Players: 3-5
Time: 45-60 minutes
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)

The Components

Tower of Babel comes with:

• 1 game board
• Wooden Bits:
  • 100 building parts
  • 1 scoring marker
  • 5 columns
• 120 cards
• 28 building discs
• 1 rulebook

Game Board: A four-panel, full-color, linen-textured gameboard. There's some nice utilitarian elements on the board, including: a scoring table for monuments, a bonus table for discs, and a scoring track. The main part of the board, however, is taken up by spaces for the 8(!) wonders of the world; it's way more space that you need, and the divisions between the the monuments are sadly harder to distinguish than I'd like, allowing pieces to accidentally slide from one area to another. The board is overall beautiful looking, but over-produced and a bit hard-to-use all at the same time.

Wooden Bits: Fifteen small buildings (temples), five large(r) buildings (bigger temples), and five columns in each of the five player colors (blue, yellow, green, red, and black). There's also a plain wooden temple which is a scoring marker used to keep track of the current space on the scoring table.

The wooden bits are all the usual high German quality, and the temple-shaped building parts are quite delightful. The columns, on the other hand, are barely useful, and then only to keep track of who's turn it is, not to keep track of player order as is suggested in the rules.

Cards: 120 half-sized, full-color cards, printed on normal, medium-weight stock. 100 are building cards, which are used to build the monuments. They depict purple ships, white stone masons, beige camels, and gray cranes. Some of our players had troubles telling the colors apart, but the cards were otherwise nice.

Each player also gets a trading card which he can offer with his building cards; it's helpfully full-color to make it really stand out.

Finally, there's also a set of 15 action cards, each of which gives its player a special action, and each of which is marked by clear iconography.

Building Discs: 28 discs, each of which is printed on linen-textured cardboard. They show the requirements to build a monument by cost and color, and are easy to use, but see my notes on color above.

Rulebook: A four-page rulebook, full of examples, and with a great summary of the action cards at the end. It does a good job of teaching the game.

Box & Tray: The box for Tower of Babel is grossly oversized, which is the game's biggest flaw. It makes the game too big to easily haul around and also too expensive for its play weight. At least there's a nice tray inside which keeps all the components from sliding around in the cavernous box (and hides just how much empty space there is too).

Overall Tower of Babel has components that run the gamut in quality from average (the cards) to good (most everything else). It's also very beautiful, and other than some game board issues, quite utilitarian. However, it's also been overpackaged even worse than most games and is unfortunately $5 or $10 too expensive as a result. I still let it eke in a low "4" out of "5" for Style, because it generally is nice, pricing & spacing problems aside.

The Gameplay

The object of Tower of Babel is to gain fame through the construction of monuments in the Ancient World.

Setup: Each player selects a color and takes the 20 building pieces in that color. He also gets one trade card (which just shows the trade picture) and four random building cards (which each show one color: gray, white, beige, or purple).

The board is laid out and three building discs are placed on each of the eight monuments. These each have a value from 3 to 6 and a color (gray, white, beige, or purple, matching the building cards).

The scoring marker is placed on the first row of the scoring table, which shows 8/4/3, the scores for first, second, and other players for completing the first monument.

Order of Play: On his turn a play may do one of two things:

• Pass; or
• Build

After each player's turn every player draws one card.

Pass: If a player passes, he takes one building card from the supply (and then everyone including him takes one card for the end of a turn, as usual).

Build: A player builds by choosing a particular disc on a particular monument to build. (This is what the player-colored columns are actually used for: you place it on the board, then you place the disc you're building on top of it, and thus it's clear what you're trying to build and who's turn it is.) The disc shows a color and a number; in order to build that part of the monument, that many cards of that color must be used.

Now all players but the active player make a blind bid, offering a number of cards no more than the number shown on the disc, then all revealing them simultaneously. Once they're revealed the active player may now construct the monument using cards that were offered to him and/or cards from his hand.

If a player's cards were used to build the monument (including those used by the active player), he gets to place a number of his markers (building parts) in the monument equal to the number of appropriately colored cards he used. These will later be used to majority-control score the monument.

If a player's cards were rejected (and the active player may never use more cards than required, so he'll often have to reject some), then the rejected player earns a number of points equal to the number of appropriately colored cards he offered. And he gets his cards back because they weren't used.

