Babel

How To Win

• Build up your towers as quickly as possible to get the most points

How Can You Do That?

• Place cards from various tribes in your territory to build towers, and to obstruct your opponent

What Else Can You Do?

• Move cards around like in solitaire to make matching sets of 3 and activate special effects

Babel is a two-player card game where you are both racing to 15 points by building up towers and attacking your opponents towers. It’s a fun mix of set collection, solitaire and risk taking that you can play very quickly once you get the hang of it.

The board itself is split up into territories, where you build up your tribes. The larger your population, the bigger the tower you can build. But because the tower cards themselves need to be placed in order, you often need to protect your cards until you get the opportunity to build the tower!

If you line up 3 cards of the same tribe, you are able to use a special power. Most of these effects involve destroying the opponents towers or attacking their population. This makes the game very aggressive! Almost everything you do will annoy the other person, so come to the board with a thick skin.

The biggest challenge for this game comes from learning the rules. There are many tiny rules or restrictions that can be easy to miss, and the interactions are not clear until you start actually playing the game.

Even the win condition is a bit obtuse! If you get 15 points and the other person doesn’t have 10 yet, then you automatically win, but if they are over 10 points then you end up going up to 20 (or if somebody ends up under 10 points, they lose). Not straightforward.

Personally, though we tend to not play very aggressive games in general, this one worked super well for us and I really enjoy it (even though I have yet to win a single game).

A final note: the box is extremely well done. It's very small, but cleanly fits everything and will take up almost no space in your collection.