Keyflower Board Game Review and Strategy Guide for R&D Games

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1. bonsaitreehugger Verified Buyer – 11 February 2025

   Wonderful game. Probably my favorite of all time. Beautiful components. Combines many different game mechanics (such as auction, worker placement, engine building, etc.) into a coherent whole. Plays equally well with 2-4. (It can play more, but I don’t recommend it–the game tends to drag then.) It’s very tense, strategic, and cutthroat, though there isn’t any direct fighting.

   All that said, it’s a fairly complex game to learn at first. I wouldn’t recommend jumping from Monopoly, or even Settlers of Catan, to this. But for those who’ve played a few games medium weight games, this is highly recommended.
   

2. Evan Wade Verified Buyer – 24 March 2025

   This is one of those games that combines systems/elements from a number of other hugely popular games – common in board gaming. It does it very well. One of the best scaling games around (we play it primarily as a two-player game and love it). Worker placement, Carcassonne-style hex tile city-building, countless opportunities to screw the people you’re playing against together… a really really good game in a series I understand is pretty excellent.

   As a side note, if you really want to fluster someone, place three workers on their transport/upgrade locations to begin a later season. You may catch a black eye but it’s totally worth it.
   

3. Kristin M. Petersen Verified Buyer – 16 April 2025

   Fun game. Not clear who published or distributed this but Huch is top notch. They sent a hand personalized letter with a missing piece all the way from Germany. Now back to the game. This one is unique and easy to setup and get moving. Don’t be deceived by the cute artwork and accessibility, its a heavy game with about a 2 hour play time our first run for 2. A lot of player interaction with chances to sabotage your opponents but a nice balance of depth, complexity, and elegance. This one seems to test analysis paralysis and end game scoring can be a little math heavy. Something this game does that I like is not revealing your performance through scores until the end of the game and assigning resources in bulk deliveries with variable abilities so it’s kind of like having a variable action point allowance system which you have to track throughout instead of just saying you get 4 action points on every turn. This game puts many mechanisms together keeping them cohesive and balanced but sometimes I wish there was a little more focus on the villages than the auctions. Overall very happy with this game it just plays longer than I thought it would so despite the short 5 minute setup time it doesn’t seem to make it to the table as often but it’s worth keeping around for when it does.