Tag Archives: richard breese

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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 →

New to Me: Summer 2015 — A Lot of Good

Posted on by
Reply

I played a lot of new games during the Summer — almost 20. And for the longest time, most of them were good but not better. Fortunately, toward the end of the season things improved and move games appeared in my Very Good to Great range. As always, this is a listing of games that I’d never played previously, and it’s my personal take on the games, as a medium-serious game player.

The Great

KeyflowerKeyflower (2012). This Richard Breese game is a couple of years old, but I played it for the first time a few weeks ago, so it makes the list. All of the Breese games I’ve played to date are dense combinations of classic Euromechanics, and this one’s no exception. In fact, it’s an auction/worker-placement/tile-placement game. (Seriously!)

I found the combination of auction and worker placement to be both innovative and interesting. Each turn you either place meeples as workers (to take advantage of a tile’s action) or else you place them as bids (to try and purchase a tile for future usage and/or victory points). The balance is a really tricky one because you might want to grab an action before anyone else, or you might try to make an all-important first bid; doing either also allows you to determine the color of meeple (currency) that must be used for all future bidding on working on that tile.

Continue reading →