I know, Scythe by Stonemaier Games has been out since 2016 and has had a couple of expansions released as well, including promo packs with additional encounter cards. So chances are you have already heard plenty of reviews about this game and maybe own it yourself, but I still felt it's worth reviewing, because I am sometimes surprised by how many people still don't know Scythe.
Oliver KinnePost read time 4 min readLeave a Comment on Haspelknecht: The Story of Early Coal Mining (Saturday Review)Haspelknecht: The Story of Early Coal Mining, to give it its full title, is a kind of action selection game by Quined Games set in the Ruhr region of Germany. The game is set at a time when the area was still covered by forests and coal was first discovered close to the surface. During the game your task is to dig up that coal until its depleted and you have to start digging deep pits to get to this precious resource. The great mechanism in this game is the action selection element, where you draw all tokens of one colour from one of a number of common pools at the start of each round. These tokens are then used to activate your workforce and develop new technologies. It sounds simple, but it creates a really complex, interesting game with lots of options and very few player interaction.
Digidiced has been very kind to offer me the opportunity to review a number of the games they have converted to digital, and I decided to start with Lookout Spiele's award winning game Le Havre: The Inland Port which is one of the many popular games by designer Uwe Rosenberg. The game is set in the 18th century in the maritime city of Le Havre in the Normandy region of France. Players are harbourmasters who try to build the best harbour by constructing great buildings to attract trade. It is a two player only resource management game with a large action selection element - but with a twist.
Tabletop games come in a huge variety with many different mechanics - and in this article I want to focus on a number of action selection mechanism which I think are interesting. I am not talking about things like worker placement or dice rolling specifically, but how these general mechanics allow you to choose an action and sometimes affect what other players can do or how effective the action is.
