Babel On

So the other new board game I received for Christmas is Tower of Babel, one of Reiner Knizia's many efforts. I've had a chance to play it twice now -- so it's perhaps a little too early to form solid opinion, but here are my impressions so far.

As with all of Knizia's games, the theme seems very loosely draped over a mechanical skeleton. In theory, you're helping to build eight different wonders of the world -- though at least one of them will not be completed by the end of the game. (Somehow, this game is supposed to be the story of why there were only seven built. But yeah, back to that whole "the theme barely fits" thing.)

Each of the eight potential wonders is represented by three chips on the board. The 24 total chips are divided into four colors, with values from 3 to 6 printed on them. On your turn, you send your worker out to one of the chips, determining the color (suit) to be played that round. Then all the players simultaneously and secretly prepare "offers" to help you build the chip you've chosen. You have to come up with a total exactly equal to the value of the chip you're working on.

One the offers are settled, they're revealed, and you have to choose which to accept and which to reject. There are a few wrinkles in this, but the simple version of it is that each offer you reject immediately earns that player one victory point for every card you're rejecting. Each accepted offer allows that player to place a "house" on the wonder indicating his help; when the wonder eventually is completed, the players in first and second place on houses for that wonder will score a hefty point benefit of their own (that increases throughout the game as more wonders are built). You get to make up the difference with cards of your own (and earn houses yourself in the process), but you must build a chip exactly. You can't go over its difficulty value, and you can't accept only part of an opponent's offer. You also claim the chip you were working on, with sets of chips in the same color being worth bonus points at the end of the game.

After two plays, I really like the game. The lack of real fit to the theme doesn't really bother me; that's not what you play a Reiner Knizia game for. What I like is that the game has very simple rules and plays rather quickly, but actually has a lot of strategic nuance in it. Some of that nuance comes from a few special rules I didn't detail here, but let me simply say that by the time you get a few turns into it, you find yourself thinking, "wow, there are more important decisions to make here than I would have guessed."

I had some bad luck in card draws kill my chances in one of the two games I've played so far (though I still placed second), but I still liked the game both times. In particular, I liked how the strategies became more twisted with four players compared to three (and I hope soon to play with the full complement of five). At this point, the game would get my recommendation.