Babylonia - First Play!

19th April 2022

It's a Tuesday and we're at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club.

Mesopotamia; source of much history, a birthplace of the world's early civilisations. Also the source of many board games, one of them being Babylonia.
Take on the role of a merchant dynasty and attempt to create the most lucrative trade routes.

What's in a game?

• Game board: Babylonia's board has an illustrated a map that depicts this part of Mesopotamia, along with the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. It has a hex overlay used to delineate, cities, farms, rivers and ziggurats. A scoring track circles the perimeter of the board.
  Additionally, the board is divided into 3 regions, north, south and central which are marked out and separated by the 2 rivers. This dictates what parts of the board are used in the game as per player count.
  Unusually, the orientation of the map feels unconventional, when viewed from the landscape orientation, north is to the left and south to the right. Only when viewed in portrait orientation are north and south where you expect them to be, it's been rotated '90!
  Obviously this is a non-issue, since I'm used to looking at both board and maps in the landscape orientation, it's a bit counterintuitive for me.
• Ziggurats: There are 5 of these little 3D wooden models.
• Cards: There are 9 of these ziggurat cards, when acquired they provide the owning player with benefit of some sort, this may be a once-only or ongoing benefit. They are numbered 1-9.
  A one-off benefit may be immediately gain 10 VPs and ongoing benefits may include allowing a player to have more tokens on their stand or being able to play 3 noble tokens instead of 2 and so on.
• Tiles: Babylonia uses 2 types of hexagonal card tile, they represent cities and farms. The front of each type shows their scoring criteria, which for farms are straight-up numbers or a city symbol, city tiles will have icons related to the game's 3 types of nobles.
• Tokens: There are 30 of these round wooden tokens in each player colour and they come in 4 types; farmers and nobles. Nobles are further subdivided in to civil servants, merchants and priests. Dang! Even in the ancient world civil servants were a thing, I'm surprised there aren't lawyers!
• Stands: There's a oblong stand with 2 grooves for each player and are used to hold tokens.

Babylonia's components are all good. the cards are actually as chunky as the tokens. The remaining components. the tokens and ziggurats are all constructed of wood and feel high quality. The stands are a nice touch.

The artwork used on the board is good and portrays what I imagine to be a suitably middle-eastern landscape for Mesopotamia. It is perhaps a little too busy and distracts the eye, however, the hexes help to make the layout clear.
The cards all use the same illustration which is a little bland.

For the most part, iconography is easily understood. Only some of the ziggurat cards are not immediately clear and will require looking up in the rule book but that only applies when and if the card comes into play. Nothing that would be a problem or approaching a dealbreaker.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Board: Put out the board and place the following.
  Ziggurats: Place the ziggurat models on their allotted spaces.
  Cities and farms: Shuffle the city and farm tiles into a face-down stack and randomly place them face-up on their allotted spaces on the board.
  In games with a lower play count, not all the board is used, consequently not all the ziggurats, cities and farms are used either.
• Cards: Put out the cards numbered 1-7.
  There's a variant where all 9 are shuffled and 7 are randomly dealt to use.
• Tokens: Give each player all the tokens and stand in their colour, they should be shuffled into face-down stacks. Then each player should deal themselves 5 and place them into their stand.
• First player: Determine a starting player.

On to play
Babylonia uses a standard turn structure with the active player taking their turn before play moves to the left.
In their turn, there are 3 phases active player must complete.

