My 4-year-old has recently been absolutely smitten with the movie WALL-E lately. A ruined world left barren and destitute, filled to the brim with trash and catastrophic dust storms suddenly whipping up to create a moment of tension. The first sign of life appears as a green shoot poking up from the dust, and that little speck of life is what brings the Axiom and all its inhabitants home from it’s 700 year journey.

Revive, by designers Helge Meissner, Kristian Amundsen Østby, Eilif Svensson, and Anna Wermlund, and published by Artipia Games in 2022 seeks to replicate a similar feeling with the cover of their game. An icy, frozen wasteland marked by a pair of yellow flowers poking out of the desolate landscape, representing the earth healing itself. The game itself takes place on a blue board laden with icy blue tiles, with only the very centre of the map being inhabitable.

Each turn, a player has two actions. They can play one of their cards to the top or bottom of their player board, and take the corresponding resources or action on that card, or they can spend their resources to explore, where they flip over icy tiles and recruit new survivors, they can populate, where they leave a population marker that improves their clan ability, or they can build, which improves the technologies on their player board.

I’m trying to keep the actions of the game tied to the theme, but the honest truth is that while Revive has an incredibly distinct art style and presentation, the theme falls apart when trying to tie them to the mechanisms. The reality is that when you start playing Revive, you’ll quickly stop thinking about the theme of rebuilding society after 5,000 years of devastation. Instead, your mind will reduce everything to it’s base elements and abstract rules that make up the gameplay.

And I’m okay with that, because the gameplay is incredibly satisfying. The player board for Revive is incredibly striking. First, it’s huge. Secondly, it’s such an irregular shape with notches carved out of the top, bottom, and right side for you to place your cards, and a small notch on the left for you to stick your clan board. Lastly, the centre is dual layered and dominated by 3 tracks spiralling out with over a dozen things to uncover.

Building the buildings will send the little cylinders on your player board along their designated tracks, pulling discs off your board and earning you machines, which are bonus actions that cost energy to use. The machines can offer you a plethora of goodies, from just straight resources, to beneficial conversions, to discounts on certain actions, and even allowing you to play the bottom half of a card on a top slot.

Speaking of the slots, at the beginning of the game, playing one of your cards for resources will net you only the resources on the cards. But plugging in slot modules will net you extra resources, if the card you play to that slot matches the colours of the slot modules. Some of the cards even allow you to layer further cards on top of the same slot, allowing you to trigger those slot modules again and again. But you can’t JUST play cards, each of the 3 resources has a hard limit of 6, encouraging you to consider timing and tempo as you earn and spend your resources.

The board itself starts the game shrouded in mystery. From a central point, all players fan out, flipping over tiles to earn points, get new cards, and reveal terrain types, which will push the cylinders on your player board when you build next to them. But just because you revealed a terrain tile, doesn’t mean that it’s your terrain. If you decide to leave it for a turn, another player can swoop in and plonk their building down on your newly discovered home. And you’ll really need to ensure other players don’t do that, because building on the juiciest spaces is lucrative and propels your engine further and further, and each hex can only accommodate a single building.

Every time you build a building, you’re establishing for yourself another post from which you can venture outwards. When you explore, build, or populate, you’ll need to pay food to cover the distance. The more you put out onto the board, the easier it is to get around. Each of the corners of the maps is also home to a large scoring tile, which you only get access to if you populate onto it. Speaking of populating, not only does putting your meeples onto the board give you a jumping off point for future actions, it also unlocks more of your tribe’s ability. The base game comes with 6 factions, each with unique quirks and powers. Each of those factions are also double-sided, giving you plenty of asymmetry to explore.

Revive doesn’t have rounds per-se. Instead of a regular turn, you can choose to hibernate. Doing this pulls all the cards from your hibernation state, all the cards you’ve slotted in are then moved to the hibernation state, freeing up the slots to be used again. You pull all the energy off your machines, enabling them to be activated again, and then you get a little bonus depending on how many times you’ve hibernated. The hibernation track also has a built-in end game accelerator, where if you hibernate for the 4th time, you discard one of the artifacts from the game entirely. But in all my games, I think I’ve only seen that happen once.

I’ve talked a lot about what you can do, but I haven’t talked about why you do. At several junctions in Revive, you’ll earn an artifact. Populating the top tier of your tech tracks, getting your 6th disc onto your player board, getting your 10th and 5th cylinder movement on each of the tracks, and earning 15 points all allow you to take an artifact. These strange, alien skull things come in 3 flavours, silver, orange, and purple, and each flavour of artifact one corresponds to an end game victory condition that’s different for every player, as dictated by a hidden card you’ll receive at the start of the game. Perhaps my silver artifacts give me a point for every slot module I’ve earned, while your opponent’s silver artifact nets them a point for every card they’ve obtained throughout the game. The important thing to remember here is that the artifacts are limited, and their score is multiplicative.

Combining the corner victory point tiles with the victory points you’ll earn from the artifacts you collect are how you will claim victory in Revive. Being able to combine or double dip on a scoring criteria, such as a corner tile giving you one point per slot module, and one of your artifact conditions giving you one point for every 2 slot modules per artifact you collect can inform your choices during the game, but it’s important to remain flexible. There are only a small handful of each artifact available, and if someone else is chasing the same artifact you’re chasing, then by the time the game is half over, the artifacts that would benefit you the most, are simply exhausted.

The end of Revive comes up dramatically quickly. The end game trigger is when all the artifacts are exhausted, which, taking an artifact is generally a reward for maxing out one aspect of the game. At the halfway point, one or two players may have claimed a single artifact. But in the last round or two, it’s not uncommon for a chain of actions to result in one player picking up multiple artifacts. You might feel safe when there are 4 artifacts remaining on the board, but the game can come to an end surprisingly quickly.

I think my only real complaint or criticism about Revive is the included ‘campaign’. When you open a new copy of Revive, you’ll be suggested to play this 5 game campaign, which introduces concepts and rules piecemeal over the course of the campaign. It’s unnecessary, slow, and a perfect way to ensure players don’t experience a full game of Revive. In a world where I only have 1 game night per week, and 4 friends all with their own board game collections and new games trickling in all the time, having a watered down first experience as a stepping stone modular tutorial towards a full game is a recipe for a great game getting lost in the shuffle. Perhaps the bigger sin is putting some of the advanced rules that come in during the campaign on cards that I keep forgetting when I’m trying to reference an edge case in the rulebook.

Revive has become one of my favourite medium-heavy euro games of the past few years because it delivers that rare mix of momentum, creativity, and tension that keeps me thinking about it long after the game is over. Even if the theme melts away the moment you start optimizing your gameplay, it does manage to evoke the feeling of moving from scarcity into abundance. Turn by turn, you chip away at this frozen puzzle until suddenly everything starts to hum, and your engine erupts in a cascade of actions you spent an hour patiently setting up. Those moments where you chain machines, chests, cards, and faction abilities into a single, absurdly powerful turn are the reason I keep coming back. It’s clever, it’s crunchy, and it’s endlessly satisfying.