Throughout the game players will need to be alert to the opportunities to best utilise their various resources, transport and upgrade capability, skills and workers. Keyflower is played over the course of one year that is broken in to four rounds for the four seasons. There are also boat tiles equal to the number of players, containing more workers and skills to help the players each season, and they are not available for bid.

In summer, autumn and winter the start player for that season is the player who won the bidding for the highest numbered start player tile (depicting the start player worker) in the previous season. Since everyone is bidding with the same thing (colored meeples), and colors are not associated with players, it takes a second to register where you are bidding, what you are winning, and where you might want to play. There are so many ways to build a big, powerful engine in Keyflower and that is absolutely brilliant. The rule book does a good job of setting out how to play the game, even if it’s unnecessarily text-heavy.

Each player receives a starting home tile, 8 random workers behind a screen, and some winter tiles at the beginning.

Overall I think KttCL has less of a runaway leader effect and all players are still in the game, but that is due to the level of strategy available in the game. For scoring purposes, the purple start player marker may be declared by the player who successfully bid for it as a resource, skill or worker of any color and, if applicable, placed on the barn, blacksmith, stone yard or timber yard. Strangely, given this sparse description, there’s more theme present in Keyflower than in many of its Euro bedfellows. Instead of having new tiles for the market, each player will pick at least 1 winter tile from their hands, and put them in the market for bidding.It is incredibly hard to figure out what you are supposed to be doing in the first half of the game when the scoring tiles don’t actually show up until the last two rounds. In this instance the tile cannot be used for a third time in that season as the maximum number of workers allowed on a tile in one season is 6. K Note that boat tiles (including the four summer boats) do not have to be placed so that the water sides connect. When bidding, players can use workers of a matching color to place them on their side of a tile to show the bid.

A puzzling euro at its core, Keyflower’s excellent player interaction and satisfying town-building elements easily make it one of my current favourites. However if you don’t get the tile to turn something you’ve been collecting into points then they will get wasted. Each season new tiles will be available to bid on and new boats will deliver more workers and resources. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Keyflower presents players with many different challenges and each game will be different due to the mix of village tiles which appear in that particular game.I mean this in the best possible sense, the feeling of uncertainty makes every decision feel important. Luckily there are a lot of options for when your plans fall through and the game can be extremely tactical in allowing you to switch directions in the middle of your turn. The space furthest to the right is the first player for the next round and gets 7 keyples randomly, the space to the left of that gets 8 keyples, the space furthest to the left gets 6 keyples and the Era 1 tile, another scoring tile, to add to their borough. This would let you be much more likely to win a tile that you really want - assuming that you're able to set the color on it.