Tower of Babel - Tuesday 7th June

Tower-of-Babel-1-Web
Originally uploaded by coljen.

This is the first Billygames session for some weeks, so it was good to get back together and give Renier Knizia's Tower of Babel a run out. This is one of the games I purchased on holiday in Salzburg. As usual the game components are up to the usual high standard from Hans Im Gluck. With such a prolific games designer as Renier Knizia you would think that it would be impossible to turn out games of a consistently high standard, while ToB isn't a classic it is a solid game design with some interesting decisions to be made. Basically players try to build the 7 wonders of the world together while endeavouring to have the major contribution to the build. Each wonder has 3 building chips, either camels, cranes, stonemasons or boats. A player places his building marker on a wonder and chooses a building chip. This will have a number on it from 3 to 6 and invites offers from the other players to help build it. He can opt to choose any of the offers to complete the build contributing cards from his hand if necessary. The players involved then put as many dobbers on the wonder as cards they played and the active player gets the building chip. The rejected offers get VPs, one for each card they played. When all 3 building chips on a wonder are built the wonder is scored according to a scale on the gameboard and the active player gets an action card. Action cards do a number of things, allowing you to draw or exchange cards, having another turn, 5VPs at game end and so on.
That is it basically, the game ends when all chips of one type are built, then all the unfinished wonders are scored and you get VPs for building chips you have collected. It played pretty smoothly and we managed to get 2 games in during the session. Gauging how many card to offer is an art, sometimes knowing your offer will be rejected can be good as you can garner quite a few VPs this way. But having a presence on the wonders when they are scored is vital too as the majority of points are scored this way.
I managed to collect a good number of building chips in the first game and scored 20pts for the last wonder built and edged the win. In the second game Steve cornered the monopoly on camel chips and scored 20 points for those. He also built the last camel chip fairly early to end the game while he was in a winning position. Another winner for the good Doctor I think.

Final Scores Game 1
Colin 83, Neil 81, Steve 68, Richard 68, Garry 65

Game 2
Steve 63, Garry 61, Colin 47, Neil 43, Richard 40

As I have said before I can only update this blog at the weekends now (thanks IT) but hopefully I can remember what went on the previous Tuesday.