We followed up Clans with the latest instalment in Richard Breese’s Key- series. This time, players are competing to build a cathedral in Keydom and gain the most valuable seats in the new building. It is quite reminiscent of Settlers of Catan in that you are collecting resources which are produced by various terrain types. Rather than hexes though, the terrain pieces are octagons, which when linked together leave square holes into which the players build their cottages. Each round, payers send their workers out from the cottages to a neighbouring terrain and collect the appropriate resources. Then players have the opportunity to spend those resources to advance their cause. They could buy seats in the Keythedral, they could upgrade cottages to houses so that more workers can be accommadated, they can build fences to hamper the progreess of their opponents, they could trade resources and so on.

This continues until the final seat in the Keythedral is acquired by someone and then the value of the seats each player has acquired is totalled, the highest being declared the winner. The initial set up of determining where to build your cottages is very important. You need to gain access to the different terrain types and ideally not be in too much competition with others for terrain. I made a mess with my set-up, placing my pieces too close together and I suffered in the first couple of rounds in not getting enough of my villagers out into the fields. Mark K followed a strategy of upgrading cottages quickly and looked pretty strong in the early stages. However, with me lagging behind, Ben and Mark were concentrating on each other’s positions which allowed me to catch up quite a bit. At the end, I had a chance of grabbing the final 4 seat once I had done a trade, but judged that Ben would be able to grab it before me, so I tried to set myself up for picking off one of the 5 seats in the next round. Unfortunately, that round never came as, through the use of a beneficial Law Card, Ben and Mark also picked up both 5s in the same round. Curses. Ben emerged victorious again, so I’m not sure it was such a good idea to allow him to come back to the club after all.