I can’t believe I’ve never talked about Keyflower before. This happens now and then, I think to myself “I’ve definitely already reviewed this game”, only for my search to turn up absolutely nothing. Well that’s certainly a treat, because I love Keyflower and am so excited to talk about it.

Keyflower is a worker placement auction game designed by Sebastian Bleasdale and Richard Breese, and originally published in 2012. In Keyflower, you are taking meeples and using them to bid on parcels of land, but those same meeples that you used to bid on tiles to expand your village are the very workers that you will use to activate the tiles ability. Keyflower is a fascinating experience the first time you play it because you will find yourself caught between these core two desires: one, to acquire as much land as possible, and two, to exploit the land that you have acquired.

The meeples come, by default, in one of three colours: blue, yellow, and red. But some of the tiles will let you exchange them for a special green one, which only shows up when someone has used that tile. And the reason why the specific colours are important is that when you bid on a tile or use it for an action, suddenly you’ve locked that tile to only be able to be used by meeples of that colour for that round. This can get very important when you are running really low on blue, for instance, and then someone plops a blue meeple as a one-meeple bid on a tile. It’s only one meeple, but if you’re void in blue, you’re up the creek without a paddle.

This mechanic creates interesting and tense dynamic moments. Another aspect that helps facilitate those feelings is the fact that you can always pass instead of taking an action. There’s no punishment for passing or set round timers. Sometimes you’ll want to go first to stake your claim on a tile, while other times you might want to hold back so you can react to the moves and machinations of your opponents. When the other players take their turns and it comes back around to you, you can choose to jump back into the action, or you can choose to pass again. The round only ends when all players pass in succession. There’s a little bit of push-your-luck, playing-chicken-with-the-other-players feeling when you maybe want to do something, but you’re waiting for someone else to tip their hand. Maybe you want someone to spend their yellow people somewhere else before you commit to bidding yellow on a different tile.

Keyflower is played over four seasons. In each season, there will be a market of tiles to bid on, and at the end of each season, each player gets to choose a boat to inject their house with more meeples. At the end of the fourth season, everyone score their points and whoever has the most points is the winner.

Keyflower is such a unique Euro game with its worker placement and auction mechanics. It’s one of those few games that plays well all the way up to six players. It’s especially exciting when you manage to read a situation correctly; when you play a single meeple to a tile completely throw a spanner in the works of your opponents, just because you used the one colour they didn’t have. it makes you feel really smart and clever.

One of the major strengths of Keyflower is that it feels incredibly replaybale and scaleable. It plays well at 2 players, it plays great at 6 players. Not many euro games can boast that. Another aspect of Keyflower that I really love is the element of positive player interaction. At any time on your turn, you can choose to play one of your workers on any tile in the game, whether that is on the auction market or in one of the other players’ villages. You place your people on the tile and you activate it. The rub being whoever owns that tile will take the workers that were used to activate the tile into their supply to use next round.

But sometimes that’s pivotal. Near the end of the game, especially in the final round, players will be using each other’s markets quite freely because you want to be using the best actions available. It’s worth giving your opponent one or two meeples to use their cart to move five goods with one action rather than try to struggle along with your own cart that might only let you move one or two goods per action. Efficiency is the name of the game. And, each tile can only be activated 3 times per season, with an ascending cost. The first time it’s used, it costs 1 meeple. The second time costs 2, and the third time costs a whopping 3 meeples. So not only are you getting the benefit of using that tile, but you’re depriving your opponents of the opportunity to benefit from that action.

Another dynamic part of Keyflower is that every player is dealt three end-game goals at the very beginning of the game, and no one reveals any of their goals that they have until the final round. Hell, in the final round you don’t have to put all your goals out onto the table. If you are holding a goal for the most green workers and you have no green workers at all. It behooves you to hold that goal back, deny it’s existance in the game. Of course, the more goals you put out, the less competition there will be for the goals you really want. After all, the end game scoring tiles are what fill the auction market in that final round. All players get to bid on those goals, meaning that one that you’ve been building towrds all game can get stolen. And the alternative is that you can steal a goal away from someone, denying them points even if it barely benefits you.

Sure, maybe they have a huge stockpile of resources and they were going to clean up, but if they can’t win that auction, those resources aren’t going to help them. It’s that dynamism that makes Keyflower so attractive.

The interaction makes Keyflower a top-tier game. It’s one that gets your elbows up as you try to outmenauver your oppoents. It’s a delicate dance of timing and being flexible with your plans, as you never really know how the meeples are going to shake out in the end. It actualyl evokes a lot of the same feelings as Hansa Teutonica, but with an auction mechanic instead of route building and overt bullying. If you haven’t had the pleasure of playing Keyflower yet, you really owe it to yourself to get it to your table.