Babel

Babel — a tower-builder after Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Tower of Babel (1563).

You are Nimrod's master builder. Starting with nothing but a purse of coins, you charter ships, hire workers, raise their lodges and mess tents, set cranes on the ramp and prop the leaning walls, and wind the great spiral up loop by loop towards the clouds.

But the higher it climbs, the less the builders understand each other. Every few loops a new tongue is born. Crews that can't talk quarrel, quarrels become brawls, dropped stones shatter on the ramp, and hungry workers turn sour. Part the fights, send scribes who speak every tongue, feed each tongue in its own tent, and keep the cranes and carts in repair. The sky darkens as you go, and the storm grows with every loop.

No words, no numbers. In keeping with the jam's rule, nothing in the game is written: coins are counted as stacks, stone as little pyramids, timber as woodpiles and the lean as a plumb-line dial. An old storyteller's voice guides you and speaks every tooltip, and there's a guided first game (press T on the title).

Features

• Everything is carried: every stone and log is hauled by a worker from ship to quay to crane to the build front
• You decide where things go: cranes on the ramp, buttresses round the foot, the stone yard, the lodges and tents of the camp
• Tongues, quarrels, brawls and broken stone; scribes who patrol a stretch of ramp and calm it
• Hunger, beds and provisions that come by ship and take cargo space from the stone
• Cranes and carts wear out and break; have them looked over before they fail
• A storm that gathers as the tower rises, with lightning and thunder near the top
• A narrated tutorial, with the narrator switchable off (N)

Controls

1–9, Tab, X	Hire, Crane, Scribe, Buttress, Ship, Yard, Lodge, Mess tent, Service; pick a tongue; dismiss
Click	Place; part a quarrel; give a crane a crew
Esc / right-click	Cancel placing
A / D, W / S, Q / E, mouse wheel	Orbit, raise / lower, tilt, zoom (right-drag also orbits)
Space / H	Follow the tower / look at the harbour
F / P	Speed ×1 / ×2 / ×4, pause
N	Narrator on / off

A game takes about half an hour.

Credits

• Design and code: Allan Rowntree, written in C on the ARC engine using Claude
• Art, models, sound effects and the narrator's voice: generated with Ludo (ludo.ai)
• Lettering: IM Fell English, by Igino Marini (SIL Open Font License)
• After The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)