Clammy Scythe-on-Expeditions Action

I won’t pretend to know what’s happening in Duel of Meloch. When we first got a glimpse of this world via Scythe, it was an alt-history Great War mechs-n’-boiled-barley affair. Then Expeditions rolled around and the whole thing took on a determinedly Strugatsky Brothers flair, all strange zones and alien meteors and zombified hussars. Now there’s a foreign entity named Meloch who’s thrown the previous games’ heroes into a time warp, resulting in one last excursion that just so happens to be a grudge match between two of Jamey Stegmaier’s most iconic gameplay systems. Do these disparate threads make a lick of sense? Not to this philistine. But even as the gameplay mostly gets me shrugging, I can’t help but find the result compelling. It’s a pickle. Scythe. Expeditions. This mat ain’t big enough for the both of us. At a sky-high level, Duel of Meloch does precisely as its subtitle proposes. This is Scythe vs. Expeditions, and so snugly fitted that while a few minor alterations are…