Visiting doctor_atomic

[prog]

So the vacation last weekend was great. The train trips to and from New Jersey were uneventful, comfortable, and not overly long. I like the train.

It was so nice to spend a lot of non-thon time with doctor_atomic, which I haven't really done since we were housemates four years ago. As she's usually completely consumed in her research, my arrival made her

Comments

[ruthling]

cooookies.

sounds like a nice trip.

[doctor_atomic]

I've been meaning to post about this, but you summed it up well enough! :)

Come and visit me any time!

[dougo]

Babel is my favorite of the Kosmos 2-player line, and in my top-five list of 2-player games. I can see why it wouldn't be considered elegant but I think it has its own internal logic. I get kinda bored with too-elegant games anyway.

[prog]

Interesting!

The wacky thing about the game, after one play, is that you'd expect all the tribes to be more or less equivalent, when in fact the Assyrians seem to trump everything. I found myself adjusting my gameplay on every turn to either set up an Assyrian attack, prevent my opponent from using her Assyrians, or minimizing future Assyrian damage to me.

That doesn't mean it was a bad game; it seemed playable once we leaned how the world works. But we couldn't shake the feeling that the game wasn't originally designed to have a single scary trump-suit like that.

If the game were called "OMG Assyrians!!! :(" and was themed around four ancient tribes who band together to build temples in the face of relentless assaults by a fifth, I may have found the game simply fun with no complaints.

[luckylefty]

Assyrians aren't nearly as powerful as they seem at first. Is it possible you missed the rule that I missed at first? When you destroy a temple with the Assyrians, you take the destroyed temple, turn it upside down as a stack, and put it on the top of the deck. This means that when you destroy my temple, then at the end of your turn, you'll put the 1 and 2 from that temple on your "available temple levels" pile, and I'll start my next turn rebuilding these levels. Then at the end of my turn, I'll put the 3 and 4 on my "available temple levels" pile, and if you're not able to use these on your turn, I can build them, too, and the 5 and 6 you will draw at the end of your turn, and I'll have rebuilt my full temple

[prog]

We got the rule. I note that you just spent three turns to rebuild a temple I smashed in one, and that's if I didn't use any of those tiles myself. And I'll probably just smash your temple a second time, won't I?

The most viable strategy we found after one game involves spreading out construction across the five spaces. Any temple that rose too tall generally got pulled down the next turn.