For centuries, the earth really was a cold dead place. We hid in shelters from the frost and built our lives underground. We yearned for daylight, for fresh air, for other sensations we once took for granted. We heard rumours about the upper world thawing for months, but they have turned out to be true. After ages, we can finally walk among the ruins of our ancestors and revive the surface world.
Name: Revive (2022)
Designer: Helge Meissner, Kristian Amundsen Østby, Eilif Svensson, Anna Wermlund
Publisher: Aporta Games
Play type: multi-use cards, tile exploration, variable player powers, route building, deck building
What the game is about
Can you revive civilization as you crawl out of your shelter to lead your tribe and explore the thawing frozen wastes of what once was Earth? In Revive, you are carefully managing your resources to build up a network across a frozen world, using multi-use cards to literally fire up your engine and achieve your goals.
I was provided with a discounted review copy of this game by Aporta Games in return for an honest review. My thoughts remain my own.
How the game works
The game of Revive is a euro game where the action takes place in two places: your personal player board, called your machine, and the central game board which represents the world around you as it starts to thaw. Your goal is to explore the outdoors, and quite literally build an engine that racks up as many points as possible before the game is over.
In the multiplayer game, every player takes two actions before the next player takes their turn. In the solo mode, you have a counter that counts down from 25: every card you play ticks it down by one, and every time you hibernate, down it goes by two. The actions you can choose are:
- Play a card into one of the free slots in your machine, giving you the appropriate resources based on the card and on upgrades placed in this slot.
- Explore a facedown tile, paying the costs on the back and paying for range if it’s not adjacent to either the starting location if you have no map presence, or adjacent to one of your buildings or population tokens on the map. Exploring gives you new ways to spread across the map.
- Build a small (3 gears) or large building (5 gears) in a sand space. You can build small or large buildings, triggering bonuses based on resources of adjacent spaces.
- Populate an ancient site with citizens. This unlocks something on your player board, as well as basically increasing your range for future buildings or population.
- Use the switch token on your player board. Depending on what you’ve unlocked during the game’s campaign, this gives you one wild resource or something else.
You can also use free actions as much as you want – trade (convert a crystal into one of the three basic resources; gears, books, or food), use energy to activate an unlocked machine or open a crate you’ve gained.
When you hibernate, you return all the cards from your resting area to your active area and put all played cards from slots into your resting area. You also recover all spent energy from your machine. Your switch token also resets, and you advance one space on the hibernation track.
The solo game ends when your counter is at 0 and you have no more actions you want to take. Then you tally up the various points you scored here and there and check the rulebook to see how well you’ve done.
Theme, setting & narrative
Usually, post-apocalyptic games focus on fighting other survivors of humanity among other inhuman threats. Just like Earthborne Rangers did, I’m happy Revive focuses on constructive rebuilding. That being said, the setting is mostly just a facade; vivid shadows on a curtain that are made by someone backstage moving their hands in peculiar patterns. However, it’s all a matter of how far you are willing to trick yourself into believing. If you do, you can see that every mechanism fits the shadow; if you don’t, it’s ‘just’ a point salad euro. Isn’t that how all euro games operate, you might ask – kind of, but I think it bears mentioning that Revive feels like it went out of its way to make a compelling package of all its interlocking game mechanisms. It’s up to you how far you’re willing to partake in the suspense of disbelief.
How does it play?
Welcome to Endorphin: the board game! Revive is a game all about chaining actions together (reminiscent of Lost Ruins of Arnak); I do A so I have enough resources to do B, trigger C, and accomplish D – and get rewarded in the process, so I can do E later too. Where the multiplayer game sports two-action turns that create interesting tension, the solo mode does away with that, instead inserting a new action economy where you have a 20-point timer. Playing a card will cost you 1 point; hibernating 2. When the counter ticks down to 0, the game ends as soon as you run out of things to do. I thought it was important for you to know this before I dive into the next section. More on the solo mode later.
Resources are relatively tight, but I love how the game gives you lots of different ways to get them. The game has a habit of doling out bonuses in the first part of the game, not in the latter, which is more common with euro games. In other words, it helps get you going faster. This means it can be delightfully puzzly to figure out how you are going to get those three gears for a small building, and if maybe you can scrounge together a fourth and a fifth so you can build a large one instead. Starting with little to no resources post-hibernation and working your way up to a few giant turns of building, exploring, settling, and racing up your research tracks.
Tracks! Revive has tracks, and plenty of them. On your player board, you can progress on three tracks that represent the state of your personal shelter. If you progress far enough, you excavate spaces where you can place a machine token (from a randomized general display). You activate these as a free action using energy (lightning) tokens – once per machine, and the tokens are renewed post-hibernation. Because this is a free action, using it feels really good. Revive does a great job at making you feel clever for squeezing bonuses out of everything you do, like chaining card actions together.
Cards! Revive has cards, and plenty of them. You can use cards in two ways; either for their top or bottom action, slotting your card in the respective spaces on your player board. There is a minor deckbuilding aspect to it, with cards you acquire going straight into your hand. When you hibernate, all your inactive cards enter your active area, while you then discard your slotted cards into your inactive area. This means that a) you get to use your new toys right away and b) you don’t get to do the same (obnoxious) combo time and time again. The cool thing is that because of how hibernation works, it is sometimes better to leave a card in your active area than it is to play it, in order to make your next post-hibernation cycle better.
