Break-Key! (3 Player Variant)
Imagine for a moment you've been shopping Keyforge to anyone with in a 100 mile radius of you to hook more people into your favorite obsession. You've managed to get people together for a night of forging bliss, only to have a player no-show or have to bail early, leaving someone to be the odd-on out.
This is the scenario we ran into all too commonly at our local scene. We got to work and last year at the inaugural Celebration we introduced a number of folks to Break-Key, our take on a 3-player free-for-all format. What's it all about, you ask?
We ended up narrowing in on some guiding design principles:
- Plays in similar length of 1v1 Match (45min)
- Short window between 1st player elimination and end of game (under 7 min)
- Needs to incentivize board interaction, particularly interacting with the previous player rather than just work "heads down on your own race”
- Keep play open to increase interaction/table politics (i.e. not limiting to only targeting player to your left)
- Outside of cards naturally carrying a different value due to multi-player, game flow should feel as close to 1v1 Keyforge as possible
Over many iterations, the ruleset is to a point where the above boxes feel solid so very excited to get more players' hands on the variant to expand on the feedback from the community to drive the next round of improvements.
If you're at Celebrations this year, and want to learn or chat, stop by and say hi! (i'm a very tall gentleman with the mohawk) For those folks who aren't KFC-ing, rules are available below, jam some games and let me know what you think!
Forge On!
4 comments · 92% upvoted · other discussions
More readable post than last time. There are no responses from OP on that previous post, though. Was this tested at all? Seems unbalanced. I believe the other poster asked why chose for elimination style? It may be interesting for a change
DevDev85 [OP] 5 points · Nov 2023
Hi, thanks for checking out the ruleset! I somehow only loaded the images last time so had to remake the post.
I'd say we have about 180 games in testing-wise. If by "elimination style" you mean why do you un-forge opponent keys, we found that being able to un-forge both opponent's keys compared to just forging your own A) Makes what you're doing with your game always relevant to both opponents, B) it really helped get the game time dialed (Currently sub 45min for a full game, and the avg time between first elimination and game end is sub 8 min) and C) it makes the ramp to the end-game faster so you get to the tense/fun moments faster.
You mind expanding on what seems "unbalanced" from your initial read?