BABEL

BABEL is a balancing game in which players make a tower of paper by building walls of different heights. This game has three modes of play: hidden identity mode (saboteurs may exist), limited communication co-operative mode (players use strange languages - frog, robot, dog, cat, no words), and random co-operative mode (players may not choose walls).

In hidden identity mode, players are secretly assigned a role: Builder or Saboteur (Fanatic is the 2nd Edition). A Builder's goal is to build an eight-tier tower, and a Saboteur's goal is to make one of the builders collapse the tower.

The 2nd edition, published in 2017, kept the gameplay the same, but made significant changes to the components of the 1st edition (2016). The original edition had the player's Height cards also acting as the actual floors of the tower. The Height card had a sort of Pac-man shape. By combining two pieces, you made the hexagonal floor you would build. The player building the level was meant to arrange the floor parts to match the wall parts. That is, if the heights combined are a 3 and a 5, the 3-wall goes over the 3-floor, and the 5-wall goes over the 5-floor.

The 2017 edition did away with this physical mechanism; instead, players had normal playing cards numbered 1 to 5, and wholly separate floor tiles to actually build with. This edition also introduced a new card 'Break Down The Wall', which means that only one wall piece is used in the level being built. Also, in the new edition, the tower starts with a floor, and on your turn you place two walls and then the floor. The new edition also has a sturdier box and is slightly larger.