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This game combines two familiar concepts — building and hidden roles — with some fanatics wanting to bring about the collapse of the tower of Babel before the builders can make it reach the eighth level. The tricky part of the game comes not only from those hidden traitors, but from walls that come in five heights, which makes it tough to keep the floors level. Fanatics can't knock over the building on their own or else they lose, so if that incompetent builder a fanatic, or are they doing the best they could with what they have?
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Your goal in the game is to be the first to launch three full ships. Each player has a hand of goods, and each turn players simultaneously reveal a card from their hand that they want to load onto their current ship. To pay for the good, they pay cards from their hand, but these cards go their left-hand neighbor, which means that everything you do fuels them — but you can't make progress without giving them something to do. Or perhaps you can since each good played has a special effect, with the strength of many effects being based on the number of such goods already on the ship. Thus, the design seems to have lots going on in a tight game space.
• The other new Tanabe/COLON ARC title, co-designed with Peke, is Cinderella Magic, with 3-7 players trying to figure out whether Cinderella has everything she needs to go to the ball. Players take turns playing cards either face down (to keep info hidden) or face up (to use the special power of the card played). When someone decides to go to the ball, everyone else votes on whether she can make it or not, then those who guessed correctly receive glass slipper reward cards. Once all of those cards run out, the prince hands over the final slipper to whoever has the matching one, then players tally their points.
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Everyone represents an adventurer setting off the fight an evil spirit, but you need to be equipped with a helmet, armor, and a weapon of some sort, and these are divvied out one at a time from the deck. Who wants this? You? Okay, you're done in the helmet category. Now who wants this whisk? Once everything is dealt out, you each reveal a secret card and use the value on it along with the value of your equipment to determine who has been swayed by the spirit to fight for them.
The player characters have special abilities on them, in addition to a melee or ranged speciality, giving you a reason to argue for specific cards during the set-up round — and not just because you want to be on a particular side of the battle, although you could be thinking ahead to that as well.
• The game BOOK MAKERS from Kengo Ōtsuka, which he self-published under the brand name Ōtsuka seisaku, is based on a fake weekly manga series, and in the game the characters from this manga participate in a tiered tournament to see who's the most powerful one of all. You and the other players care who wins not because you represent these characters, but because you're placing bets on who will win each bout, which is conducted in a quasi-RPS way.
Totally off topic, but I found Ōtsuka's voice entrancing in a movie star kind of way.
• We have another two dozen game overviews to post, but the editing crew is already in Dallas to prepare for BGG.Spring this coming weekend, so those videos will start popping up on BGG's YouTube channel the week of May 28.
Many thanks to Ken Shoda, Simon Lundström, and Sam Don'trecallhislastname for the huge translation assistance they provided because otherwise the designers and I would mostly have been staring at another and pantomiming and not getting much accomplished in the way of demonstrating games. We couldn't have done it without them!
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