Biblios | Meandering the Dune Sea

Joe, Louis, and I tried out a couple new games Saturday afternoon. We started with Joe’s copy of Scoville, a game of planting peppers and making the best chili. It was a lot of fun with some neat mechanics. I was able to position my farmer to monopolize the rare ghost peppers that are needed for the highest scoring recipes. I created a bunch of different recipes and ended up running away with the win.

We followed that with my copy of Biblios. I was collecting brown cards and had a little bit of green and orange. I had pushed the value of the brown cards up, but then when a #4 in brown came up for auction I wimped out. Louis outbid me and ended up taking control of brown and the victory. Joe had blue and red, but they were pretty low value colors.

Then, Saturday evening Kevin joined us for a couple more, starting with Caverna. I was going third in the initial turn order and watched Joe and Kevin take the two spots that I had planned on focusing on. I ended up starting towards a mine, but failed to follow through and Louis took the lead in that. After that I was struggling to find a good way to feed my family and really get anything going. Louis had a ton of donkeys and ruby mines all provided by two well-armed dwarves, Kevin was farming like crazy, and Joe had a huge family of armed dwarves and was concentrating on bonus tiles. Joe’s bonuses ended up being the difference as he broke the 100 point barrier.

The final game of the weekend was Castles of Mad King Ludwig. I bought as many activity rooms as possible, since they were needed for the end game bonuses and one of my bonus cards. The big swing in the game, though, happened with the final card. Louis had a bunch of the small, round rooms, while I had a bunch of the small rectangles. Each pile only had a single room left and would provide a big boost if depleted. The final card ended up being a small rectangle, netting me a 10 point bonus and sealing the game for me. I managed to win with nearly 100 points.