Episode 242: Revive

In Revive designed by Christian Ostby, Helge Meissner, Anna Wermlund, and Eilif vensson published by Aporta games, you lead your tribe out of a hole your people have lived in for 5000 years to explore and repopulate. Now there is a campaign light element here that slow rolls the rules, but I’m just going to give you all the rules…in gist form. Every player gets a player board that has several unique powers and when unlocked are extremely helpful. In additional, each player drafts a deck of starter cards. Once the cards have been selected half are put in the resting area and half are put in the active area (where you have access to them to play). To win Revive you want to have the post points after the game end is triggered. That end is triggered when the last major artifact is acquired.

There are 3 different types of resources in the game and a wild resource that can be anything. On a player’s turn they get two actions and as many free actions as they want (and can pay for using energy). Some of those actions are, as followed: You can play a card from your active area which involves tucking the card under your player board if you have the space. These are multi-use cards. They have a top action that get your resources and a bottom action that do all kinds of things like get you tech (which makes your future card play more fruitful), trigger your player power, get you better/more resources, let you play another card..all kinds of stuff. Or you can explore the board. This involves you paying resources to flip a tile on the board. This action also gets you some points and a new card from the market that goes right into your active cards.

You can build. You pay resources for the building and range to place a building. Depending on where you place it will get you more stuff like tech, crate tokens (which get you all kind of things), energy that you can us to power your free actions, and more importantly move you on a machine track. Each player has three machine tracks. As you move up on a track, it gets you access to free actions, helps you acquire artifacts, and finally gets you some end game scoring. IGNORE THESE TRACKS AT YOUR OWN PERIL.

You can also populate, pay some resources to put your people in a city or end game scoring area, doing so also unlock more of your player powers and obtain more artifacts. After the last artifact has been obtained all the remaining player gets one more turn and who ever had the most points through game play or end game scoring did the best reviving the world.