The E.B.G.G. Report: Sunny Side Up

Another day another E.B.G.G. (Evening Board Gaming Group). Despite a flood of emails out to everyone on the list, we only had one maybe from JoAnna, so I had started to get a little worried. Around mid-afternoon I received an email from Tim Harvey (I guy I haven’t hung out with in some long, I could have had a baby in that time, well, not me per say, but rather I could have sired an offspring in that amount of time) and he asked if he could join us for the night. Since I rarely turn down a gamer in need, I was glad to have him along.

Well the night had finally arrived to try out Keythedral. Keythedral is a game by Richard Breese and it’s part of a collection of “Key” games that he has developed: Keythedral, Keytown, Keydom and Keywood. I haven’t had a chance to play let alone even see a copy of these days so I cannot speak to their value as individuals or as whole series. However, I can tell you about the wonders of Keythredral.

In Keythedral, you are working together as a community to build a mighty cathedral in the center of town (I assume Keytown). In order to do that you need to gather resources to meet the specific needs of each phase of construction. As the cathedral progresses into its finer points, more expensive resources like stained glass, gold, and iron are needed to finish it off. Each “chair” in the cathedral is worth a certain number of victory points, the more resources required, the more points they are worth. They range in value from the first phase being worth 4 points each, the second 6, the third 8, the forth 10, and the fifth and final stage 12 points.

The board of Keythedral has a very Settlers of Catan feel, in that certain tiles produce certain resources: Lakes produce water (blue), Fields produce food (green), Woods produce wood (blue), Quarries produce stone (black) and vineyards produce wine (red). However, what makes these different than Settlers is these tiles are octagons (8 sided for the layperson) where as Catan tiles are hexagons (again 6 sided for the layperson). This allows for the placement of the “key” piece (just taking a stab here in the dark) bordering up to 4 tiles (numbered 1 to 5) and is the staging area from where a player places his workers into open fields.

The initial setup of the board is done in turns where players place a tile and then a cottage until all players have placed 5 cottages and 5 tiles. Cleverly all tiles are numbered on the back from 1 to 5, so depending on the number of players, you only use the tiles that match their number. So if there are only 3 players (as was the case last night) you would use tiles 3, 2, and 1. Once all tiles are placed the fun begins.

The first phase in the game is the “Workers” phrase. This is where players take turns moving workers into open fields to harvest resources. Each field may only have one worker in it, once its occupied, no other workers maybe placed inside it. Workers may only be moved into fields that are adjacent to your cottage. Simple enough. Well, it’s never quite that easy. As we mentioned above your cottages are numbered (Ah, the reader says). The starting player decides which numbered cottage will place workers first. This is extremely important for several reasons. First off, not all your cottages will be surrounded by four tiles, some of them might only have access to two or three fields. Secondly, if a player has “super sized” his cottage into a house, they can place two workers, which might further reduce your options. Lastly, there are these wonderful things called fences that a player can build to lock you out of a field all together. Since others might have a chance to place workers before you do, there is a very good chance some of your cottage workers might just have the day of (which happened to me on more than one occasion, thank you very much Jon Adam). Since resources are limited and workers are plentiful, its quite competition.

In clock-wise fashion, players choose which cottage will place next until all 5 cottages have been selected. Then beginning with the Starting Player, workers collect resources. This too is important because much like Puerto Rico, resource cubes are limited. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. Workers are removed from the field as they collect their resources.

This part was a little tricky for us since the colors were something we weren’t used to. The “brown” woods were more orange, and the white/grey quarries produced black stone. The only other color issue was on the back of the “chairs”, the black cube picture looked more dark brown, so unless there was a brown cube with it (which was very light brown) you had to do a double take.

So now you’re thinking great, I have all these resource cubes, what can I do with them?

