Episode #18: Key to the City: London & The Voyages of Marco Polo

So I'm going to kick things off just by giving a little bit of an overview of what Key to the City London is in case you haven't heard of it.

This is part of the Key series of games.

Some of the other games you might have heard of from that series, obviously Keyflower, which is my number one game of all time.

It's in Carlos top five last we did it.

We've talked about that game a lot.

But there's also Key Flow, Key Harvest, Key Market, Keydom's Dragons.

The newest one being Keyside that we still haven't played came out, I think, in 2025, 2026.

And so there's through lines throughout the entire series.

But I would say that what I was most intrigued about with Key to the City of London is the fact that this is very much like...

I don't want to call it a sequel to Keyflower, but it's more closely tied to Keyflower specifically than just being through lines through like key games.

I think this one and Keyflow, I think are two of the ones that are considered actual, they're branded as re-implementations of Keyflower.

Whereas the other ones are just games in the key series or universe where they're not, they're completely different mechanisms, but you can see the common DNA from Keyflower here for sure.

Oh, yeah.

And like, even I mean, they go so far as to like, give you a section in the rulebook called quick rules for keyflower players in where it's like this little box where in essence, you could theoretically like just read that and, you know, gain 90% of the knowledge you'd need to be able to just start playing key to the city of London if you were a keyflower expert.

And Like I didn't do that, but I feel like I probably could have, and I probably could have taught it to everyone at the table and only had to refer to the rule book for a couple small clarifications.

Well, and even just when we wanted to refer back to what the differences were is super helpful.

That's something I'm glad you brought that up, having that section of the rules, because I wish more games that are borrowing from another game did that.

It makes it way easier to jump in for people who are familiar with it.

And we criticize bad rule books all the time.

So yeah, that needs to be applauded for sure.

100% I feel like like you said either if a game is doing what this one is doing and sort of really re-implementing a lot of things or if it's just like in the same line if you can give me a way where I can like skip half the rulebook and this isn't the first time I've seen this done a lot of times in other rulebooks it'll be like it's not in one box but throughout they'll be like bolded text or a different colored text and they'll say this is just for I think Frosthaven might have done that where it's like if you're coming from Gloomhaven just read the new colored stuff and you can probably play so it's it's it's a cool little thing that they've added so um i'm gonna give a quick little review of what this game is but i'm gonna spend most of the time talking about the differences with keyflower because if you've heard us talk about that you probably already know what this game is so um this is an auction bidding game but it's also a worker placement game um there are going to be these hexagon tiles that come out in different in this game they're called eras in a keyflower they're called seasons And those tiles are going to be able to be bid on by the players at the table.

And the way you bid is that you have colored meeples in three different colors.

In Keyflower, there is an additional fourth color that can come up, which is the green meeples.

There are no green meeples in this game.

We'll get into that later.