I think of Scythe the way I think about fighting games.
In a fighting game, the “real” high level game that pros are playing is a psychological duel of rock/paper/scissors. However, a casual player can’t play that game. Until someone has mastered executing special moves, combos, and all sorts of other manual dexterity challenges, the psychology doesn’t come into play at all. Even a player who is better than the pros at mind games will lose if they have not perfectly mastered the joystick.
The “real” game in Scythe is the same as Diplomacy. WOR! A bunch of Scythe professionals playing together will be effectively not much different than a game of Diplomacy. The main differences being that the game will likely be shorter and there are no hard a fast rules about discussing things in secret or submitting turns within a time limit.
However, Scythe covers up its Diplomacy with euro fiddly bits. Someone who has not mastered the euro fiddly bits will not gain admittance to the game of Diplomacy. Players with superior euro skills/luck will have more resources than their opponents, and will not need to deal or bargain. They can just roll.
I think part of the reason I did not like Scythe the first and only time I played is because I didn’t realize this is what the game was. I thought it was euro only. Also, most (all) of the players played it as if it was euro only, and the war game aspects were not used much at all until the very end. But at that point nobody had the resources to prevent victory/game end/etc. compared to say… Dune.
This skill-hurdle gatekeeping doesn’t necessarily make a game bad. Civilization does it. It doesn’t matter how much Advance Wars skill you have in Civ if your opponents just have more better units than you do because you suck (like me). Yet Civ is still great. Even Jungle Speed does it. If you fail at the pattern recognition skill test, your dexterity at grabbing the totem won’t matter.
Scythe I think simply has a Euro part that is inelegant and not well polished. Its war part is not fundamentally different or special. Above all else they clearly spent a lot more effort on miniatures, production value, and theme than they did on the actual game.
The board game community is dividing even more between the people who actually play a lot of games and those who are collecting them. Just like video games have those who care about graphics and getting lots of fps, and those who care about actually playing games, board games now have people who care about physical cardboard bits and those who actually care about winning and losing.
When I read about board games online in Reddit or BGG the topics are always kickstarters, collections, prices, deals, playing solo games, bootlegs, complaints about game components. When actually playing games with people, those are brought up rarely, if ever. Usually we are talking about rules and strategies.
The designers and publishers cater to the collecting part of the community since that is the part that spends more money. The players are more likely to get fewer games and play the hell out of them. Thus, we see a lot more games with fancy components and less playtesting.
