Beachy Keen

We headed to Cleny's cabin this weekend to enjoy her birthday week. We had a roaring good time. Very relaxing and low key. We also busted out a few games I hadn't gotten to yet.
When Liz and I went to get breakfast, I set up...

Biblios 2-4 players 
I had seen this game in the stores a number of times, but never bothered with it. There were always other games I was drooling over. I recently added this to the basket when I needed a third game for a buy 2 get 1 deal.

This is an auction card game. The deck has a number of cards with a color and a value (between 1 and 4 depending on the color). Of those cards, some are gold, used as money, some have dice, used to change the worth of a category, and the other colors represent control of a category. Each of the 5 categories start with a worth of 3 shown on the dice. Play starts with a player drawing one card at a time and deciding to either keep it, put it in the auction pile, or give it to the other player(s). Once the player has drawn a card for every player and the auction, the next player does the same and the rotation continues until the deck runs out. The game then moves to the auction phase. The auction pile is shuffled and one card at a time is auctioned. Players bid gold they acquired on most of the cards, but bid cards on gold that pops out. At the end, players total up the some of cards in each category. The player with the most in a category wins the corresponding die. The player with the highest sum on their dice wins.

For a first game, things when pretty smoothly. I didn't take out as many cards as I needed for a 2 player game, but it just meant a slightly longer game. Liz didn't do so well, mainly because I had seen the game played and had strategies in mind. By the end, Liz said she enjoyed it and she could see the mistakes she made. I'm sure the next game will me much more confrontational.

When we got back to the cabin, people were awake and Cleny wanted to know what we were playing. I pulled out...

Tales of the Arabian Nights 2-6 players

It's much like Arabian Days. Just kidding. The best description of this game is a chose your own adventure book in game form. You are a character from one of the Tales of the Arabian Nights. You move around the board and encounter hags, beast, djinns, and wizards. You are then asked to chose your reaction to this encounter. Depending on how you react, it will lead you to a paragraph in a a book of thousands of paragraphs. What happens to you then will be based on what skills your character has and possibly a few other choices you make. Sometimes you can read the situation and make a good choice. Sometimes there are no good choices, but you can still hope. It's wonderful and usually hilarious. My first play of the game I became crippled, wounded, ensorcelled, and turned into a beast, and somehow I still won. But really, this game is not about winning. It's about enjoying the ride. It's about seeing the look of disappointment on another players face when they are stuck in prison for a fourth turn and all they can do is laugh.

Liz had a pretty rough start, but then started sweeping though the game with ease. Cleny had some lucky breaks and was able to ride high, but was greif-striken, fated, and diseased late in the game. I was wounded a number of time in the beginning and didn't really get any momentum until everyone else was mid-game. Liz got the victory alone, but Cleny and I weren't that far from a victory either.
If you love a good story, this is a must buy. Hell if you love making an Excel document to remove the use of reaction matrices, this is also a must buy. There is so much to love.

This game was quickly followed by...

Blokus 2 or 4 players
I first played this one with my friend Drew. It was pretty interesting and quite colorful too. I don't bring it out too much mainly because I have so many other games that I'm dying to play, but it's a great game to bring out for people who only have a basic knowledge of the "new gaming scene". It's abstract and pretty and the rules are utterly simple. It's like a much less intimidating form of chess. That isn't to say it plays anything like chess.

Each player starts with the same pieces, but in their color. Each player takes their turn adding one of their pieces to the board. The rules for placement are as follows. The first piece must must start in your corner of the board. Any following piece added must have the pieces touch only by corners. You can touch other players pieces however you want, but you can never overlap a piece. Once all the players have run out of pieces to place or have no moves left, the score is tallied. Each player gets a negative point for every square in every piece they didn't place. A +15 score is given if all pieces are played and a bonus 5 if the last piece was the single square.

We had a blast at this one. People got mean and people got frustrated. Brian was shut out early. Cleny was next, but she only had 3 pieces left. Liz got all but one of her pieces out. I cleared out all of mine and had the single square piece as my last. I had quite a high after that game. It felt so good.

We played one more game before we took off for home, Qwirkle. I got really lucky during play and scored about 7 or 8 qwirkles (one of them a double qwirkle). No one liked me at the end. Thankfully the weekend was so nice, Liz didn't bother griping about it. She was being quelled by the hot goodness of clam chowder.

Tally: 108/171  Bonus: 26/50