LogFAQs > #938930871

6. Keyflower (2012)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Bidding, worker placement, tableau-building, tile-laying
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 7
Game length: 25-30 minutes per player
Experience: 6-8 plays with 3, 5, 6 players (2016-2018)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), 6/80 (2018)

Description - Over the course of four seasons, each player builds a village of hexes. During each season, a set of hexes become available for players to bid on. On a player's turn, they either bid using their personal supply of colored meeples, or place meeples on a hex (in the market, in their village, or in someone else's village) to activate that hex's ability. While any meeple can be used to bid on/activate a hex, all subsequent bids or activations on that hex must be of the same color as the first. Most hexes have abilities that generate or convert resources, while some give victory points and others are used to upgrade your tiles to make them more powerful and be worth more points.

Design - Keyflower unites many of my favorite game design elements to become the second-highest-ranking eurogame on my list. Bidding and auctions are inherently fun. Building your own little village tableau is inherently fun. And worker placement in general is inherently fun. Keyflower has all of these, and each of these little steps is executed to near-perfection.

Unlike many other auctions, Keyflower dumps the entire market at you at once, and all of it is fair game. Allocating workers to one bid means that you pass up a turn in which you could be setting the color on another tile. You're able to divest out of a losing bid, but sensibly not out of a winning bid; however, getting into losing bids is dangerous because those meeples you place there must move somewhere else together, and they have to go somewhere that their color is allowed. The green meeples are a brilliant addition as well; you start the game with a random collection of red, yellow, and blue meeples, which you can replenish essentially once per round. However, certain hexes allow you to get green meeples - and if you corner the green meeple market, you can dominate bids with considerably fewer resources - as long as no one else gets the green as well. The color system is really what drives this aspect.

The tableau-building is also above average. Hexes are more fun than squares, and these have routes that you'll need to follow. Each tile in your tableau can be upgraded (flipped); most are not worth points otherwise. This is where Keyflower's entire resource and transportation minigame comes into play; like most eurogames, Keyflower has a standard array of resources you collect and spend throughout the game: wood, stone, metal, gold, and special tool tokens. What makes Keyflower unique is how you spend them. Instead of paying out of pocket, all of the wooden pieces of the board actually need to be on the location they're upgrading in order to perform the upgrade. Resources generated by local tiles appear on those hexes, while resources generated by your meeples on others' tiles go to your home tile. The same hex which grants the action to upgrade your hexes also allows you to push these resources between your hexes, so that they're available on the upgraded hex. It's a fantastic little mini-system that is the most abstracted from the core game of bidding and worker placement, but it makes the tableau-building that much more rewarding.

Then there's the worker placement. As with bidding, the color system makes the worker placement - a tile can be activated up to three times, if you use an increasing number of meeples (assuming you don't intentionally block it the first use by placing three meeples on it to start with). But, each activation requires you to use the same colored meeples that were used the first time. This can lead to competition from the green meeples once again, and monopolization of a tile if you have the best of its color. But the other coolest part of the worker placement is that you can place on any hex, not just ones in your village. You play a quarter of the game (Spring) with just a single hex in your village, and you only get additional hexes once the season is over. But you can still activate tiles - you just activate them directly in the marketplace. And later, you can get people's meeples into your own village when they place there... but it can feel rough when someone locks down your badass move/upgrade tile with a green meeple.

Even with each individual component popping, the blend of them actually elevates Keyflower beyond the sum of its parts. There is no divide between auction phase and activation phases; instead, on your turn, you either bid or activate. That gives each decision or action a massive opportunity cost. Keyflower constantly forces you to assign value to your actions. Auction and worker placement games have minimal confrontation, but because of the confluence of mechanics and the sheer number of potential contested battlegrounds, the board state will constantly be affected by others' decisions in a chaotic way. In the end, you can't math out everything, only determine which primary tradeoff you want to make, and hope that your opponents don't block you so you have no other options.

I haven't played Keyflower with 2 players or with 4 players, but for my money, it scales great between 3 and the 6-player full complement. The arc of the game remains the same: try to fetch the engine and powers in the first two seasons; finalize your engine and start planning victory points in autumn; and finally just focus on upgrading and gaining those potentially massive victory point tiles in winter. It leaves you wanting more but also gives a feeling of satisfaction.

Keyflower isn't the prettiest game. The tile art on the cardboard hexes is mostly functional, the meeples are standard grade, and the quality of the resources are pretty typical. The theme is laughably thin; I don't know the names of the majority of the tiles in the game, and the three basic resources of wood, stone, and iron are literally entirely symmetric. It's a game that succeeds based solely on the strength of its brilliant mechanics - and I have no qualms calling those mechanics brilliant.

Experience - I advised a friend buy Keyflower in 2016 without having played it. It was one of the earlier games I made it my responsibility to learn without being taught, and then teach myself. The sense of ownership (even though I didn't own the game itself) may have added to my enjoyment of it, and it definitely made me feel closer to the hobby overall. I've also generally done well at the game, which could definitely affect my opinion of it, in fairness, but I think as long as the game were played quickly, even a poor performance wouldn't cause me to think less of its excellence (contrast AGOT:TBG, where getting blown off the board as the Lannisters felt pretty bad).

Future - I'd really love to own Keyflower. The biggest fear is that it's a bit confrontational at two players (and you see fewer tiles, which makes planning more difficult). But as one of my favorite all-time euros (my favorite as of 2018), it is something I'd like in my collection at the very least.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness