Skara Brae

Skara Brae brings us to the Orkney Islands in prehistoric Scotland. You manage a growing settlement. As more and more people flock to your settlement, you need to make sure you gather enough resources, build shelter, and cook enough food to feed everyone. At the same time you need to manage the waste generated by the settlement. There is a message about sustainability here. 

Players gain settlers through a drafting process. New settlers bring you resources and a single-use ability. They are also worth points at game end if they stay till then. Other than this drafting, players mostly do their own stuff at their own player boards. 

There are 10 action cards in each player area. 9 are standard, but you’ll have a unique 10th action. You get pawns to place on your action cards to perform actions. You start with just one pawn, but every new round you get a new one. As the game progresses, you get to perform more actions. The actions are mostly related to gathering resources and spending them to score points. There are three broad directions in which you score points. Settlers come in four colours. Each settler is worth points, and each set of four colours is worth points too. You can increase how much they are worth by advancing on a furnishing track. 

The next scoring approach is trading. This is another track you can advance on. The further you go, the bigger the rewards. However, you have to pay an increasing number of goods of the same type, which is not easy. Each time you advance on the trading track, you can trade a knife for a specific good type. You should make sure you have a knife on standby so that you don’t miss out on this perk. 

The third main scoring approach is upgrading your cards. You spend resources to do this. Upgraded cards become more powerful, so the earlier you do this, the more you will benefit from it throughout the game. 

One interesting challenge the game presents is the middens. Middens are mounds made of waste, like bones. In the game they are a bad thing. On your player board you have a storage area. It starts at a small size but whenever you run out of space and need to store more, it automatically enlarges. That’s not a good thing, because the larger your store room, the more middens it will generate at the end of a round, and these middens need to be stored too, potentially enlarging your store room even further. If your store room is beyond a certain size by game end, you will lose points. Managing your store room is a challenge. You don’t want to stockpile too many resources. You want to use them quickly. This game is a Just-In-Time (JIT) exercise! There is an action you can take to remove middens. Your store room automatically enlarges when space is needed, but it doesn’t automatically shrink when you have surplus space. You need to perform a specific action to reduce the size. 

Feeding your people is something you need to worry about every round. Getting roofs helps reduce the food requirement. Usually you need to cook. Animals and crops are not food. They need to be cooked first. We are not barbarians okay. Cooking is an action you can take. If you can’t feed all your people, or you choose not to, some will leave.  Losing people means losing end game points. 

Skara Brae is a resource management game. There are many resource types to handle. Storage management is challenging and interesting. Player interaction is not high. It happens in the card drafting part of the game. You spend more time doing your own thing on your own player board. That sounds boring but the fact is many fans of Eurogames like exactly this. I must admit I did enjoy figuring out the game.