• Play Tokens: The active player must play tokens, depending on where tokens are placed, there may be immediate scoring. When playing tokens, the active player can choose from 2 options:
  Play any 2 tokens: The active player may put any 2 of their tokens (Any mix of nobles and/or farmers.) on to the board. These may be used on river spaces but must be turned face-down to do so.
  Play 3+ farmers: The active player may put 3 or more farmer tokens and only farmer tokens on to the board. They cannot be used to cover river spaces.
  Placement rules: Some rules and restrictions apply when placing tokens.
  ​In the 1st two turns only 1 or 2 tokens can be played respectively, after this the usual limits apply.
  Tokens may be placed on to any empty hex space. That's is one not occupied by a city/farm/ziggurat or opponent's token. Tokens do not need to be placed next to each other or the board edge or anything like that.
  Farms: Having said that, a farmer token can be placed on a hex with a farm tile if the active player already has at least 1 other token adjacent to that farm. When this occurs, the player token replaces the farm tile which is removed and score - more on this below.
  Scoring: Farms and ziggurats can be immediately scored during this phase depending on where the player put their tokens.
  Farm tile: When a player acquires a farm tile, it is immediately scored. If the tile contains a number, that's the VPs scored.
  ​If it has the city symbol, then the active player gains VPs equal to all the city tiles all players have in their personal areas! (More on acquiring city tiles below.)
  Ziggurats: When a player puts one of their tokens adjacent to a ziggurat, they immediately score VPs equal to the number of ziggurats they have tokens adjacent to. Thus for the 1st time a token is placed adjacent to a ziggurat, the active player gains 1 VP, if they place a token adjacent to a second ziggurat, the would score 2 VPs.
  Multiple tokens adjacent to the same ziggurat do not increase scoring, it ziggurats, not tokens that score.
• Score surrounded cities/ziggurats: When all the land hex spaces surrounding a city or ziggurat are occupied (By any mix of player tokens.), it is considered completed and is scored. Tokens placed face-down in river spaces adjacent to a ziggurat do not count towards completion but do count for the purposes of majority.
  Whoever has the most of their tokens surrounding a city/ziggurat has majority (Which confers extra benefits.), in the case of a tie, no one will have majority.
  Cities: When a city is completed, all players who have adjacent noble tokens that match the icon(s) on the city tile score 2 VP per matching token. Furthermore any matching tokens connected via the players own network of other tokens (Including face-down tokens.) also score 2 VPs each. This can be a good source of VPs.
  Finally, whoever has majority, takes the city tile and places it in their playing area and scores VPs equal to the number of city tiles they've acquired and placed in their playing area. Thus the first city tile acquired earns 1 VP the second gains 2 VPs and so forth.
  If there is no majority, then the city tile is discarded and no one scores it.
  Ziggurats: When a ziggurat is completed, whoever has majority immediately takes an available ziggurat card of their choice and gains whatever benefit it confers. Again, in the case no majority, no one can acquire a ziggurat card via that ziggurat.
• Refill tokens on stand: Once the active player has completed the first 2 phases, they draw tokens from their personal stack to increase the tokens on the stand back to 5.
• Next player: Play progresses to the player on the left.

Endgame
Play continues until 1 of the following 2 criteria are met:
A player has no tokens on their stand.
Or
There are only 1 or 0 city tiles left on the board.
In either case, the game ends immediately!

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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Overall
If you were to look at a game of Babylonia in progress, you'd be forgiven for thinking that with all these tokens in play at the same time that it's a complicated game but it's not.
From the rules write up above there's not too much to learn but like all good games, there's a lot to think about.
Right from the start Babylonia provides players with meaningful decisions to make and several paths to scoring VPs which can be prioritised. Often these will vary in value contextually and in relation to other decisions. There will be short term and long term goals.

Take ziggurats for example, a player may put tokens next a number of different ziggurats to score points as efficiently as possible but may also choose to concentrate on a single one in order to secure a card. However, taking too long to gain majority on a Ziggurat may lose you some actions.

Cards themselves will change in importance, those with continuous ability will be most exploitable in the early game and those with once-only bonuses will be important in the late game - provided of course, that someone else hasn't beaten you to the punch. 

Farms and cities have an interesting relationship, getting cities quicker than other players can earn a lot of VPs when some farms are scored or more city tiles are acquired. But city tiles need to be surrounded to score - unlike farms which can score immediately. Sometimes It may also take more actions to surround a city; if it looks like a player is going to get majority in a city (Or ziggurat actually.) other players wont be incentivised to complete it early for another player's benefit.

Finally, there's the network of tokens that players will create, their trade routes. Finding ways to connect nobles to matching city tiles on other parts of the board can be a good source of points. Especially if a noble can be connect to multiple cities, a city can only be scored once so getting another use out of already played token is useful.
It's here small token plays can have big outcomes.
Sometimes players will want to put specific nobles into player or sometimes use farmers for rapid expansion. All of this is dependant on what tokens get drawn though. It's likely that something will not go to plan thanks to other players. Adapting to circumstances can also be important.

Paying attention to what other players are doing is also vital since - apart from what's on a player's stand - everything is open. It means that it's likely that getting majority will eventually become a race as players' objectives clash and anticipating those objectives can make a difference.

With straightforward rules and a brisk playing time, Babylonia is fairly accessible but also provides players with meaningful decisions.
I enjoyed it and would recommend it.