Revive is a reasonably heavy Euro game with some funky tracks. And I love tracks—especially funky ones. Five thousand years after we finally destroyed the planet, we awaken from our icy slumber to explore the frozen wastes of the planet. We’ll recruit survivors to support us in our cause, build factories with powerful machines, and discover ancient alien artefacts. Or, to be more exact, we’ll be shuffling some resources around, acquiring new cards, and moving up those delicious tracks.
Yes, it’s a pretty themeless Euro.
How Does It Play
On your turn, you either take two actions, or you hibernate. Easy-peasy. When you take your two actions, you can choose from 5 possible options and do 2 of those options or the same one twice.
Your first option is to play a card from your active area and tuck it into one of the card slots on your board for either its top or bottom ability. Suppose the card’s colour matches the colour of a module you have previously placed there. In that case, you get that ability, too.
Alternatively, you can use your switch action to flip your switch and take anyone basic resource. It sounds rubbish but can get you out of a few scrapes.
The third option is to explore a tile on the main board. To do this, you pay the range cost in food, which is how many spaces you have to travel to from one of your previously placed pieces to the tile you’re exploring, plus you pay the cost of the tile. Then you get a few points and can recruit a new card, which goes into your rest area for future use.
The fourth option is to populate an area, which requires you to pay the range cost in food again, then place one of your meeples from your player board onto a city space on the main board. Removing the meeple reveals a new special power on your player board.
Finally, you can build a building. Choose a sand space, again pay the range and cost of your building—either 3 or 5 gears—then place it out on the main board. Look at the spaces surrounding it. For each coloured space adjacent to you, move up one space on the corresponding track. If you paid for the larger building, you can move up two spaces on each track for each corresponding coloured space.
You can also take some free actions, such as putting your energy tokens onto one of your machines on your player board. These get unlocked as you progress on your tracks. Some of the machines require you to have reached a certain point on two of the tracks to unlock them.
On your hibernation turn, you perform a little bit of upkeep. Recover any energy you have spent on machines back into your supply, take all the cards
from your rest area and put them in your active area, then take all the cards from your card slots and put them in your rest area, flip your switch token back up, and finally move up one space up the hibernation track and gain the bonus.
What’s Good About It
For the rest of this review, please bear in mind that I only play Revive at two players. My favourite aspect of Revive is puzzling out how to achieve what I want, especially later in the game when I’ve got plenty of machines on my player board and energy to activate them with. By the end of the game, there are just so many bonuses. Every card you play, from what can be a fairly hefty selection, could trigger up to another three modules, getting you a ton of stuff, and the machines give you so much flexibility. It builds nicely throughout the game and has fantastic turns by the end.
I also like the way that you are doing some minor deckbuilding with not one but two decks—your active cards and the cards in your rest area. Plus, there are ways to manage these cards for even more flexibility. I don’t like—an understatement—deckbuilders like Dominion, where the sole focus is on deckbuilding, but as a side mechanism, where you never really have to deal with that many cards, it can be fun.
The art is fine. The cards have one of three images depending on the card’s colour. I don’t mind this because it’s not like the abilities on the card are thematic in any way. It also makes it easier to see which colour cards you have. Oddly, my favourite piece of art is on the crates that reveal their contents when you turn them over. I enjoy this piece of artwork way more than I should.
For quite a heavy game, it’s pretty easy to get back into when you haven’t played it for a while—a plus point for any game on the heavier end of the scale.
Revive has asymmetric powers, and these add to the replayability.
What’s Wrong With The Game
One minor point is that the back of the exploration tiles shows you whether that tile will contain a city, water, or neither. The city and water tiles look very similar. Making these more distinct would have aided playability.
The campaign mode is neither a plus point nor a negative. We played through it once, and the writing was unintentionally funny. All it really does is unlock new content, which is fine as the trickier player powers are introduced later. I can happily say that I’ll never play it again, though. I’m not even sure it would be that easy to reset, as there’s nowhere to tell you which components were in the base game and which were unlocked in the campaign unless you go through every card. Now that I’ve played through it once, I’ll just keep all the content unlocked, ignore the campaign, and continue playing the game.
Conclusion
Revive is a crunchy Euro with good decisions that can end surprisingly quickly. Even being a Euro there are some nice points of player interaction: fighting to get to the large city tiles first and to the alien artefacts that you desperately need, putting a building in that perfect spot that allows you to move up every track, along with getting the modules, cards and machines you want first.
If you like games like Lost Ruins of Arnak and Viscounts of the West Kingdom, Revive may be a game to consider.
