The other half of Babel are the Great Projects of Babel in which all players may participate. At the beginning of each age a new Great Project will be revealed, any its shows a prestigious building which the players may build together. Each great project shows one of the basic building card colours, and whenever a player builds a building of that colour he is allowed to make an extra payment in resources/coins in order to take a Participation token from the Great Project.

When the project had been revealed, a number of Participation tokens corresponding to the number of players minus one had been placed on the project card, and if the players should fail to collect all of these tokens before the end of the current age the Great Project will be considered a failure. In this case all players who have not acquired at least one Participation token during the current age will have to pay a penalty as listed on the project card, and this may be the loss of a building, money or victory tokens. If, on the other hand, the Great Project had been properly finished, all players who have participated in the project will receive benefits for their Participation tokens. These benefits range quite widely from money, military strength or victory tokens to a free building or an increase of the value of the player's wonder stages, and to keep track of all these effects a total of 166 (!) additional tokens has been included in Babel. Mind you, this is not 166 unique tokens, but apart from additional coins and victory point markers the expansion still includes multiple copies of a good number of new effect markers.

7 Wonders Babel is indeed a new milestone for the developers of 7 Wonders, because the expansion greatly changes the general orientation of the game. Up to now the players had to focus mostly on the cards at hand during the drafting process, but now the development on the common Tower board and the Great Project need to be taken into consideration. This forces the players to think in rather different ways, since resources and money need to be re-directed especially towards the Great Projects which may - in turn - turn out to be a wise investment because of the associated benefits. It may seem like a gamble to speculate whether a project really will be finished, but usually the other players will have their own interest to finish the project because of the threatened penalty. But nonetheless things may get tantalizing if a project is still unfinished before the last round of an age.

The eponymous Tower is a wonder of its own, since it introduces a new degree of player interaction which is yet unknown to 7 Wonders. I like the fact that the negative effects brought about by some of the Tower tiles are mostly indirect, so that no player sees his buildings destroyed. Instead, these tiles will force the players to rethink their current strategies in order to avoid the impact of the negative tiles, and in most cases the drafting mechanism of 7 Wonders will give the players enough flexibility to do so. However, a well-timed new Tower tile may have some nasty effects especially if it is played during the last rounds of an age, and such a late placement can rarely be tackled properly. Quite interesting is also the fact that the Tower will develop rather differently from game to game. Sometimes the players will battle for Tower tile predominance in order to get unwanted tiles out of play, whereas at other times the players should be content with some beneficial tiles available in the Tower and so everybody will focus on their own wonder. All this proves for the renewed degree of variety which can be found in 7 Wonders Babel, and even seasoned players will be surprised how different it can feel to play one of their favourite games!