Games That Don't Suck: Biblios

(For the other games in this series, click here and scroll down.)

Fans of designer board games soon become familiar with expansiveness - with games that feature large, well-illustrated boards, lengthy rule books, and hundreds of plastic or cardboard or wooden playing pieces. (Fantasy Flight Games made its reputation producing such behemoths.) These titles impress the observer and can satisfy players’ craving for an immersive experience, but they tend to intimidate beginners and to consume lots of time. Fortunately, the hobby-games industry long ago - well, over twenty years ago, anyway - recognized the concurrent demand for products with simpler rules, a more compact set of components, and shorter playing time, yet also with opportunities for deep play. I have reviewed several such games here; Biblios is another recent example.

Physically, Biblios takes up little space, comprising just a deck of cards - category cards, gold cards, and bishop cards - a small cardboard “scriptorium,” and five dice used (with the scriptorium) to indicate the current value of each category. The objective is to have the highest scores in the most valuable of the five game categories: monks, pigments, books, manuscripts, and forbidden tomes. Each category’s victory-point value starts at 3 but players may modify it by playing bishop cards. One wins a category, and takes all of its victory points, by accumulating category cards whose total value exceeds that of all the other players. As one would expect, whoever wins the most victory points wins the game.

Players acquire cards in two phases. In the gift phase, each person takes turns drafting cards, drawing from three to five (depending on the number of players), taking one for him/herself, putting one in the auction deck, and placing the others in the “public space” for the others to choose. Once all cards have been chosen or allocated to the auction deck, the auction phase begins. Players in this phase take turns bidding for each card in the auction deck. One bids gold cards for category or bishop cards, and category cards for gold cards. (One cannot bid bishop cards, since one plays them as one acquires them.) During the auction phase players can interfere with each other’s acquisition of valuable cards by bidding up their prices - provided the player can afford to pay the bid price.

Bishop cards are another vital part of the game’s inter-player dynamic, as they allow players to raise or lower the victory-point value of categories mid-game. A bishop card gives the player the choice of which categories to modify, specifying only the direction (or directions) in which they may move the die/dice, up or down. Bishops advance one’s own plans and interfere with other players, and can prove especially valuable late in the game, after players have chosen which categories to accumulate.

That’s the whole game: three kinds of components, two playing phases, 20-30 minutes of play time. The “skin” or “chrome” on this game is thin; the game dynamics and objectives have little to do with the rhythms of a medieval monastery*, and I am more likely to refer to the categories by color - brown, blue, green, yellow, and red - than by name. It doesn’t matter. Biblios is quick to learn, features ample opportunities to interact with other players and with the field of play, and thanks to the drafting and auction mechanics has almost no down time to speak of. It is both a good introductory title and a very good light game to play during a break or a late-evening session.

* Or any medieval institution, for that matter. “Realistic” medieval games should at a minimum have some sort of disaster mechanism, since plague, famine, robbery, and other maladies were so common a part of medieval life. Bruges is one game that does this well.