Night of the Grand Octopus is a game of second-guessing and double-think your opponents, with Cthulhoid overtones, as you try to be the cult that summons the great tentacled one.  The first player to gather all of the required items to perform the summoning rite wins.

Each player has two tokens – one represents your cultists and the other represents your monster.  Each turn, players set, and then simultaneously reveal, the locations where each of their tokens is going to move to.   Monsters can move anywhere, but cultists can only move to one location one space from their current location.

Each locations starts with items that the players are trying to collect.  If one cultist token is on a location with no monsters, they can take one of the items.  However, if there are cultists and monsters on a location, the cultists gain nothing and a fight breaks out with all players involved losing 1 cult power.  If there are multiple cultists but no monsters, the player must agree to all take nothing, or agree which single player will take an item; if they can’t agree, a fight breaks out and all players lose 1 cult power.

As well as the main locations, the game is played with 1 of the 4 external locations which players can move to instead fora special effect.  I like that the rules explain what effect on the game each of these external locations will have, i.e. longer, more tactical, etc. Read the rest of this entry »

In Biblios, players are monks trying to make the best library and the player with the most victory points (VPs) at the end of the game wins. Biblios is a card game with some similarities to For Sale (as players spend the first game phase gaining cards and the second phase using those cards to get better cards) which already gives it a good start in my eyes.

During the game, players gain cards of 3 different types: coloured cards (which have values on them), dice cards and gold cards. At the end of the game, the player with the highest total value of cards in each of the 5 colours scores VPs equal to that colour’s value (between 1-6 VP).  However, the VP value of each colour (shown on coloured dice on the board) can change during the game because players that gain dice cards can alter 1 or 2 dice values up or down 1 or 2 points each depending upon the card.

In the first game phase, players gain cards. Players take turns drawing and allocating a number of cards equal to the number of players plus one.   The player can place 1 card in the auction pile, 1 card in their own hand, and the rest in the common area.  However, the interesting part is that the active player draws cards one-by-one so they must allocate each card before knowing what the next card is.  Read the rest of this entry »