We started the night off playing Biblios. Biblios is a great game split up into two phases where you first do a card by card player selected draft followed by an auctioning phase. The goal of the game is to acquire the most points which are represented in the game as dice. These dice represent different genres of monastic books and they come in five different suits where three of them have values of 1 and 2 and two of the suits have values of 2,3, and 4.
Whomever has the highest total sum of each suit at the end of the game will acquire the die of that suit. The die’s value indicates how many points the player will get. All dice at the start start at three pips value and they may go up or down later on in the game due to church cards. There are also money cards that will be used in the second phase of the game for the auction. These cards come in values of 1,2, and 3.
The first phase of the game the player whose turn it is will draw cards from the top of the deck one by one and choose what to do with these cards. They can either put each card in (1) front of them into their personal pile, (2) next to the board as part of the auction pile, or (3) into the gift pile. The amount of cards drawn is one more than the amount of players. Some cards will be culled from the deck at the beginning of the game so that perfect information about what is in the deck and also to make sure the deck drafts correctly with 2,3, or 4.
Cards are always assigned after they are drawn and part of the appeal of this game is pushing your luck trying to get a better card to keep in your personal pile, or having your luck fail you when you keep a card you wanted, but then draw a higher value card of the same suit that you have to put into the gift pile.
Any church card acquired during this phase either in your personal pile or in the gift pile is immediately played which will either increase 1/2 dice values either up or down one pip. There are a few cards that go up and a few that go down and one card that goes up or down, the player chooses.
After the deck runs out you go into the second phase of the game which is the auction phase. The auction deck gets a quick shuffle and then you flip over the top card. If it’s a church card or book card, players bid money to win the card. No change is given. If the auction card is a money card then you bid cards you want to discard from your personal pile. This is an effective way to get rid of cards you can’t win or even upgrade cards (i.e. bidding two discards, winning and discarding two “1” money cards to acquire a “3” money card).
I’ve always liked this game and I’ve had it for a while now. Someone at the meetup brought it and I’m always happy to play this one. It doesn’t play very well two players in my opinion and three is a better game, but I think four is the best player count. It causes more moments of throwing stuff into the gift pile that you wish you hadn’t.
Tonight I got to play one of my favorite games of all time, Power Grid! This is Friedemann Friese’s masterpiece game that I think everyone that is in this hobby needs to play at least once. Preferably playing with four or five players for their first game. This is a game where all the players are power companies trying to build out a network of power distribution throughout multiple cities on a board. These boards represent countries or regions of the world. The player to power the most cities once a player has built into 17 cities wins the game!
The game is played over a series of rounds which are played over a series of phases. These phases are (1) Determine Turn Order, (2) Auction Power Plants, (3) Acquire Resources, (4) Acquire Cities, (5) Bureaucracy.
The first phase the players determine who is in the most cities. If there is a tie then the person who has the highest costing power plant breaks ties making them first.
The second phase the players in turn order will auction plants off until either everyone has acquired a plant or passed. The cards up for auction come in two lines of cards. There is a current market which are the cards that can be obtained and a future market where cards may be come into play. The player in first chooses a card to auction off and must start at a minimum value printed on the card. The players in clockwise order either bid or pass and when all have passed out of bidding, the winner acquires the card.
These cards will have a resource type on them combined with an amount of cities that these plants will power using those resources. The amount of resources is important because you can store up to twice the amount of resources on a plant as it costs to power it (i.e. a two coal power plant to power 3 cities can store up to four coal on it). Some cards are eco-friendly plants and they will have no resource cost. They just provide free power to x amount of cities.
Cards that cause a spot to open up in the current market will fill with the future market in numerical order. The market at the beginning is seeded in such a way that most of the basic plants will take a while to filter out for the first two rounds of the game, but then there will be new plants that are much more powerful in the game.
The third phase is buying resources. Resources are laid out on a track on an edge of each map. These resources are in blocks with cost amounts. At the beginning there’s very few of certain resources like garbage and nuclear, but more of coal and oil. The buying happens in reverse player order. Players will buy any resources they can store on their own power plants if they choose to do so.
As resources are bought the leftover resources will be in higher costing blocks, so you can play this game really mean by making sure to block an opponent from getting resources at a good price.
The fourth phase is buying cities. This also happens in reverse player order. Players will choose a city to start in and pay 10 elektro (dollars). They can pay connection fees indicated by pipes and pay another 10 elektro on top of that to setup in those cities also. If someone is in a city they they can’t setup there yet, but can pass through as long as they pay the connection fee all the way through. As players buy cities, their marker showing how many cities they have will increase.
