Anatomy of a Line: Keyflower, Part Two — The Expansions & Variants

Figure 2-1: Keyflower and expansions (in Meeple Reality’s Keyflower Port)

Keyflower (2012) has found continued success over the last several years thanks to an innovative design that effortlessly merges together worker placement, resource management, and auctions. However, as is often the case with game design, what’s most interesting is what came afterward, as Richard Breese and Sebastian Bleasdale expanded Keyflower into a whole line, including to date two expansions and two variants. Continue reading

Anatomy of a Line: Keyflower, Part One — The Original Game

Figure 1-1: Arriving in the Keyflower boats

Richard Breese has been designing and publishing games since Chamelequin (1989), but he’s better known for the “key” games that began with Keywood (1995). His best received and most popular game is actually a co-design, Keyflower (2012), with Sebastian Bleasdale. It’s no surprise that it’s led to two supplements and two reimaginations of the game, the newest of which, Key Flow (2018), finally got to American backers in December. As is usually the case, looking through a series of designs like this can offer intriguing lessons about the art of game design.

This first article focuses on the original game, while a follow-up in two weeks investigates how the expansions and reimaginations have changed the game. Continue reading

A Deckbuilding Lite Look at Great Western Trail

One of the most popular games of recent years is Great Western Trail (2016), an intricate resource-management and set-collection game … that also has a relatively minor deckbuilding component. But, as it turns out, that deckbuilding includes some pretty innovative aspects, and so is worth discussing as part of my overall series on deckbuilding mechanics.

ThreeFour Generations of Deckbuilding

I’ve typically classified deckbuilders as falling into three generations — or three degenerations if you prefer, as each moves further from the original precepts of Dominion (2008), now a decade old. These generations aren’t entirely separated by time, but instead by the maturity of the mechanic. Continue reading

A Model for Decision Making in Games, Part Four: Case Studies

Last fall I laid out a model for decision making in games that divided it into three parts: action selection; action execution; and action resolution. This article concludes the series by examining how it works using the concrete examples of three games: the DSP winners from three different decades — which also does a nice job of highlighting how the hobby has changed in the last twenty or more years.


Tigris & Euphrates (1997) by Reiner Knizia

Tigris & Euphrates is a game in the classic eurogame mold. It features some elements rare in modern eurogames, such as more chaotic resolution, and it has a simpler selection model. Put all that together and you have a game that does a great job of demonstrating how this decision making model can be used to map out any entire game.  Continue reading

A Bagbuilding Look at Altiplano

Deckbuilding seems to have slowed down in recent years, after being one of the dominant forces in the industry throughout much of the ’10s. But it’s nice to know that when we see a new game in the genre, it tends to be more original and innovative, as is the case with Reiner Stockhausen’s newest bagbuilding game, Altiplano (2017).

The Physicality of Bagbuilding

Each of the bagbuilding games that I’ve played has gotten me thinking about the genre because it’s simultaneously so close to deckbuilding, but so intriguing different. So I previously defined the subgenres derived from deckbuilding (while writing about Orléans) and talked about the things that bagbuilding does particularly well (while writing about Automobiles).

This time I was thinking more about the physicality of bagbuilding: how it tends to be built around small pieces, like the cubes in Automobiles or the discs in Orléans (and Altiplano Itself) by simple virtue of the fact that that’s what you can easily draw from a bag. Continue reading

A Model for Decision Making in Games, Part Three: Action Resolution

In recent months, I laid out a three-part model for decision-making in games, where you first choose an action with action selection, then specify an action with action execution. Now, I’m ready to talk in brief about the third part of the process, where you determine the results of an action with action resolution.


Phase 3: Action Resolution

Action resolution forms the back end of a decision, where the decision-making mechanics have been overtaken by the game mechanics. In other words, it’s not actually about the process of making decisions, but instead about how the decisions that a player makes are translated into results within the game’s core system—whether it be resource management, area control, majority control, or something else. Continue reading

A Model for Decision Making in Games, Part Two: Action Execution

Last month I posited a model for decision making in games that divides decisions into three parts: action selection, action execution, and action resolution. That article also discussed a variety of popular methods for choosing actions. However, that’s just the start: once you’ve chosen an action, what do you do with it?

Phase 2: Action Execution

The action-selection phase of decision making took a broad view of player actions, asking the question, “What category of actions does the player take?” However, even after a player has selected a type of action, there’s often more choice to make: how exactly does the player implement (“execute”) the action, within the scope of the current game position? Continue reading

A Model for Decision Making in Games, Part One: Action Selection

Two weeks ago I wrote an article defining worker placement in response to some rather loose use of the term. I thought I might get some disagreement on my definition, but instead I got disagreement on the use of the mechanic itself. Some people apparently hate worker placement because they feel that it restricts their choices and has made previously complex games simple. I disagree, because I think the comments reflected a somewhat superficial understanding of how decisions are actually made in games. Though it’s quite possible that some worker-placement games have fewer meaningful choices than some pre-worker-placement games, I don’t believe that it’s endemic in the category of play, and I’m certain that it’s not a requirement. That’s because worker placement only affects one phase of the decision making process — and not the one that leads to the most voluminous set of options. Hence, this article, the first of three. It’s not about worker placement specifically, but rather about the whole spectrum of decision making in games (and how worker placement fits into that).


Introduction to Decision Making

When you make a decision in a game, it comes in three parts: what you are doing; how you are doing it; and what the results are. The first two parts of that formula represent an ever-branching tree of options, while the last part involves the mechanics of the game system churning out the results.

Figure 1. The three parts of decision making.

Continue reading

Defining Worker Placement

Would worker placement by any other name smell as sweet? Perhaps. But there’s power in names: they allow us to develop a common vocabulary, so that we know what other people mean, permitting us to set our own expectations.

That means that a big kerfluffle about naming conventions is significant, such as when a notable board game show says that a non-worker-placement game is one of the top games in that category of play. Because it muddles our meanings, it impairs our communication, and it sets incorrect expectations:  if you loved worker-placement games and picked up the game in question based on a recommendation, you might well be disappointed (or not: it’s a great game otherwise).

So this week I wanted to give my own definitions of worker placement, starting with a look at its history. Continue reading

A Legion of Legacies, Part Four: Legacy Emotions & Agency

Welcome to the fourth article in a series about our industry’s newest category of play: Legacy Games. Previous articles in this series discussed: Legacy Play (an overview); Legacy Venn (a definition); and Legacy Mechanics (a toolbox). This final (for now) article in the series is going to look at Legacy mechanics from a few different directions by focusing on Legacy Emotions and Legacy Agency.

(As for me: my Legacy adventures continue, and I continue to love the continuity and the idea of building something from session to session. During our last Pandemic Legacy Season 2 session, we finally managed to recon one of the areas laid out at the start of the game, and that was very fulfilling; Pandemic Legacy Season 2 continues to be a well-designed and inventive game. Then, in our last SeaFall session we did something that changed the whole game, and we had to figure out what that meant; SeaFall continues to be a messy and chaotic but fun game.) Continue reading