Keeps Weekly V: A Nervous Requisition

This is an archive from the Keeps Weekly, a newsletter that ran from April 22 to June 3, 2026. 

A fine evening to all.

It's rather difficult to think up a pun with the word "requisition", so you'll have to bear with me. Let's dive in.

PROGRESS UPDATES

The new prototype (it's version 8, for anyone counting) with the new box arrived, and it looks and plays great. We decided on spending an extra ten cents to get the inside of the box printed as well; the black interior feels much more refined. It also gives us the opportunity to add not one but TWO hidden secrets:

Do you see it? There's actually a third hidden secret inside, but you will have to find that out for yourself when you get your copy.

At the same time, Elaina and I are working on finalizing the First Edition artwork. We want to make sure the people who believe in us early on get something really special, and it is shaping up to be so. Here is a bit of a teaser for now:

These are just the start; 36 high-profile backers will get their name printed on their choice of these cards. I'm telling you guys here because it will be first-come, first-serve :).

The remainder of our time is going towards setting up the Kickstarter page in a way that does our little game justice and attracts as much attention as possible. Our pre-launch page should be available by next week!

CARD SPOTLIGHT

With great power comes, like, a bunch of good stuff.

Requisition is a telling card. It lets you look through an entire pile of your choice and pick a card to take. Played early in the round, the piles are fuller and so you have more cards to choose from, but you are less certain about what card you might want. The choice becomes: take a well-rounded and reliable card now, or search for guaranteed help later but with fewer options.

Obviously, having your pick of up to nine cards is handy. Yet the arguably more salient effect is that you now know the entire contents of that pile. You can reposition it to you if you want something else in it, or you can let others draw from it, telling you (and only you) what enters their hand.

Requisition is good enough in most cases, but is most potent when you are on the hunt for a specific card. For example, each character has a "Token" card, and if you collect all three, you win the round. If you have two of the Tokens, but know the other one is somewhere in someone else's pile, Requisition can get it for you in a single action. Often the game comes down to "if I only had X card...". With Requisition, you can get it.

As much as I (and seemingly, you guys) love the puzzles, they are flawed in that they are only able to capture certain aspects of Keeps—namely, the endgame. To get a true sense of the early pile gleaning and midgame positioning, you'd have to play. Requisition is a great card, but nearly useless in the endgame, so there are no puzzles for it this week.

To satiate your hunger for puzzles, check out this week's giveaway.

BLOG HIGHLIGHT

If you are wondering how a game with three characters, one of which has all the victory points, could possibly be fair, check out this week's short post On Balance and Personality. It also looks into the flexible nature of the Keeps cards.

GIVEAWAY

The winner of last week's giveaway is Max, who liked On Theming the most, which is also perhaps my favorite. He says it "made him think", and wants to try playing Uno with two decks of normal playing cards. He also says "P.S. The blog with the cute wittle dogs and cats is a close second :F". We're flattered.

To make up for the lack of puzzles, this week's giveaway condition will be solving one. A particularly difficult one, mind you. To enter the giveaway, give the Keeps Courier the TWO solutions to the puzzle Nothing Doing. Remember to use the subject "Giveaway 5". The winner will be randomly selected from the entries with both correct solutions. As a hint, you will need knowledge of cards that don't show in the puzzle, so you might have to look to previous ones.

IN CLOSING

Thanks for coming back for week four. This mailing list is our ticket to Kickstarter success on June 10th. If you know someone with a penchant, predilection, partiality, passion, preference, propensity, predisposition or proclivity for puzzles, forward this email to them! It helps more than you know.

Until next week,

David & Elaina