Game review: Keyflower

[cjwatson]

ghoti bought me Keyflower for my birthday, and we played it for the first time yesterday evening.

Keyflower is a strategy game of the kind familiar to people who've played German "designer games"; in this case one of the designers in question is a friend of mine, angoel, a number of our friends are credited as playtesters, and we've played and enjoyed a number of his games before so it was a good bet. It plays out four seasons in the life of a number of villages, where workers arrive on boats and can either be used to bid for tiles or to work tiles for resources; tiles successfully bid for become part of your village for the next season, and the winter tiles generate victory points for various combinations of workers, resources, and skills built up through the game.

Physically, the game is very well put together and made an excellent first impression on me. It uses Carcassonne-style "meeples" as workers (by permission and with acknowledgement), which always have a nice feel to them; it comes with enough resealable plastic bags to store each type of tile etc. separately (yes! more games should do this!); it includes a quality-feeling cloth bag to draw workers from; and the artwork is beautiful. The rulebook is well-presented, with a summary bar down the side of each page which I'm sure will be useful on subsequent plays, and for the most part it's clearly and unambiguously written.

As usual it took a while to get used to the mechanics and figure out what the goals were, but it started to become obvious that it was possible for villages to specialise in particular kinds of resources: for instance, given a gold mine, bidding for a jeweller's in winter was clearly a good bet. The (fairly light) simulation aspect here seemed well-thought-out and made it easier to get to grips with the available tiles. So far we've only played it through once, and only with two players, but it feels like the sort of game we'd enjoy replaying with two or more.

Niggles: We could have done with some general strategic advice in the rulebook, as we were initially quite confused about what would make a good balance of workers between bidding and production. We could see at least two possible readings of the rules on when you're allowed to upgrade (can you spend a turn to upgrade a tile provided you have the resources, or do you have to work a transport tile to do so? conversely, when you work a transport tile, does that allow you to upgrade tiles for free as a side-effect, or do you still need to have the resources available?), which no doubt are answered somewhere on the internet but we haven't yet looked. There are a lot of special-case tile effects, particularly for boats, and although the pictographic clues on the tiles themselves are pretty good, each tile only comes up at most once per game so it's pretty hard for things to sink in and we spent a lot of time flicking through the rulebook.

We enjoyed this and definitely intend to play it again. Let us know if you'd like to join us!