Inlocuitorul lui
Key Market - campanie pe Kickstarter si release la finalul lui 2017.
Finally!
Keyper is a game with high player interaction for two to four players played over four rounds. Each round represents a season: spring, summer, autumn and finally winter.
Each player starts the game with their own village board, a mini keyp board, 12 village tiles, a keyper (waving meeple) in their player colour and a team of eight multi-coloured keyples, including two white keyples. Each differently coloured keyple is a specialist in one activity; the brown keyper is a woodsman, the black keyple is a miner, the orange keyple a clay worker, etc. The white keyples are generalists who can represent any other colour.
Keyper is a worker placement game. (Keyper is the eighth new title in the medieval Key series of games, with Keydom, the second in the series being ‘widely recognized as the first of the worker placement genre of games’.) What makes Keyper special is that when one player places a keyple on a country board, another player can join them with a matching coloured keyple on the first player’s turn, to the benefit of both players. In this way some players are likely to have played all their keyples before others. All keyples have the potential to work twice. If a player had played all of their keyples, but another player still has some, then on their turn that player a player with no remaining keyples can ‘lay down’ a keyple(s) on the country board they have claimed or in their village board, to secure additional resources or actions. It can therefore be doubly beneficial to co-operate with your fellow players, although Keyper is not a co-operative game in the usual sense of the term.
The country boards are also noteworthy in that they can be manipulated and folded at the beginning of summer, autumn and winter to show one of four different permutations of fields for that season. A player will chose the one to suit their strategy, often hoping that another player will complement their choice. Certain fields on the country boards are only available in certain seasons. For example: raw materials can only be upgraded to finished goods in spring and summer after which you can only convert using tiles in your own village. Gem mining only occurs in autumn and winter.
A player’s strategy is likely to be influenced by which (seeded) spring country tiles that they acquire and by the particular coloured keyples they have available in the later seasons. Different combinations will encourage a player develop their farm and/or village, help with their shipping or mining activities and prepare for the seasonal fairs. Players will constantly need to evaluate whether or not to join other plyers, when to claim a country board, whether to play on their own or another player’s country board, when to use their own village and whether to create a large or small team of keyples for the following season. Players are fully engaged throughout. The winner is the player to gain the most points, usually through pursuing at least a couple of the different strategies.
Contents include: 48 country tiles, 48 village tiles, 26 fair tiles, 6 boat tiles. 4 ‘flexible’ country boards, 4 village boards (which are comprised of a farm, village, fair ground, storage area, dock and keyp) and 4 mini keyp boards. There are 4 waving wooden called ‘keypers’. 32 wooden ‘keyples’. 96 wooden raw material and finished goods counters. 8 wooden score marker cylinders. 96 wooden animeeples of eight different types, 20 wooden wheat counters, 64 gems and a black cloth bag.
As well as the theme and mechanics, Keyper has similar traits to the earlier key games: game actions are positive and constructive, not destructive; player interaction is through the game mechanisms not direct and, like Keyflower, the previous game in the series, there is a lot of player interaction.
There is a special English language Kickstarter edition with ‘character’ keyples and keypers. The game will be released in autumn 2017.
