Farming

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 color, and a team of eight multi-colored keyples, including two white keyples. Each differently colored 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 color.

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 colored 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 has played all of their keyples, but another player still has some, then on their turn, the player with no remaining keyples can lay down one or more keyples 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 available only in certain seasons, e.g., raw materials can be upgraded to finished goods only in spring and summer, after which you can only convert using tiles in your own village. Gem mining occurs only in autumn and winter.

A player's strategy is likely to be influenced by which (seeded) spring country tiles they acquire and by the particular colored keyples they have available in the later seasons. Different combinations will encourage a player to develop their farm or village, help with their shipping or mining activities, and prepare for the seasonal fairs. Players constantly need to evaluate whether or not to join other players, 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. The winner is the player to gain the most points, usually through pursuing at least a couple of the different strategies.

In addition to the theme and mechanisms, 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.

A special English-language Kickstarter edition of Keyper with "character" keyples and keypers will also be released.

During the second half of the nineteenth century in what was then Ceylon, today known to all as the nation of Sri Lanka, a deadly fungus killed off all the coffee plantations on the island thus causing a serious economic crisis. The Scot James Taylor, and later many other entrepreneurs, set about substituting coffee plantations for tea plantations and hence creating what many connoisseurs today consider to be the best tea in the world.

In Ceylon, players take on the role of the pioneers who developed the Ceylon tea industry. As such, they build plantations in different districts and at different altitudes. They produce tea and try to sell it to the most important export companies. To favor this task, they must win the favor of the counselors of each district and develop the necessary technology that allows them to get ahead of their competitors.

At the end of the game, players score points for having plantations in each district, for meeting demands that have been set, for the level of technological development reached, and for the amount of money collected. In the end, the player who has the most points wins.

—description from the publisher

Growing tomatoes, lettuce, or carrots on Iceland? What an absurd idea!

But still, whoever had that idea was a genius! Geothermal energy on the island allows you to cultivate the most unexpected fruits and vegetables — an oddity that no tourist would want to miss. You are not the only farmer in Reykholt who is looking to make a fortune out of this, however, so you better be quick! The tourist season in Reykholt is short, and there are more people coming every year. Making use of the right people and having the right vegetables at the right time in Reykholt will give you the advantage you need to win the race!

In Blossoms (original title Kwiatki), players compete to create the most beautiful flower bouquet. The longer the flowers, the higher they score!

To set up, give each player two random face-down cards and three action tokens. Place the flower pots in the center of the playing area with space above them for the growing flowers. Place four different flower cards, one in each pot. Take one card from the draw pile and place it aside face-down.

Players alternate taking turns, trying to make the most valuable combination of flowers possible. On their turn, a player can conduct any number of actions, which are:

Growth — Draw one card from the deck and place it in any pot that has the same flower type.
Cut — Cut down one pot of flowers to score points; this ends your round.
Special — Use your action tokens to perform one extra action depending on which pot you choose.

A player's turn ends when they decide to cut flowers, pass, or when they have BAD LUCK. The game ends when the last card from the deck is drawn. Points are then scored by the size and diversity of sets you have planted. Whoever has the higher score wins!

Riverboat posits each player as the owner of a 19th century farm on the bank of the Mississippi River. You need to organize your workers to ensure that the fields are ordered according to their type and harvested when ready so that the goods can be shipped to New Orleans.

In more detail, the game lasts four rounds, and at the start of each round players draft phase cards until they're all distributed. The phases then take place in numerical order, with the player who chose a phase being the first one to act. In the first phase, players place their workers in the fields, with each player having the same distribution of colored field tiles, but a different random placement for each player. In phase two, players organize their crops, trying to group like types together, with some fields requiring two or three workers. In phase three, players harvest crops and load riverboats, with a dock needing to be filled with all the goods of a single type before it can be loaded. In phase four, the boats are launched and players can take special actions, with additional victory points possibly coming in phase five.