Again, beginning with the Starting Player you can take one of the following actions:

1) Purchase a Keythedral chair by paying the resources pictured
2) Convert a cottage into a house by paying one brown and one black
3) Build a fence by paying one brown (each player only has 3 fences)
4) Remove a fence by paying two red (the fence is removed from the game)
5) Purchase a craft good: Iron (2 cubes), Glass (3 cubes), or Gold (4 cubes)
6) Trade with the trader (2 cubes for 1)
7) Buy a law card for one cube (this ends your round)
Pass

Players may one at a time continue to take one of these actions until all players have passed in succession (meaning, if you passed before you can still take another action) or until all players have purchased a law card.

Law cards are amazing powerful for what they cost. One of the things that I will do differently in our next game is purchase more of them.

Now, if the game wasn’t already exciting enough, it’s time for the Starting Player to change. The SP marker is passed to the person to the left of the current Starting Player. Beginning with the player on the left of the player with the marker, each person bids for the right to choose who’s the next SP, we didn’t quite play it this way, but I can see how it would have a greater impact. Each bid must be higher than the one before it and each player only gets one shot a bidding. You are bidding with your resource cubes and in at least our game (not sure if we did this wrong or right or if it even matters) we named the resource. So for example Tim might bid one blue cube.

Once the last bid is played, the player holding the SP marker has a choice, he can either accept the bid, collect the resources and pass over the marker, or he can match that bid and pay it to the highest bidder and keep the marker.

Now the only time I can see it getting tricky is this, say Tim had instead bid one glass cube. Technically according to the rules, “each resource cube and each craft cube has a value of one for bidding purposes”. So a bid of two black would trump the glass cube (even though it has a value of 3, since that is what it cost to buy it). I haven’t quite decided how to work out a balance in my head on the matter. Say Jon bid a gold and an iron (or a value of 5 cubes), but Tim bids 4 wine. Since winning bids are played by the person holding the marker I might want the gold and the iron, or perhaps I need the 4 wine (a lesser value) instead. However, if I decided to keep the marker who would I pay? I guess that’s why I shouldn’t try and tweak the rule, but that is neither here nor there.

Now whoever ends up with the marker gets to decide who the Starting Player is. This is where we deviated. Who ever won the bid was the Starting Player, but I think next game we’ll play it the right way as there would be an advantage to choosing the player to your right to be the SP.

The other mistake we made in our first came from the fact that we did not turn over the entire row of chairs on each stage, we only turned over the first one so that you never knew was coming next. According to the rules you are supposed to turn over the whole row. Personally in retrospect, I liked the tension that only seeing one piece created, you always had to be ready to adjust your strategy. I’ll leave that up for the guys to decide next time we play.

So, any how, back to my original report. Jon, Tim, and I all sat down to play Keythedral.

What an amazing game. It was filled with tough decisions, lots of tension, and how many games you can just say, “Well fine, I’m going to burn your house down” and get away with it?

In the initial board creation Jon ended up in a straight line down the right side of the board, while Tim and I were pretty scattered all over. In the first round the 4 point victory chairs went pretty quick and I built the games first house and was able to place two workers the next round.

Jon, being an avid fan of Brian’s (who wasn’t there in person but was in spirit), decided to copy the “If Bob does it strategy, then I’m going to do it”. Within 4 rounds Jon had built 4 houses and had a keen edge on controlling who go shut out of what fields.

Tim and I got into a fence war that we launched against each other and Jon, but they seemed to have less effect than Jon’s house strategy. It should be noted that Jon never (who claimed to be playing nice) never once purchased a fence or a law card for that matter.

The game flew along and quickly we were at the last victory chair to be purchased. Tim had the collected resources ready to purchase it when I slapped down a law card that swapped that tile and one that hadn’t been played. Jon had the cubes (not to be confused with tackle) to be able to buy the new tile and that triggered game in.

Now in addition to victory points purchased, all remain cubes are worth one point and craft cubes are worth what you purchased them for. Jon was quite happy with his 69 point total and made several jokes relating to his total. I didn’t quite have enough to beat him and Tim fell in third. However, before final totals were announced I noticed an error in my math, 12+8 is not 10, its 20. On a second counting I had 70 victory points and had won the game and had been declared the victor.

