Page 47 - spielbox_0717_EN

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to happen to the two keyples at the end of the season. They are on
the build tiles you have taken from the center of the table early in the game.
The way it works is that players who begin a season with more than eight key- ples will have to decide which eight they are going to use. They will get some bene- fit from the surplus in the form of resource cubes and animals, but it is less and more restricted than they would have got had the extra been allowed to work normally. For the players with fewer, the benefits will show themselves towards the end of the season. At that point they will find themselves in a situation where they have played their keyper and all their keyples, while others still have some waiting to be assigned. They can then start making keyples in their village and on the cen- tral board claimed by their keyper work second shifts. The result is that they can focus these later turns on the activities that are most profitable to them, while their opponents are still spreading their efforts over a wider area. It is all nicely balanced. A further result of the rule is that, because players know that this is how the later part of each season will play out, they are going to play more freely in the early part.
Although there is a lot of computer program style “if this, then that; else the other” to the rules for determining how many resources or actions you get from each keyple you place, the underlying principles are easy enough to under- stand. You get more when people work at what they are good at, and also when they work together. The only further step is realizing that, under certain circum- stances, people will work overtime.
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u can also play onto a field or tile that con- tains a single keyple placed there on a previous turn, and this time it can be done either on one of the central boards or in your village. The idea here is that keyples work overtime whenever the management wants them to. The keyple already in place does a second shift, and you again get one more resource or action than you would have got had the
new keyple been working alone.
I Making it sing
There is one more element in the game’s
machinery, and this is the cleverest one, the idea that brings everything together and makes it sing. In the first season everyone has the same number of key- ples, but the way that they are assigned at the end of each season means that this is unlikely to be the case in future ones. If the result of this were that players with more had a significant advantage over those with fewer, the game play would be badly damaged, as everyone’s primary concern would be to retain control over the pieces they had at the start. They would claim a central board as their first action in a season and then confine their play to their own territory. This will prob- ably happen in your first couple of games in any case, since players are likely to be nervous about how the novel parts of the system will play out in practice.
The extra idea is a powerful compen- satory mechanism, whose result is that in some circumstances having more keyples than your starting eight
is good, but in others having fewer is better.
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and that will be influenced by
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d do the job than you would if you sent a sailor. Most of the squares on the central boards have colored borders that indicate which specialist skills apply. The second idea is that workers are more productive when they cooperate. Two key- ples working together will produce more than the same two keyples each working alone. In game terms this means a change to the normal worker placement rule of “no more than one worker in a location”; you can now have up to two. Moreover, the two do not have to come from the same player. When you place a keyple onto a hitherto empty square on one of the central boards, you have to invite other players to join you, with the option to do so proceeding clockwise round the table. In terms of the resources or actions gained, both players do well from such cooperation, but there is a condition to be met and a consequence to be consid- ered. The condition is a compatibility one with the colors – and this is where the generalists are valuable, since they will work with anybody. The consequence to be con- sidered is what is going
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