The active player then gets to take the building disc that he built, which will be used fo additional points at the end of the game.

(Unless he failed to build the monument, in which case everyone earns points for the cards they offered, and the active player gets nothing.)

Using Trade Cards. A trade card can be included as part of an offer. Each player has one which he always gets back. The active player may only accept one offer with a trade card and if he does he must give the building disc to that player, but he gets to place his own markers in the monument for all the building cards that his opponent played. (Thus the building disc is traded for additional control of the monument.)

This is helpful because of that aforementioned bonus scoring at the end of the game for the bonus markers. It can also be used in an attempt to force your opponent to reject your offer, thus giving you free points.

Completing a Monument. If the third building disc from a monument is completed, then the monument is completed (and scored).

A scoring track shows how many points the first- and second-place players (who had the most and second-most markers in that monument) get. It starts out at 8/4, and increases after each monument is built. If the seventh wonder of the world is built during the game, it's worth 20/10. Every other player who had at least one part in the monument always gets 3 points.

The active player then gets to take an action card. These can give various bonuses in or out of play. The possible cards are:

• Trade 5 building cards with the supply.
• Draw 3 building cards.
• Take two actions in a turn.
• Replace two required cards on your monument.
• Get 3 points for each card that was rejected in building a monument.
• Get 5 points at the end of the game.
• Get 1 point at the end of the game for each building disc you have.

Ending the Game: The game ends whenever the last disc of a particular color is removed from the board. This can theoretically happen pretty early, but I've always seen it happen when the board is almost clear.

Every remaining monument is scored at the 10/5/3 level.

Each player also gets a bonus for how many building discs he has of each color: 0 for 1 of a color; 5 for 2; 10 for 3; or 20 for 4+.

The player with the highest score wins.

Relationships to Other Games

Tower of Babel is a majority-based area-control game with some set-collection and blind-bidding mechanics. Majority control is a popular category of play that includes classics like El Grande and San Marco. Remarkably, this is the only major Knizia design that I'm aware of that ventures into the genre. (Doubtless someone will now post an example of the same in the comments section of this review.)

The blind-bidding element isn't very typical for the genre, since what other players offer doesn't have as direct of an effect upon what you can do as most other blind-bidding games. If anything, the blind bidding aspect reminds me the most of a 2004 Moon design, Oasis, where you'll also making offers to other people (though, there, it's open and in turn order).

Beyond that the game is vintage Knizia, with lots of interesting and well-connected systems, and an action-card reward system that comes straight out of his own Carcassonne: The Castle.

The Game Design

Tower of Babel is a game that looks like it shouldn't work. There's a number of very disparate game systems (majority control, blind bidding, set collection) and with all the passing around of cards, building parts, and columns, it feels like it should be fiddly. But it isn't and it works.

Overall the game is clever and thoughtful; you have interested decisions every turn: which building disc you choose to try to build and which cards you offer toward a building effort and whether or not you use a trading card all feel like important choices, every single turn (and, honestly, they are).

I think the game is slightly shallow, because it's a light, fast game, but even in that there are multiple paths to victory, as you can concentrate on building majorities, on building singular presence, on disc collection, or on getting rejected, just as the four most obvious strategies.

The only complaint I have about the actual play of the game is the silly bit in the rules, which I've mentioned before, where you're supposed to constantly rotate the player columns on a track to keep track of who the current player is. It's easy enough to ignore--you're really just going around the table in any case--but the presence of this useless rule just serves to confuse people trying to learn the game.

Beyond that I think Tower of Babel is a fine light game. If it were in a box about half the size, and $10 cheaper I might have thought it was a great game, but unfortunately the decision to package it as a big game really colors my attitude toward the game. I've nonetheless given it a "4" out of "5" for Substance, since it's very playable and replayable.

Conclusion

Tower of Babel is the newest big-box game from Reiner Knizia, and unfortunately it shouldn't be. Knizia serves up a fine combination of majority control, set collection, and blind bidding that create an enjoyable, strategic, and thoughtful light game. However, it's overproduced and overpackaged for what it is. If you don't mind the extra cost, and can set your expectations correctly, however, you might really enjoy this game.

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