by August222
The SettingAfter dinner, we clear the kitchen table for a few games of Biblios. A light rain falls outside. The dogs are on their pillow. The house is cold but the oven is still warm. M refills the wine, and we settle down for another session of gifting and burning.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that cards of this game need to be sleeved. The black borders of one of our cards—a low ranking Forbidden Tomes card—is frayed a bit, betraying the card’s type regardless of where it is in play. I recently purchased sleeves for the game, but the cards bow terribly when placed in them, so I’ve decided to go without and let the fraying continue. Our playing of Risk Legacy must have bent my brain a bit—I figure this one frayed card is a part of our Biblios world: we need to play with it and around it. It is a part of our customized monastic order.
But this being said, the cards of the game are gorgeous. The black borders contrast nicely with the glow of the monk illustration. Each card is a little symbol of the light of learning in an utterly dark universe; each card is a candle in the night. As I remove the six gold cards and twenty one additional cards for a two-player game, M and I admire the cards.
M reaches down to give our retriever, Charlemagne, a scratch on the chin. Charlemagne is more of a beached sea lion than a dog, but he loves our little monastery as much as we do, so we accept his slothful ways.
The deck is placed between us. We smile and take a sip of wine (mine is more of a gulp, remember I am going against M and need the fortitude). We have no idea that we will soon experience both a Church that mostly ignores our illumination efforts and a Church that allows libricidal priors free reign among the early monasteries.
Highlights
Game One
During the gift phase, we only encounter one Church card, “the preacher” (-1 to one category). My favorite strategy is exposing the Church cards during the gift phase; M often does the same. So we are both a little confounded when only one is put in play during this phase. M uses it to really take a random shot—it showed up early before either of us had begun accumulating specific categories. She uses it to take down Manuscripts one point.
A “Pope” (+1 to two categories) shows up during the auction phase. We both bid for it and M finally lets it go to me for 9 gold. I have accumulated several Monks and Forbidden Tomes, so I give them both a bump.
As it turned out, only two out of nine Church cards were in our first game’s deck—seven cards remained in the twenty one I removed for the two-player game. It is amazing the feeling of abandonment felt during the game. The Church cards serve several purposes during game play, and when they are not present you are flying without instruments, monking without tallow. A completely different kind of Biblios.
M had two more Monks than I did, so she took that category for four points and I really thought I had it. She also took Pigments for three points and Holy Books for three points.
Final score: M 10, Me 6
Game Two
I spent more time shuffling the entire deck this game. We wanted to make sure the Church was consistently meddling in our monk affairs during game two. As it turned out, they not only meddled, they cried havoc.
Right out of the gate we had two “book burners” (-1 to two categories) nearly back to back. I was forced to play the first one, M the second. I had decided Monks and Pigments were the best choice. When the next book burner showed up, M decides to do the same.
“Let’s take down the big dogs—see what happens.”
Only two more Church cards show up and we ended the gift phase with the following values:
Monks 1
Pigments 1
Holy Books 3
Manuscripts 4
Forbidden Tomes 4
Monks 1
Pigments 2
Holy Books 4
Manuscripts 4
Forbidden Tomes 4
I took Pigments, Holy Books, and Manuscripts for the win, ten to five. Two very new and strange games, but all the more fun thanks to the newness and the strangeness.
Lesson Learned
As I have mentioned in another session report, I have taken the 100 Play Challenge with Biblios and prior to this session learned that if you are going to belt out a bunch of games and report on each, you better discover or invent an annotation system for that game. My notes were getting a bit crazy and a bit illegible so I typed up a game annotation sheet that easily allows recording of category values and Church cards throughout each game.
It is not lost on me that I am thoroughly enjoying a game, the theme of which borrows from the monastic commitment of 12th century Europe. And here I am, a 21st century gamer trying to figure out how to best record the events of the game, so that I may transcribe, preserve, and distribute little ideas and insights to other players of the game. Perhaps we have never stopped glossing great cultural prizes. Maybe all great cultural prizes require such monastic glossing. If so, I am doing my part with the cultural prize that is Biblios.