Key Flow is a card-drafting, tableau building game for two to six players. It should last between one and two hours. As you may have guessed, this is another game in the Key series by Richard Breese. Now, if you’ve played Keyflower, this game is the card drafting variant. Yes, card variants remain popular. Yes, it still feels like Keyflower. Yes, it will move faster. Yes, you will pick this up extremely quickly. Meeples are cards you draft rather than resources you use to bid. You can now go to the end of the article or read the rest of the article and play spot the difference.
If you haven’t played Keyflower, this is a game about trying to build the most prosperous town. There are three card types that you will have to choose from: meeples, town cards, and river cards. Each turn all players will pick one card from their hand, simultaneously reveal and resolve it, and then pass their hand to the next player. This game will be played over four seasons, with each season providing different cards.
Meeples are the easiest to break down: Each card has one, two, or three meeples on it. Meeple cards are used to activate buildings. You can only play meeple cards on spaces where there were fewer meeple cards at the start of the turn than there are on the building that’s being activated. Breaking that down: a card with one meeple on it cannot be placed on a building with a meeple card. Cards with two meeples cannot go where there are two or more meeple cards. Cards with three meeples cannot go anywhere there are three or more meeple cards. Because play is simultaneous, it doesn’t matter whether any player also plays a meeple card onto the same building that you plan to use: only how many meeple cards there were at the beginning of the turn. Sometimes meeple cards have a symbol with two meeples on it. These represent tokens that can be added to meeple cards to increase the number of meeples on them (to a maximum of three). At the end of each season, these can be used as to take extra actions, following the rules of placing meeples. Each player then claims any meeples that have been played on their buildings and sets them aside for the end of the game.
Town cards are both cards that you place within your tableau. River cards have water at the bottom of the card, town cards do not. Some river cards will have a grey box down by the bottom. If it contains any resources, those are placed on the card. If it contains any skill tiles, you gain the appropriate ones to your supply. River tiles are static cards. Once they are placed down, they provide whatever benefit is listed on them. They can never be activated. River cards are placed in the bottom row while town cards are placed in the top row. There is a half card separation between river and town cards. When placed in the tableau, all cards must be connected to other cards, but this does not mean that cards must be placed directly adjacent to another card in its row.
Town cards are the dynamic cards activated by meeple cards. There are two main types of buildings: production buildings and transportation buildings. Production buildings produce resources, sometime with a cost, whenever a meeple is played on it. If the owner of the building played the meeple, the resources are left on the building. If any other player played the meeple, the resources are placed on that player’s home. Transportation buildings are marked by the symbol of a horse drawn carriage with a number on it and a house symbol. The transportation symbol means that the player who activated the card may move one good one space along a road as many times as the value in the carriage. If the number is three, the player can move three goods one space, one good three spaces, or any combination thereof. The house symbol means that the player can upgrade one building card.
Most buildings will have two boxes on it. The top one will have an arrow, with a cost in it, pointing to the bottom one. To upgrade a building, the player must have the resources listed in the arrow already on the building. If one of the costs is a skill tile, the player just needs to be able to spend one of those tiles. Upgrading tiles will provide a more powerful action and more victory points at the end of the game.
The final distinct type of card is a scoring card. These are usually buildings, but they will provide a certain amount of victory points based combinations of cards, animals, meeples, and resources. Every card, animal, meeple, and resource can only be allocated to one victory point card, so no double counting. Resources must be placed on the card in order for them to be allocated. Most of the scoring cards are buildings in winter. At the beginning of the game, each player will be dealt five winter cards. Then at the beginning of the winter phase, they will choose one to immediately build before the rest of the scoring cards are shuffled into the winter deck.
Once each season has been completed, the players will calculate all of their points and determine who won.
This game will run faster than Keyflower and the overall flow is smoother. Players will not have to worry about how many meeples they can spare to bid and which can they spend on actions. Players will also not have to worry about what color meeples they need to use because each color only appears during one season. That said, the gameplay feels mostly the same; most of the essential features of Keyflower remain. Successfully building a thriving town and filling it with resources remains just as satisfying. If I had to choose between which of the two to play, all else being equal, I would choose Keyflower every time. But! Key Flow is faster. Key Flow is smoother. With a group of people familiar with Keyflower, I would expect the game to take anywhere between an hour and a half and two hours. With a group familiar with Key Flow, I would expect the game to be finished in under an hour.