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Key Harvest / Demetra
Author: Richard Breese
Publisher: R&D Games / QWG
Year: 2007


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‘In a kingdom, far far away from here, so, very far eh, well, there once lived a king who...

O please! Do we have have to? Do we need this, all this fantastic chat, to warm us up for a game that, and no wizard can do anything about it, simply is abstract by nature? For we see no kingdom in front of us, but a clear grid of hexagons, pasted with co-ordinates. Each player has such an Excel sheet in front of him and the intention is to use the bingo numbers that are drawn from a cloth bag, and put them through a second link onto this sheet. Each player scores for the two longest chains on his sheet, with extra points awarded for special tiles. Something like this, and as we have set this possible romantic misconception straight, we can approach the game unbiased from this point on.

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Apart from his own player board each player also has six worker tiles, some harvest cubes that have been randomly divided between the players and that they put behind their player screens, and a shop that can keep up to two field tiles. On a central board six randomly drawn field tiles are put in a registry. In a turn a player may choose two from four actions, and may perform any of these only once per turn.
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He may place up to two of the field tiles from the registry in his shop when he pays at least one harvest cube per field tile for it. If there are already tiles in his shop, he may place these on his board matching the co-ordinates of the field tile with that on his board. All this in trying to grow the largest chain of field tiles, but not too large, as the second largest scores two points per field tile at game end, while the largest chain scores only one point per tile.
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Easy peasy, isn’t it? Well, not quite, as all players may be playing on their own board, but with the same co-ordinates - and all field tiles only occur once per co-ordinate. So, if B6 is in the registry, it may be attractive to more than one player. Well, the first to take it and put it in his shop, he has it then, right? Unfortunately, not quite so. As apart from taking tiles from their own shops, players also may take tiles from other players shops, and then it becomes quite a different story!

A player has to pay for a tile from another players shop: as many crop cubes as the owning player had put in his shop, matching them in colour and amount. These crop cubes all go to that other player, including the one he put in his shop. But when a player takes a tile from his own shop, al the cubes next to it go back to the general supply.

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A player will constantly have to ask himself how cheap or expensive he will make a field tile when he puts it in his shop, because when this tile also is of interest to another player, he will have to put some more cubes next to it in order to make it more ‘expensive’. When he makes the tile too ‘cheap’, it could be taken by another player in his turn, leaving the player with additional cubes but no field tile to place on his board. It’s all part of a farmers life!
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So, a player pays his tiles with crop cubes, but these are only limited available. To acquire cubes, a player has to harvest; a third possible action in a turn. The easiest way is to harvest from all tiles in a chain; this earns one cube of the correspending crop per tile. But the fields get depleted this way, and the tiles have to be flipped to their harvested side. How to collect additional cubes then? It is here where the usefull workers come in!
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As a fourth possible action a player may place a worker; these come in values from one to four and this value also is their point value at game end. At the same time these numbers indicate the condition under which they may be placed; a worker with value ‘1’ in fact could be placed anywhere adjacent to the chain of field tiles, but a ‘4’ worker needs four field tiles, not necessarily connected, adjacent to him.
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The workers all have different possibilities, such as harvesting without the need to turn over the adjacent field tiles, take crop cubes of your choice from the general supply, or turn back the harvested field tiles to their unharvested side. On the central general board there are three ‘4’ and ‘5’ workers for the first players who can build them, and do nice things as directly placing a field tile from the registry onto a players board - so without having to pay for it with crop cubes!
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These special worker actions only are executed once: at the time of placement. But also: when they are replaced, and this may happen when a worker currently occupying a hex co-ordinate gets replaced by a field tile of that same co-ordinate. If, at that same time, there is a legal placement for the worker elsewhere on the board, it moves to that spot and immediately performs its printed action, such as harvesting the adjacent tiles! This consequence often leads to nice chain reactions, with the positive effect of in fact having more than only two actions in a turn, as all these effects do not count as actions.
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And then there are the event tiles, taking care of nice things, or cause hard decisions. Each time when a player puts a field tile from the registry in his shop, the registry is immediately resupplied. Among these are twelve - fourteen in a two player game - event tiles, often nice for all, sometimes annoying for a single player. When one has been drawn, the text of the tile is executed. Some of the events are volontarily, others mandatory, such as the event having to discard a field tile and pass it to your left neigbour. But when no player wants this tile, it could easily end with no consequence at the original player’s board!
When ten event tiles have been drawn and executed, the game nears its end. Each player then has two turns left to put one’s affairs in order, after which the points are added: longest and second longest chain, workers according to their value, and finally the occasional point for majorities in crop cubes.
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Players constantly wil have to keep an eye on each other to see which tile leads to what effect. When a to be placed tile moves a worker, such an action becomes more than effective, because it almost always leads to harvesting additional crop cubes, but apart from this, it does not count as an valuable action. Because of this, sometimes harvesting cubes only gets important towards the end of the game, when a chain of tiles has grown to such an extend that it earns many crop cubes that may help in getting majorities for the end score.
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x Unfortunately the survey gets hindered by the pastel colours of the tiles. Noting the size of a player’s chain also gets harder to distinguish because of the camouflage colours of the workers, and the colours of the tiles themselves that often extend to adjacent tiles. Because the possibilities of a worker are put in tiny text on the worker tiles, it also is impossible to see what another player’s worker may do. This is the downside of a concept subordinating playability: when all tiles are put together, we see a multi coloured landscape. But who cares? The otherwise nice and more or less naive illustration style of Juliet Breese overshoots the mark this time; we only can speak of functionality in the monstrous and uninventive typography in Times New Roman - new and revolutionary in the thirties of the former century but not very fashionably nowadays! Nice detail: on the box we see a reprise from the fox from ‘Fowl Play’.
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Remembering what sort and how many crop cubes a player has behind his screen is almost impossible and surely has been included as an insecure factor when it comes to placing cubes in a shop. Will it be enough to put two orange cubes there? Does it need a third of a colour the other player possibly will not have in stock? Could the other player harvest from his chain, thereby getting the missing cubes? Where does a player has to make room for his ‘4’ or even ‘5’ worker? Does it need to take G5 from the registry, hoping for a connection with a chain, or does it take D7, hoping E7 will show up and give a player the connection with his chain?
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A game takes as long as it takes the players to think their turns with these kinds of considerations, together with the speediness of the occurrence of the event tiles. At some times, the event tiles show up in a row, leaving the players in confusion when they get back to their ‘normal’ play: ‘Was this my first action?’ Occasionally this leads to a long game, where it has to be said that an average game of ‘Key Harvest’ has about the same playtime as its predecessors ‘Reef Encounter’ and ‘Keythedral’.

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‘Key Harvest’ has a low entry level, but plays somewhat drily; the events shake it up a bit in what otherwise would be a rather linear game. AP lies in wait, when players think over all the possibilities of the tiles in the registry. ‘Key Harvest’ has also been released as ‘Demetra’, that, apart from the title, only has a different box cover illustration but otherwise has the very same game components and design inside.
© 2008 Richard van Vugt

Key Harvest / Demetra, Richard Breese, R&D Games / QWG, 2007 - 2 to 4 players, 10 years and up, 90 minutes


A 6.5 for Demetra because of ugly box cover mismatch
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