The fifth phase is Bureaucracy. In this phase players spend resources to power cities to generate money. The more cities they power the more money they make. Even if they’re setup in more cities that they can power, they can only make as much money as the amount of cities they can actually power.
There is also an upkeep process in this phase where new resources will be generated on the market and also the power plant market will lose its highest costing plant to the bottom of the power plant deck and a new one will come out. This is important because there is a step 3 card which is setup at the beginning of the game under the deck. This card when drawn will shift the game into a new phase where there will be only a current market of six power plants to auction from in the second phase of the game.
There is a step 2 of the game when someone builds their 7th city. It is entirely possible in the game to have the game skip from step 1 to step 3 if the power plant deck run through fast enough, but generally I’ve only seen that more at the 2-3 player count. Each step dictates the resources generated in phase five Bureaucracy. It also lets another player build in an existing city. In step 2 another player can pay 15 to be in an existing city and in step 3 pay 20 to go into a city with two others.
This process goes on and on until someone triggers the end and hopefully by that point you have enough plant strength to power 17-19 cities and actually have those cities built out. Money is a tie breaker so spending too much will cost you the game more times than not.
I’m a huge fan of this game because of the way the turn order system works. You don’t want to be in the lead too much, but if you’re behind cities-wise you don’t generate enough money. If you’re too far ahead cities-wise, you won’t get resources or cities at a good price and in terms of cities you can be entirely block out of areas you wanted to go to simply because someone else built there first.
The game is very math heavy which can be a deterrent. Later on in the game you may have a turn where you’re trying to connect four or five cities and it can take a lot of time to figure out not only the cheapest way to do it, but whether or not you have the money to do it. Connection fees range from 0 because the cities are right next to each other to the high 20s.
Playing your first city in a corner can effectively limit what you can do if someone else plays next to you so you have to be aware of the possibility of being locked in for a while. Also you can only have three power plants and you don’t want a plant that uses resources that other players are buying up a lot of. If you can get a plant type that only you are using it helps out a lot, but if you can’t get the resource of that type to generate fast enough every round you might get into a bad cycle of spending too much to power a plant.
There’s a lot to this game, but it’s broken up into phases that keeps everyone engaged almost the whole time. There’s a ton of maps for the game that change how the game plays. From India where too many cities cause outages on the board to Korea where the North and South have different markets. There’s a lot of variability in this game and tons of different modules one can add to the game.
The final game we played was Gizmos. We didn’t get to finish the game, but we played maybe half of the game.
In this game you are simply building up a tableau of cards that represent some kind of Rube Goldberg machine. On your turn you will take one of the actions on your little horizontal board you have. After you take that action any cards you have built under that action will trigger and you can potentially get a lot of things done if you’ve built up that action. The actions are (1) File, where you reserve a card from the table, (2) Pick, where you pick a marble out of the tray, (3) Build, where you build a card either in the market or in your reserve, and (4) Research, where you look through one of the three tiers of market decks for a card to either build or file.
The cards you build will be added to a section of your board that matches the action of the card. This means in the future that action will be that much better. Some of the cards generate more marbles you can pick or generate points if you build a certain color card or add to the amount of marbles you can store in your marble ring. There’s a lot of different things you can build up in this game and people can easily have three or four things for one action and they just drill that over and over again to do a lot of things. The cards I really liked in the game allow you to convert marbles of one color to others or multiples of that color.
The game ends when a certain amount of Tier 3 cards are built or if a total amount of cards are built in someone’s tableau. My impressions of the game from the half play I had were somewhat lukewarm. There really is no theme to this game at all. The choice of marbles as your resource is a weird one. They look and feel solid, but I feel like it’s a weird choice for resources. They come in this cup/cone with a drain so they can pop out for the pick action. Multiple times during the game the marbles would not refill unless we massaged the marbles in the cup.
Resources aside, the game had two things I really did not like. That was the card market always seemed too limited to me. I felt like there should be more cards out. I didn’t do the research action that much and maybe that would have offset this feeling. The File action, unless you’ve built it up feels like a trap in a way. It’s sort of like how reserving a card in Splendor feels, but you don’t get a wild, you just get a random pick out of the cup (unless you’ve built up your File action). Research lets you Build or File that card which triggers those bonuses which is nice and it seems like that’s going to be a better way to get cards you need.
Multiple times in the game I felt like the market had the same colored cards that no one wanted and if you were the one to pull those cards you just opened it up for the other players and then when it got back to you, the market would stagnate again. I really dislike this feeling in the game where you don’t feel like you’re progressing any more and have reached a roadblock that makes you go farther and farther back in the game. I’ll try to get a full play of it at the next Meetup if I can.