A collaborative domino game where two players must prevent the Tower of Babel from completely collapsing by building winning keystone domino layouts, which is easy, but only if the players can figure out how to communicate!
A set of double six dominos.
First, shuffle the dominoes facedown. Then build the Tower of Babel by stacking layers of facedown domino pairs.
Each player takes an initial hand of three dominoes, or “bricks” from the top of Babel. Each player places their hand so that their partner can see their hand, but not themself.
Players also each take an additional brick from the top of Babel to start their personal keystone layout. Each player places their layout so that they can see their own layout, but not their partner’s.
During the game players cannot look at their own hands, nor at their partner’s layout.
As play progresses dominoes will be discarded face up from the Tower of Babel and from players’ hands. These dominoes are rubble and never return to play. However players can look at the rubble to inform their decisions.
The object of the game is to construct a keystone domino layout and prevent the total collapse of the Tower of Babel.
Players take turns informing each other about their hands and their layouts, and then exploit that information by playing matching dominoes from their hands to their partner’s keystone layout, in the hopes of constructing a sound keystone.
The game ends when the Tower of Babel has completely collapsed, when a player’s hand is empty at the start of their turn, or when one player claims that the keystone is ready during their turn.
At the end of the game the layouts are revealed and if they can connect, the keystone is sound and the players win. If they cannot connect the keystone breaks, the tower of Babel totally collapses, and the game is lost.
Players can only communicate through the listed Turn Actions. Communicating outside of these actions at any point of the game results in a loss.
After setup the players randomly choose who goes first.
Each turn a player can take one of the Turn Actions. Then play passes to their partner.