By the day after my first play I was already thinking about it obsessively and I continued to do so until I finally got the chance to try it again. A player may use more workers than are required, for example if they are reallocating workers from a losing bid which cannot be split or to prevent other players from using a tile.

Since the players know exactly which resource generation tiles will come out during the game, this makes their value effectively fixed (plus or minus which other scoring tiles come out along the way). They mention that it's a good, thoughtful family game with a solid bidding-based Eurogame and that there are many ways to play and win. Last up you have transportation tiles that let you move goods between tiles in your village and upgrade buildings. The iconography on all the tiles is clear and concise making it a pretty easy game to both learn after one playthrough without having to look up rules every couple of minutes.For example, if a gold counter is allocated to the jeweller for two points it does not score an additional one point.

The owner of the developer scores 2 points (or 3 points if the tile has been upgraded) for each upgrade icon that is on an adjacent tile. If you want to play Keyflower with new players KttCL provides gameplay which is close to Keyflower, but much more approachable in terms of strategy and learning the mechanisms. To ensure that there aren’t too many options in the later rounds, some of the tiles in Autumn and all the tiles in Winter don’t have an action and can only be bid on.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. If you use most of your workers to take actions then you won’t have much to do with the tools and resources you get and will not score many points from your village tiles. I’ve seen games where one player and her pool of green keyples ends up with nearly all of the winter tiles, or where she blocks off players from using their own tiles by simply placing out one green keyple.

The next boat that arrives in the spring brings along some able bodied workers to help in your vision. The game takes place over the following year and is divided up into four rounds depicting the four seasons from Spring to Winter.The change in the way you pass removes a lot of the tension of, “Is she really out or is she just passing to see what I do? A player may usually use a tile for a third time by placing three workers of the same color as the workers previously placed.

Before the start of winter, each player has to select which of their tiles (at least one) will be available for auction that round.It can be a hard sell to a table who may struggle to see past the slightly dreary box, but it’s one that’s well worth persevering with.