Designer Shem Phillips has made his mark on board gaming with his ongoing series of worker-placement games with geographical titles: Raiders Of The North Sea, Architects Of The West Kingdom, Mountebanks Of The East-southeast Pothole, you get the picture. These games have become heavier over time, attracting a dedicated fan base but also becoming more niche as the series has progressed.
Phillips has succeeded with lighter games before; I loved 2019’s Noctiluca, a simple dice-drafting and set collection game. His 2025 game Skara Brae, which unfortunately is not a nod to The Bard’s Tale, sits in the middle of his two modes: It’s much lighter than his big worker-placement series, but is still a worker-placement game, just one that’s easier to learn and takes half the time to play. (As for you Bard’s Tale fans, meet me at the end of Sinister Street. I might be late.)
In Skara Brae, you’re building a village to get the most victory points. You get those points primarily from upgrading your action cards, getting more settlers, getting sets of settlers in the four different colors, and moving up the two scoring sliders—one that makes your settlers and sets worth more, and one that’s just straight victory points. You can also lose victory points quite easily in Skara Brae, as you get hit with midden, the primitive humans’ equivalent of trash, and no, pickup is not every Wednesday.
Each player gets only 12 turns over four rounds to draft settlers, gather and convert resources, and try to improve their village for victory points, while also feeding their settlers at the end of every round. There’s a bit of the game Le Havre in here as you gather some basic resources (wood, stone, seaweed, barley) and convert them to more valuable ones (cows, deer, sheep), and then cook them to get food, hides, and bones, which you can use to do other things, and on and on. It’s nowhere near as annoying as Le Havre is, though, so that’s a point in its favor. (Le Havre does have coke as one of its resources, which always made me want to say, “No shit, you guys got coke here?”)
Your tableau starts with 10 action cards, nine standard and one random additional one, and each of them starts on its basic side. You can use the Craft action to upgrade them to their more powerful sides, which also makes them worth two victory points at game end. On each turn, players draft Village cards that either show settlers, giving you resources based on where they’re placed plus an immediate additional resource or conversion shown on the bottom; or permanent benefits like roofs, utensils, or stone balls; these can be pretty powerful, especially utensils, but come at the cost of adding more settlers to build your little engine.
After you’ve taken your Village card and used its actions, if any, you then place your workers. You have just one worker in round one, and then gain one more in each round. Your first worker is larger than the others, but I’m not fat-shaming anyone here—he’s just built differently. You can place the large worker and any smaller worker on the same action tile in a round, but can’t do that with two of your more fun-sized workers. Placing workers can get you more resources, convert resources, flip action cards, cook, or move yourself up the two scoring sliders.
Or you can clean. I mentioned midden above, and the only way to get rid of it is to take a clean action. Your resources go in your storage area, regardless of resource type, and as you fill columns (they’re three spaces high), your storage slider moves to the right and increases the number of midden tokens you must take and store at the end of each round. At the end of the game, each midden token you have costs you a victory point, and you may lose more points if your storage slider is still in column six or beyond. So you will want to use the clean action at some point to take out the trash and/or move that slider back to the left.
This all adds up to a game with a lot of decisions and not enough time to do everything you want or need to do. It reminds me a little of 2023’s The White Castle, a game in which you get just nine turns over three rounds and always want just one more turn, although Skara Brae doesn’t have the action chains of that game (where you can set yourself up to get the equivalent of extra turns). Here you have to feed your settlers, upgrade your action cards, keep converting resources, move up the two sliders, and deal with your shit, literally, and then suddenly the game’s over. I think it’s great—I love the tension or the limited number of turns, the cognitive demands of the strict mechanics and scoring, and the fact that I can play a whole game without needing to take a midden break.
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