As we were packing up the cubes and pieces, Jon cursing his luck, I happily pointed out how when I first counted I had made an error, and showed Jon my mistake. Enter mistake number two.

Jon, being a sometimes math challenged individual and obsessed with the number 69, decided to re-count his points looking for hanging chads and the like only to discover that he had indeed miscounted. So like Paul Hamm in the 2004 Olympics, I had my gold medal stripped from me because of a counting error. Congratulations goes to Jon for his win.

All in all, this was an amazing game and I cannot wait to try it again.

We had had so much fun playing Keythedral, we had considered playing the game a second time, however with the arrival of Michelle we decided that we should try a new game that we all hadn’t played.

We decided on St. Petersburg (being the recent winner of the IGA award).

St. Petersburg was an odd game to get into at first and I am not sure if we did some things wrong or not. The game is played over several rounds (7 to 10 as the directions suggest). Each round consists of 4 parts: Workers, Buildings, Aristocrats, and Trading.

During a phase you can either buy a card (put it directly into play), pick up a card and put it in your hand (save it for later, you can hold a maximum of 3 cards), play a card from your hand (you still have to pay the cost) or pass. Once all the cards are purchased or everyone has passed, the phase is scored and the cards are moved down the row.

This is one area I believe we screwed up. There are two rows of 8 card slots. According to the rules you are supposed to move any un-purchased cards to the end of the row, only after the whole round do you move them down to the second row (where they are discounted). We moved them down to the second row and used the discount for the following phase. Oh, well, better learned for the next time. When deal new cards the administrator deals up to a total of 8 cards, so if there are already 3 on the board, only 5 new ones would come into play.

In the Worker phase you are buying and playing workers. Workers aren’t worth any victory points, they only give you Rubles (which you need to buy and play cards). Any card that you already have in play helps discount future purchases; so for example say you already have 2 fur trappers in play. Normally the cost for a fur trapper is 6, however because you already have 2, the cost is now 4 (however the cost can never go below 1). At the end of the phase, players are paid for their workers (these cards stay in play and are paid out ever Worker Phase).

In the Buildings phase you are buying and playing buildings. Buildings rarely pay any Rubles, but they are worth victory points (who ever has the most victory points wins at the end of the game), and are scored every Building phase.

In the Aristocrats phase you are buying and playing aristocrats. These are the key to winning the game. Most aristocrats are worth both money and victory points. In addition, at the end of the game you score more victory points for number of different aristocrats you have in play. For example if I have 2 different ones in play I might only score 3 victory points, where as if I have 5 I would score 15.

The trading or exchange phase works differently than all the rest. You are buying cards that you will exchange with cards you already have in play. Perhaps I have a lumberjack in play and in the exchange phase I buy a lumber mill. I would replace the lumberjack (removed from the game) with the lumber mill. Generally this increases your income and or victory points. This is very important when it comes to Aristocrats as it allows you to increase your diversity and thus increase you victory points in the end of the game.

The game ends when one pile of cards is exhausted. The remaining phases are played out and the game ends at the end of the round.

None of us had a clue when we first started. Tim and I were buying guys who were costing 7 Rubles to play instead of guys who were only 3 because we thought they were better. We all pretty much ran through most of our starting cash at the end of the phase.

In the next building phase Jon Adam slapped down 23 Rubles to purchase the academy which was worth 7 victory points.

Jon took the early lead in the game as each building phase he was racking up those huge points thanks to his academy. Some how Tim managed to get a pile of miner workers (the gold kind, not under aged) and was cranking out the cash.

Cash is the key to buying stuff. Doh!

Tim commanded the late game and won by a handy margin (10 to 15 points would be my guess). Jon, Michelle and myself were all within a point or two of each other.

This was a great game and I can see why it won the IGA and when we get a chance to play it again, the competition will be much more fierce.

All in all it was another fun gaming experience (kinda makes you wish you were there).

I hope to see you all on October 11th which is Columbus Day (perhaps we’ll do something in honor of that). As a side note if you want to make sure you are always reminded, you can sign up for Meetup.com where we have a little list going.

Until then, happy gaming.