This is Richard Breese's third game in his 'Key-' series, the second of which was converted into Aladdin's Dragons. Basically, you control a family of townsfolk living in Keytown. You are wanting to advance the esteem of your townsfolk at the expense of your opponents, so that your family have the greatest total esteem at the end of the game. The game is played over four rounds, in each of which you deploy your 6 townsfolk (initially) to (a) gather resources, (b) attempt to increase their esteem, or (c) attempt to expand your family of townsfolk. After four rounds, each of your townsfolk brings victory points equal to the square of their esteem level ( a level 3 person scores 9 VPs) - the highest total score wins.
Now I've played this a couple of times before and we've quite enjoyed it. The game builds in intensity because in the later rounds you tend to have more resources to influence players' attempts to improve their townsfolk's esteem. However, this time, players found it dragged on, although afterwards, Mark K said that he liked the fifth round (curious for a four round game). It was also strange because the start player only changed once. I took over from Mark K as start player during the fourth round, as I wanted to control the order that the resource cubes were played and, to my surprise, nobody tried to stop me. Nige was my main rival and I expected him to push up the bidding, but he didn't, and the resulting control allowed me to increase the esteem of 3 of my townsfolk from level 2 to level 3, sealing the victory. However, this was despite me believing Nige was adding up the resources in the area he was interested in correctly when, in fact he had miscounted. I had the resources to stop one of his townsfolk increasing in esteem but didn't do so because I thought it wouldn't increase based on Nige's adding up. Thankfully, it didn't affect the final result, but I would have been mad if it had allowed Nige to win.
John also made a vital error in the last round in the Market where he had 4 people to Mark G's 1. He had plenty of resources but left his 4 townsfolk all tied on points which meant none of them increased in esteem. With those points, he would have beaten Mark G into fourth place.
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