- Publisher : Matagot
- Designer(s) : Helge Meissner, Kristian Amundsen Østby, Eilif Svensson, Anna Wermlund
- Artist(s) : Gjermund Bohne, Martin Mottet, Dan Roff, Jessy Töpfer
- Players : 1–4
- Playing time : 90–120 Min
- Weight BGG : 3.41
What's this?
Brings civilization back to life, 5000 years after everything was destroyed. Lead your tribe and explore the frozen land. Exploit its resources. Recruit surface survivors to your cause. Build factories with powerful machines. And populate ancient sites to relearn your tribe’s forgotten technologies.
Revive is a game for 1-4 players with asymmetrical player powers, a highly variable setup, and no direct combat or conflict. As you play through the 5-part campaign, unlock additional content, and once all content has been unlocked, the game can be replayed indefinitely.
How do you play?
The goal of the game is to lead a tribe and rebuild the world according to your own ideals. You will explore new territories, construct buildings and populate different areas.
Players take turns performing actions:
🔸Play a card on a free space on your player board. Cards can provide benefits such as resources and special abilities. You will earn bonuses if you have active modules of the correct color.
🔸Use your lever: to gain resources or activate the top of a map in advanced mode.
🔸Explore: You can explore new areas by spending the necessary resources and thus turning a terrain tile face up. You will gain new cards and victory points.
🔸Populate: You can populate areas already explored by placing population figures on area tiles. This allows you to unlock tribal abilities.
🔸Build: You can construct buildings by spending the necessary resources. Buildings provide various benefits depending on where they are built, such as resources, special abilities, or improvements for your actions.
In addition to taking actions, you can also perform free actions such as trading crystals, opening crates, or activating machines.
On your large machine board, you will unlock new ability tiles, resources, victory points, etc.
At the end of each turn, players must hibernate if they have not performed at least one action.
🔸The game ends when the last major artifact is taken from the game board. Then you score points from multiple sources, including your collected artifacts, your artifact card, your researched technologies, your progress track, and your populated areas. The player with the most points wins the game.
Is it good?
What a nice surprise this Revive, asymmetric factions, exploration, resource management, customization.
The game is not that complicated, on your turn you do 2 actions out of 5 which makes the game fluid, then it must be said that all the mechanics work very well together.
The machine board will allow you to create your own engine with actions, resources, free skills and this engine increases in power as you go, it’s simply rewarding. The mechanics of the cards to be placed at the top and bottom of the board are ingenious and you will have to make choices to optimize everything. Your faction will have its own skills that will need to be unlocked, Revive will have very high replayability.
On the main board, exploration is also interesting for its victory points, the addition of new cards to your deck, and also necessary for reaching large cities. These large cities which will be able to guide our strategy for victory points, not to mention our personal objective cards. There is so much to do in this Revive.
For the criticisms that I could make it is its absent theme, its forgettable campaign mode and very limited interaction. And its artistic direction is really generic…especially for the cards. But all this does not prevent Revive from being one of the best games released in 2023 with all its mechanics, this feeling of freedom in its strategic choices, I still want to play it. Go there with your eyes closed!
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Review Revive
Positives
- Building your personalized engine with its machine platform
- The asymmetry of factions
- The race for artifacts
- Very high replayability
Negatives
- An absent theme
- The forgettable mini campaign
- Very generic illustrations
Breakdown
- Components and illustrations 8.0
- Mechanics 9.5
- Theme 7.5
- Replayability 9.5
- Handling 9.5
- Interaction 8.5
- Originality 9.0
