That’s a small enough pool to tabulate against what you’ve already placed on the table, if you’re so inclined. Each player has twelve peasants and six of each priest. And it works for two major reasons.įirst, your pool of tiles is entirely your own. Enough to chew on, not so much that anyone will choke. Seven if you’ve claimed a particular ziggurat power. Rather than slapping you with an entire stack of thirty tiles, you’re limited to the contents of your rack. What makes all these investments manageable is how Knizia doles out your options. Around and around it goes, escalating with the same pitted anxiety of a wager gone too far. Every overture is deliberate, betraying something of its maker’s designs. Someone adds a rush of peasants, blocking the previous player’s hopes of unfettered expansion. The next player places two chips within reach of disparate cities. When someone plays their two chips, carefully arranged to score a few points now and prepare something for later, the entire board is rearranged in light of this new information. Which is why Babylonia is a bidding game, right down to its cadence. There’s an element of chance in what you draw. By game’s end, strands of priests and peasants can cover as much ground on the scoring track as in a half-dozen of those early turns. Early cities tend to be worth a handful of points. Adjacent priests, yes, but also any priest chained via friendly tiles, sometimes far away across expanses of dirt or water, sometimes via hard-fought routes, sometimes nearby thanks to clever preparations. When a city is surrounded on land (another rule to consider! how they accumulate!), it scores points for every connected priest of the same type. There are three varieties of priest in Babylonia - pots, suns, and the immortal likeness of Ashurbanipal. The very first claimed city, even if worth nothing in its own right, might be worth a game-swinging quantity over time.Īnd sometimes these investments are even subtler, a tile played to bridge regions or head off opposing offshoots. In such a case, every claimed city scores yet another point for its owner. Other times investments are recurring, in particular when cities are claimed by whichever merchant prince happens to control the most adjacent spaces. Sometimes these investments are immediate, as when a farm is claimed or a ziggurat is partially surrounded, trickles of points exchanged for your tile. But calling those few extra rules complicated would be like saying a handful of soil can muddy the whole Tigris River.Įvery placement is an investment, one whose ultimate payout is never certain. There’s more, like how farms can only be claimed by a peasant and only if you’re already next to it, or how anything can be placed face-down in the river, or that ziggurats dole out points based on how many ziggurats you’re already adjacent to. A turn consists of either placing any two tiles or placing three or more peasant tiles all at once. It’s redundant to talk about Knizia’s talent for simple rules that belie great depths, so we’ll skip the particulars except to say that Babylonia is no exception. See, I said “bid.” We’re halfway to an auction.īut that’s exactly how Babylonia feels. From a certain perspective, any game could be called a bidding game, one in which actions, resources, even gestures and facial expressions become the currencies in our ever-shifting bid for victory. It may be a cop-out to call Babylonia a bidding game. Placing tiles and forging connections, two to five at a time.
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