Babylonia

Great game despite atrocious graphic design!

The game play is fine - tense, fast-playing and with important tactical decisions on every turn.

But the board. Oh dear. This is the first time in the hundreds of board games I've owned where I've had to take a sharpie to the board.

There are two major flaws:

The first is that it is extremely hard to distinguish the river hexes from some of their neighboring land spaces that are colored exactly the same shades of blue (but lacking the hard-to-spot triple wavy line icon).

The upshot of that is that land spaces are sometimes overlooked as players believe them to be river spaces.

So we put a brightly colored plastic gem on each river space to make sure the distinction is very clear.

The second flaw though needed the sharpie. The board hexes are often extremely faintly drawn, making the edges of the play area difficult to discern.

The result of that we witnessed only last night - a player with interests on the far side of the board believed he had totally surrounded a crop field tile and could take it when he liked. Unfortunately he had not made out the faint hex just next to the crop field which another player placed on and thus took the crop field.

So now the board has a thick sharpie outline which clearly illustrates what parts of the board have hexes and are therefore in play, and what parts are outside and so not legitimate areas for placement.

I don't know how this design got past all the playtesters.

Don't even get me started on the ridiculous trays supposed to hold your discs. We use scrabble tile holders instead, they do a much better job.

The inevitable comparison for Babylonia is [thing=3][/thing]. Like Samurai, you're working to place your pieces around ziggurats and cities to score points. The difference is, in Babylonia you have a little more control of the pace of your play, as well as the possibility to reel off large chunk scoring plays.

While Samurai is a cagey narrowing of scope until the last pieces are removed from the board, Babylonia feels more expansive. You want to delay in scoring your cities in order to maximize their value, but you also want to snag cities so that you can score 'residual' points as other people score cities.

Babylonia also offers some specialization -- while Samurai is the same game every time, Babylonia has special tiles as a reward for claiming the most space around ziggurats.

I can't quite put my finger on why I prefer [thing=3][/thing]. Maybe it's down to the fact that we are biased towards whichever games we try first. But, after this latest play, I thought to myself, "This game is exactly a 6. It's solid, I wouldn't really turn down a play of it, but I feel no need to own it." And that's still my conclusion. With [thing=3][/thing] in my life, I don't really feel the need to own Babylonia. I just prefer the puzzle of Samurai.

That said, Babylonia is a solid, more accessible version of Samurai, sort of like [thing=244114][/thing] is to [thing=42][/thing]. It's a fine game and one you should certainly check out.

I am always impressed how Dr. Knizia can revisit his old ideas, and make a few tweaks to produce a game that is different enough to stand on it's own. This one is a blend of his classics Samurai and Through the Desert, with some exciting rule-breaking special powers thrown in. I do miss the cleaner scoring of his previous titles, Babylonia is more transparent about what you need to do to get points at the cost of a little more admin from multiple players scoring points after each turn. The tile trays are a nice idea but functionally useless.

Nice light abstract strategy game. Plays quick at all player counts, and requires you to pay attention to your opponents. Simple rules, but still many interesting choices.

2 plays / 3 players

LIKE: I liked the quick actions and great map positioning for various point chains. I liked how the farmers could be used late game to grab the city bonus tiles. The game played quickly. Good simple ruleset, but there are some larger strategic ideas that can be missed. The ziggurat tiles felt nicely balanced.

DISLIKE: Some of the point salad aspect created too many options and that made the tension less in the game. It was difficult to discern the best positions on the board, which can lead to some min/maxing in the game. The board artwork did obscure the river a little. Needs a player aid for new or casual players.

OVERALL: I liked it, but needs more plays. I felt there was not enough tension (only a first play) because of the high number of options. There is some fun interaction in blocking other players, while trying to keep yourself in a good position. Some elements of Samurai, but Samurai feels more head-to-head. I have the second printing with the waves on the river and the thicker tile holders.

Similar games: Samurai, Through the Desert, Hacienda

Outstanding. Pure 10

Like many Knizia games, I'm expecting this game's rating to go up with more plays. The components quality is great, but gameplay is ok so far. Only played 2p, but looking forward to seeing how more players will affect gameplay.