What did not like about the cards ties into my next point, which is the solo mode and how it works. The solo mode that comes in the box reminds me of goldfishing Magic; aptly named thusly because this one guy was bored and wanted to play Magic, but he just played solo against his goldfish. How the solo mode works is that you basically have infinite turns but for two exceptions, playing cards and hibernating. You have a countdown timer starting at 20 – it ticks down by 1 every time you play a card (except through card effects) and by 2 when you hibernate. There is nothing else to worry about or take into account!
As you might guess, this comes with a few not-insignificant caveats. In multiplayer, you get two actions per turn; in this solo mode, those tactical intricacies are lost. It basically is a huge sandbox you get to play in, doing all the cool things without repercussions. Sounds good, right? Well, not after a while. For one, playing cards and slotting them into your player board is cool – why tax it? Second, when you start to get better at playing Revive efficiently, soon it won’t be a mere matter of ‘what can I do by the end of the game?’, but ‘how quickly can I do everything to leave time to crank my point-scoring engine?’. All the cool things the game has to offer get a little bit lost when you can access them so freely and so carelessly. Like a lifetime supply of candy, I think the solo mode of Revive loses its meaning over time. It is serviceable, don’t get me wrong, but it is the weakest part of this whole package. Luckily, there is a pretty easy solution – see below for my thoughts on the unofficial Mautoma solo mode.
Another thing to mention, especially something that is important to us solo gamers, is that this game can be quite the table hog. And an impressive one at that, but a space eater nonetheless. I found it quite intimidating as well, at least by the looks of it, but that evaporated quickly as I started playing. The actions you can take are relatively few and good to understand; the map looks impressive, and it reminds me of Gaia Project in the way you’re planning where to build, populate or explore, and gather the appropriate resources accordingly.
Is Revive a tough game to learn? Not really, I’d say. Does it, therefore, need a gradual step up in difficulty through a five-part mini-campaign? Again I’d answer ‘not really’. But Revive has it; trying to inject more narrative into its setting, there is a small campaign you can play through that lets you unlock additional gameplay elements like new tiles, new factions, and extra tokens for existing supplies. Nothing groundbreaking you couldn’t play with from game 1, although you could argue that the final unlock (extra starting cards and a drafting variant) might be too daunting for a first-play experience. Still, I applaud the movement in general that tries to infuse euro games with more narrative backbone.
I don’t know if this was a me-thing, but all of the campaign components (tokens and cards) in my copy had a slight discolouration from the base components, therefore making them identifiable. For solo, I don’t care, but it could be an issue for multiplayer.
Final note: yes, it is more satisfying to make a ‘CLUNK’ sound when you activate your switch. The fact that this is not in the rulebook is a huge oversight and should be fixed in subsequent printings.
What you might like
- An endorphin-infused chaining of smaller actions, Revive is all about rewarding you for everything you do, yet pushing you to be most efficient about it – and making you feel clever
- While the theme is take it or leave it, it’s up to you how much you’re willing to invest in it – the tools are there
- Relatively easy to get into, because the actions you can take are pretty select and clearly delineated
- Additional mini-campaign that lets you unlock more components as you progress through a narrative
What you might not like
- Sadly, the solo mode in the base game is the weakest part of this package (but there is a solution; see below)
Expansion
Revive has one expansion to date: Call of the Abyss. I haven’t played it yet so I wasn’t planning on discussing it; however, if you want to talk about an unofficial expansion, at the very least you should acknowledge the first one. So there; Call of the Abyss.
That unofficial expansion is called Mautoma and is a fan-made solo variant, mimicking a human opponent that races you for various goals. It can be found on Boardgamegeek and requires you to print out a few cards and an automa player board. (It’s compatible with the official expansion, too. So there; Call of the Abyss.)
While it is a step above the freeform solo mode of the base game, it still is not an automa. I think that’s both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is that it still is easy to manage; the bad thing is that there is little to no way to predict their behaviour, and Mautoma is no player; it doesn’t score points, it merely hinders you in doing so – although it is now possible to lose the game if your score is too low. It also reinstates the two-action turns, and the accompanying tension of predicting if Mautoma could benefit from your actions; say, by building in that sweet location you just explored. Mautoma expands across the map to populate, explore and build, yet it never collects resources so you have a hard time preparing for what they might do. I mean that in a multiplayer game, someone who is saving up gears is probably going to build somewhere, so if you want dibs, you need to beat them to it.
Conclusion
Revive is a new kind of resource management game; one that places an emphasis on theme, but one that also starts doling out rewards like candy pretty much from the get-go. It is a game of rewarding yourself with micro-actions while you work towards larger goals. It is a euro game that teaches you that endorphin rushes don’t need to only happen in the penultimate turns of a game. However, the solo mode is Revive’s biggest flaw – the one that can be found in the base game is serviceable, but if you truly want this game to shine, I recommend branching out and downloading the Mautoma variant to truly experience Revive.
Base game rating: ★★★☆☆
Mautoma rating: ★★★★☆
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Stidjen Plays Solo 