Butababel

• Designer: Yuo
• Publisher: Homosapiens Lab
• Players: 3-5
• Age: 6+
• Time: 5 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

In the game of ブタバベル (ButaBabel), you are a pig who takes charge of building your Tower of Babel (“Buta” means Pig in Japanese). Your duty is to build a higher tower than everyone else.  The deck is made up of three kinds of cards: straw houses (paper), stick houses (scissors) and brick houses (rock).  The deck is shuffled, and each player is dealt a hand of 3 cards.  Each player also then is given a card face up to serve as the foundation for their tower.  If there are only 3 players, deal a card to the table for the dummy player’s tower.  Split up the deck into 3 piles and space them out on the table so players can easily reach at least one, but hopefully two, portions of the deck.

When all players are ready, someone says Go! And the real-time game begins.  Players can play cards onto a tower by placing a card which beats the current top card (following rock-paper-scissors rules).  Anytime your hand has less than 3 cards, draw a card to get back up to 3.  If there comes a point when none of the players is able to play a card, if all players agree to a stalemate, each player simultaneously plays any card from their hand to their tower and the game continues.  The game continues until all the draw decks are exhausted.  Players immediately stop playing cards and scores are collected.

Now, each player counts up the cards in their tower. The player with the most cards wins!  Well, not exactly, if the winning tower has 3+ cards than the second place tower, the God gets angry and destroys that tower – it is eliminated, and now the new first place tower sees if it can win.  Also, if there is a tie for highest tower, the God gets frustrated and smites all those tied players down, and they are eliminated as well. The player with the highest surviving tower (which might be the last player left standing) is the winner.

My thoughts on the game

In this frenetic game, you try to maximize the height of your tower while making sure that it isn’t too high.   It is easily to quickly play cards to your own tower from your hand.  And the game plays out lightning fast – if you don’t play enough to your own tower, you’ll never have the most!  

You can also raise opponents’ towers in the same manner, so you should watch every tower and keep your tower at moderate height, though this game proceeds in real time so fast that you don’t have enough time to watch closely.

When the players have exhausted the decks, the round ends and players compare towers by counting the cards stacked in each. In a three-player game, there is a fourth dummy tower as well. The tallest tower wins, unless it is three or more cards higher than the next highest tower. If it is too high, it’s eliminated (tying towers likewise). Then compare the next highest tower to see if it is too high and so on. This way, it is possible for the dummy player to win.

Of note, this is a weird lefty-indexed game – all of the cards are indexed for left handers, so I find that I have to hold them in a column in my hand to see the icons for the RPS part. Not sure why it wasn’t just quad-indexed.

I’m generally not a fan of real-time games, but this one is alright given its super short length.  Just play your rock/paper/scissor cards as quick as you can.  While you can get a general sense for how high a tower is – the cards will surely be played fast enough that you’ll not be able to keep an accurate count of each stack.  Regardless of how the stacks look; there is always some suspense at the end – because no one is ever quite sure if they are involved in a tie… or the “leader” ends up with a stack too large and gets eliminated!  Laughs are had at the result, and then it’s time for another game!

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor