Block and Key: My Favorite Game Mechanism

Jamey discusses his favorite mechanism in a 3D game all about perspective, Block and Key.

[whitewolf]

Wow! Using the box like that, that’s clever game design! :)

[thomasoswald]

Seikatsu is a nature-themed abstract game where perspective means everything. There’s no rotating goal cards, but I suppose the flexibility comes with allowing you to choose the color of flower you’d like to score in each row. It’s a very underrated gateway game, in my opinion. You can teach it and finish playing in under 20 minutes.

[stephenfarrell]

Interesting, thanks. Didn't know about either Mountains out of Molehills or Seikatsu although I feel like Seikatsu speaks more of a Cascadia vernacular than Block and Key...
I played Block and Key yesterday having not had the money to back ti and talked a friend who likes abstracts into a pledge.
Wow!
I am just recovering from serious illness so my brain is quite slow and I haven't played a board game in 6 months but this game was exactly like I imagined it when the project launched. Absolutely fascinating and a novel struggle to secure one's end game aggregator colour at it's maximum while hiding any colour resources from opponents and scoring for non-mirrored patterns in the tiles.
The Kickstarter characters add a little asymmetric twist to the game which puts only slight pressure on one's focus but threaten retrospective run away synergy stories already after only 2 games.
There are dangerously few rounds to the game and like a lot of games there is a sweet spot where one has to swap from scoring 4's to maximizing aggregation so if one was slow out of the blocks this can be punishing.
Our first game I lost by 3 points 93-96 or something. Unfortunately, my friend is a lot smarter than me (and often luckier, fatal in this case) and hadn't considered blocking the opponent in the first game until I employed this tactic. By the time we finished our second game 122-98 he had not only managed to corner the majority of grey tiles corresponding with his bonus resulting in 8 points per card (I had 6) he had also miraculously drawn all the grey dominant score cards allowing him to finish the game with 12 cards and had blocked me from scoring 8 per card as well.
My head hurt but we didn't have to deal with any rules vagaries or stop to consult anything and we played for 2 hours solid. This game rocks just as expected (although I wish I hadn't casually thrown that block tactic away like that, as I said)
Okay, if any one out there is planning on playing with BIG guys you might want to assemble the board for show and tell kicks and then disassemble it. Okay, okay, the whole point of this game is that players interact with it at eye level so maybe just separate the decks from the structure as picking up and replacing the pieces seems fine but when a big guy tries to pickup a card from one of the stack there is a lift action occurring... We had to rebuild the structure 4 times and Paul isn't clumsy his arm/paw combination just don't leave enough margin for error. With 4 players I can see this being disastrous as inevitably someone will have no idea where the fallen blocks were and shouldn't have to be thinking about it other than for snap shoots relating to their score cards.
I'm looking up and thinking that perhaps i have gone over time, sigh.
Love the game and wish I wasn't over budget when I needed the money to back Block and Key.
Cheers and good gaming.

[phairlyoddparent]

It’s like an advanced mountains out of molehills. Same board structure, but different goals.