July 30, 2025
Pair A Dice Games Corner
Skara Brae
Skara Brae? More like Skara Yay!
Admit it, you love the feeling of resource management. That cool feeling of a billion wood meeples piled in front of you, the sly efficiency of generating exact change for an upgrade, when you turn one thing into two other things and are able to cash in on a bajillion amount of points.
There’s nothing quite like it. With 16 different meeple types in the game, plus multiple resource cards, Skara Brae is a resource management enthusiast’s dream. You start your turn drafting a settler who helps secure resources, then players begin simultaneous turns, placing workers on different actions.
Actions often include spending resources to upgrade actions, or converting resources from one thing to another, or creating food to keep your settlers alive. For example, the Cook action, a key and critical action you take, can convert raw materials like Fish, cows, and Wheat into Food.
In the case of the former two, when you do the Cook action, they create Food, but they also create Bone and Hides, which may be used in other actions, such as Trading or Cleaning. Speaking of Cleaning, the push/pull of the game is inventory management. Each resource is a slot in your inventory; you may have infinite resources; however, the more resource spaces you open, the more Midden (refuse) is generated each round — Midden, which itself takes up more spaces and is worth negative end game points.
Also, having a large inventory is worth negative end-game points. So you're trying to open your inventory as wide as you can while also being able to Clean to close it and clean your Midden. It plays in around an hour, so it's crunching and thinky, but in a tight, svelte package.
Another hit from the folks at Garphill!
