Tuesday 30th November - Keythedral

Keythedral-start
Originally uploaded by coljen.

Keythedral, designed by Richard Breese has turned into a sought after game with copies selling at Essen 2003 for over 100 euro. Now they have reprinted it and it has become more accessible. If you would like to read a review of the reprint by Greg Schloesser look here:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/55252

Basically each player has five cottage tiles, that can upgraded to villages, and 10 worker tiles. The board consisting of hexes that produce different resources is laid out by the players at the start placing their cottages as they go. Then each player picks a number from 1 to 5 and the workers come out of the corresponding cottages and harvest resources. These resources can used for various things. Upgrading cottages, buying law cards or buying buildings that get VPs etc. And that very briefly is it. As with Settlers the placement of cottages at the start is pretty vital, even more so here as it is more difficult to recover from a bad position, as Neil found out to his cost. Each player has 3 fences that can be placed during the game to restrict a players workes egress from their cottages, this can be particularly nasty. You can pay resources or get a law card to get rid of them though.
This was a first play for Garry, Neil, Richard (I think) and myself. Steve had played a couple of times before so he ran through the rules, Richard didn’t have any wooden blocks to play with so I think he actually listened this time. Including the rules explanation the playing time was about 150mins. I think everyone except Neil, who got particularly badly stuffed in the setup, enjoyed the game.