New Game Round-up: Breese Boards Keyflower, Rejiggered Contraptions & Ignacy Makes Big Promises

Keyflower is a game for two to six players played over four rounds. Each round represents a season: spring, summer, autumn and finally winter. Each player starts the game with a "home" tile and an initial team of eight workers, each of which is colored red, yellow or blue. Workers of matching colors are used by the players to bid for tiles to add to their villages. Matching workers may alternatively be used to generate resources, skills, additional workers and victory points (VPs) not only from the player's own tiles, but also from the tiles in the other players' villages and from the new tiles being auctioned.

In spring, summer and autumn more workers will arrive on board the Keyflower and her sister boats, with some of these workers possessing skills in the working of the key resources of iron, stone and wood. In each of these seasons, village tiles are set out at random for auction. In the winter no new workers arrive and the players select the village tiles for auction from those they received at the beginning of the game. Each winter village tile offers VPs for certain combinations of resources, skills and workers. The player whose village and workers generate the most CPs wins the game.

Keyflower presents players with many different challenges and each game will be different due to the mix of village tiles which appear in that particular game. Throughout the game players will need to be alert to the opportunities to best utilize their various resources, transport and upgrade capability, skills and workers.

Moloch forces are heading towards New York to destroy the city. Soldiers from the Outpost army have to stop the convoy of machines, and the fate of New York is in their hands. Can they destroy all Moloch machines before they reach the city? Can they slow down the convoy in a series of ambushes and small battles? They have to...

Convoy is an asymmetrical two-player card game set in a world of Neuroshima. Both players command their forces, represented by 35 cards with unique skills. The Outpost player aims to kill all Moloch machines before they reach New York; Moloch, on the other hand, has to destroy the city.

Robinson Crusoe: Adventure on the Cursed Island is another epic game created by Ignacy Trzewiczek, the author of Stronghold. This time Trzewiczek takes the players to a deserted island, where they'll play the parts of shipwreck survivors confronted by an extraordinary adventure. They'll be faced with the challenges of building a shelter, finding food, fighting wild beasts, and protecting themselves from weather changes. Building walls around their homes, animal domestication, constructing weapons and tools from what they find and much more awaits them on the island. The players decide in which direction the game will unfold and – after several in-game weeks of hard work – how their settlement will look. Will they manage to discover the secret of the island in the meantime? Will they find a pirate treasure, or an abandoned village? Will they discover an underground city or a cursed temple at the bottom of a volcano? Answers to these questions lie in hundreds of event cards and hundreds of object and structure cards that can be used during the game...

Robinson Crusoe: Adventure on the Cursed Island is not only a thrilling story perfectly combined with its game mechanisms; it's also designed to change the co-operative genre by doing away with the major nuisances of cooperative games: the "leader issue" and the "dumb player issue". It's the first cooperative game in which the problem of a single player deciding for the rest of the participants does not exist, the first game that reacts in an exciting way to all of the players' actions.