also have to pay extra resources if you're going to a spot where someone else already is. So there is a race element to it. And there are these artifacts which are scoring multipliers. Each player has a little scoring card that gives them points for different things they've achieved. And you score each of these three categories once automatically. But then there are these artifacts around the board and they're in different colors, and there's not that many of them. And when you get one, it then multiplies your scoring for that category. So if you can get out early and get some artifacts quickly, you're able to multiply your score based on the particulars of the different scoring categories you have. So if you're leaning into one of your scoring categories, you can do really well. In one of my recent games, for instance, I was scoring these flasks, which are icons that are on some cards, some items and some spaces. And so I went to the endgame scoring space that multiplied my that gave me points for every flask I had. But then I also had a flask in my endgame scoring card. So I leaned into that really hard and I got multiple scoring multipliers, the the artifacts for that card. So I ended up really getting a lot of points out of the flasks, which worked out great. Another thing I really like about the game is the tech board. Um, and this leads into the last thing I like about the game too, which is it's really combo tastic. So the tech board, uh, is, as I mentioned, the central thing where you have these pegs that are moving along, and the way that you advance them is around the player board. There are these spaces that have little green, gray or yellow arrows on them, and if you build next to one of the green, gray or yellow arrows, you advance your tech board once or twice. If you build next to a green arrow, you advance at once. Well, if you if you build next to a green arrow, you advance it once. If you build your large building next to one of those arrows, you advance it twice. If you build a small building, you advance it once and you get three large buildings and two small buildings. So managing how you advance your tech tree is a really important aspect of the game. And, uh, has taken me a while to sort of figure out, but boy, it's really exciting when it's clicking. So um, and then the tech board, like I said, as it moves along, it unlocks these spaces where you can buy machines, and the machines allow you to manipulate your game space and game state in various ways by using these energy tokens. And you start off with, I think two, 1 or 2 energy tokens, maybe just one. But then as the game goes on, you get more and more. By the end of the game, I usually have like 4 or 5. And those energy tokens, you use them to activate these machines that give you bonuses. They allow you to convert resources from one type to another. They really give you a lot of room to benefit. So the tech board is really neat. Also, if you get your tech high enough, you start scoring those artifacts I was talking about. And you also, if you get your tech to the end of one of the tech tracks, then you're going to score points for any cards you've acquired of a particular color. So you can sort of lean in early to a color of a card and try to get lots of those, and then try to advance your tech board on that color so you can multiply your points that way, too. In case it's not clear, this game is incredibly combo tastic, which is another thing I like about it. So I've talked about the tech board, I talked about interaction, I talked about meaningful factions, and I talked and I'm not talking about it being combo tastic early on in the game. It's very likely even late in the game to have turns where you just like, oh, I get this resource, this resource, I do this and this and I'm done. But other turns, you're like, I do this, and then I do that and I do that, and then that lets me do this and I get to do that. And it's really fun when you have those turns. And revive is one of the best examples of this kind of combo building system that I've played. Love it. Well, that is four things I like about revive, so I think I'll stop there. If you haven't had a chance to play revive yet, I strongly recommend it. You can play it on Board Game Arena and of course I'm happy to play with you there. I also recommend playing it on the table. It's kind of a beast to set up, but it's really fun once you get it going. So that is my message from the Deep Revive. Well, head over to Board Game Geek Guild 3269 and let me know what do you think of revive? Have you played it? Do you enjoy it? What do you like about it? Share your thoughts there. I'd love to hear them. I know other members of the guild would love to hear them. Hopefully that'll get some more games of revive going. Well, thank you for joining me on my walk today. I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Bye bye. Not great. It seems like no matter what I do. I can't get away from the garbage trucks. Brought to you by Rattlebox Games.