Keyflower. Has anybody else here played it?
It continues to blow my mind because it mixes so many different mechanisms but it doesn't feel busy or disconnected. On the contrary, it is cohesive and elegant.
Mechanisms in the game include:
- auction/bidding
- worker placement
- tile laying
- pickup and deliver
The game plays out in four rounds ("seasons"), each of which introduces a set of hexagonal tiles in the center of the board. On your turn, you can either make a bid for a tile or place a worker (or workers) on a tile to use its ability. Bids are actually made with workers -- meeples (called "keyples" in the game) that come in red, blue and yellow (and green, if you use certain special tiles to get them). Because the meeples are used for both bidding and activating tiles and the number of meeples in the game are limited, bids tend to stay low, which helps mitigate the problem being discussed above.
A further restriction really opens up the gameplay -- colour restriction. In each round, each tile can only be used by a single colour. If I bid 1 red on a tile or if I activate the tile with a red worker, only red meeples can go there from then on, whether for bidding or for working.
At the end of each season, the people who won bids for tiles take those tiles and add them to their own little village (tile laying!). Any workers who were placed on that tile
go with the tile, adding to the player's stock of available meeples for the next round. Note that tiles in players' villages can also be used by workers. If you use another player's village, the only drawback is that they will take that meeple into their stock at the end of the round.
Tiles can be upgraded. You usually do this by generating the requisite resources and using a special tile action to transport the goods to the tile and upgrade it. Pickup and deliver! Well, generate and deliver.
It all plays very smoothly, even with the maximum of 6 players.