New Game Round-up: Spiel 2014 – Merchants Come to Keyflower, Samurai Walk in Takamatsu & Monkeys Fling More Coconuts

In Keyflower, each player develops her own unique village over four seasons by successfully bidding for village tiles that feature specialized buildings and boats, and by collecting skills, resources and workers ("keyples").

In Keyflower: The Merchants, the second expansion for Keyflower, players continue to develop their village by building extensions and cabins, entering into lucrative contracts, and encountering new combinations of items on the incoming boats.

Whereas Keyflower: The Farmers added "width" to the Keyflower game, Keyflower: The Merchants adds depth. The contracts, for example, provide more ways to score points, but may also be traded for the item they depict: workers, resources or skill tiles. Extensions double the fixed point scores of existing tiles. Cabins provide more opportunities to upgrade and to build the extensions. Keyflower: The Merchants works well with 2-6 number of players and particularly enhances the two-player game.

Players may choose to use all of the tiles from Keyflower: The Merchants, then add additional tiles at random from Keyflower in order to make up the required number of tiles (the Merchant's variant), or they can simply combine the new tiles with the existing game.

There's excitement in the capital as Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu wants to assign the Han of Takamatsu in a challenge. The competing daimyos direct their samurai through the palace following simple rules and quickly see that they can use the samurai of the other daimyos for their purposes.

Takamatsu is a game of conflict and cooperation, with players trying to place (or not place!) their samurai in their own rooms. The palace consists of two circular paths that merge at one point, then separate once again. Players have 5-7 samurai that are split between two color-coded rooms at the start of the game, and a row of scoring cards — some face-down — are laid out next to the board.

On a turn, you choose a room that contains at least one of your samurai, then you move some number of samurai in this room clockwise from this space. If the room contains only one samurai, you can move it one space; if it contains two, you can move both two spaces or only one a single space — but if an opposing samurai is with you, then you must move both exactly two spaces. When a room has three or more samurai, he must leave at least one behind (while still needing to bring at least one opposing samurai along, if any). When a samurai ends movement in a room of the same color, that samurai's daimyo collects the topmost scoring card, with multiple scorings being possible on a turn. For each open scoring card collected, the player immediately adjusts his scoring marker — which could move you back on the track, so sometimes you want to escort another samurai to his pad instead of bringing him to your place.

When one player reaches twenty points, players finish the round, then tally their hidden scoring cards, if any. The player with the most points wins! (With two players, each daimyo controls two colors of samurai and must move an opposing samurai when possible. After one pagoda reaches the twenty point threshold, the players sum their two scores to determine a winner.)

In the quick-playing card game Lunte, the fuse is burning. Players take turns quickly adding more fuse cards to a continuously growing fuse until someone lets the bomb explode by playing one of his bomb cards, thereby earning him all of the fuse cards in play. He takes these cards, leaving only the starting match in play, then the fuse is lit once again.

Each fuse card has a value, and playing the bomb cards too early doesn't bring many points; that said, waiting too long to score lets others play their defuse cards — which cuts the fuse back to the match and removes those fuse cards from the game — or jump in with a bomb card of their own (which nets them any defuse cards played since the previous bomb). You might want to hold on to high-valued fuse cards rather than let others snatch them up, but the game ends when all bombs have been played or the time bomb (inserted in the deck at the start of play) goes off. When that happens, everyone tallies their cards, then loses points for all the fuses in hand. Whichever bomb thrower has the highest score wins!