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REVIEW
Keyper
In Equal First Place
This is the latest in the series of “Key” games from Richard Breese and his com- pany, R&D Games. They began over twenty years ago with Keywood, a game that Richard designed for a competition and then self-published in a small edi- tion of 200 copies. Things have grown a lot since then.
What links the games is their setting, which is that of a pre-industrial village or small town, where ordinary people get on with the sort of jobs that ordinary people did in rural communities, when spared from calamities and the interference of their social superiors. In other words, bucolic
and vaguely medieval. Keyper is either the 8th or 9th in the series, depending on whether you regard last year’s Key to the City: London as a separate entry, or just a self-contained variant of its prede- cessor, Keyflower.
The setting is one that lends itself to the use of the worker placement mech- anism, and it was in the early games of the series that we first encountered this. It is a natural fit. You have a set of people and you send them out to col- lect resources and do jobs. The mech- anism is one that has been used a lot and by many different designers over the past dozen years, but it was in Key- thedral (2002) that the idea was crys- tallized. Not all the “Key” games are worker placement, but this latest one is, and indeed that is largely its main
point. Having introduced the idea fifteen years ago, Richard has now taken it and developed it further in several new and interesting directions.
Each player begins the game with their own personal board, a dozen assorted building tiles and a set of nine “people”. The board is divided into
two areas, one for farm buildings and one for the village. The building tiles are equally split into the two types,
with the farm build- ings being shelters for different types
of animals, and
the village
ones being
mainly places
where you can
process various types
of raw building materials into
more useful form – wood to planks, clay to bricks and rough stone to blocks. The important thing to note here is that these tiles begin off-board. If you want to use them, you will have to transfer them to your board by “building” them. This requires the use of specified resources.
There are also some boards for general use – as many as there are players. These,
along
with some boat
tiles and a further selection
of building tiles, are in the middle of the table and available to everybody. It is from these that you will get animals and resources.
I Claiming one of
the central boards
It is with the people that the game
introduces new ideas. Your initial set of nine consists of a “keyper” and eight “key- ples”. The “keyper” is the person in charge and so doesn’t do any of the actual work.
The game is split into four seasons, and at some point in each one you will use your keyper to claim one of the central boards. At the end of
the season, this board and all the keyples on it will become yours and they, along with those in your vil-
lage, will make up your workforce for the next season.
The keyples are all people with special- ist skills: a farmer, a sailor, a forest worker, a clay worker, a miner, a quarry worker
and two generalists. Generalists are those irritating people who are good at everything. The first idea introduced into the game system is the natural
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