Three Little Pigs meet Rock Paper Scissors in this super-light real-time card game from Homosapiens Lab where your pigs are building Towers of Babel (buta is the Japanese word for pig). The game is designed by Yuo for 3-5 players.
ButaBabel consists of a deck of cards comprised of each of the house types in the Three Little Pigs story: straw, sticks and brick. Each house type is represented by the broadly corresponding Rock Paper Scissors hand signal: paper for straw, scissors for sticks and rock for bricks. Players are all dealt three cards and they play them to build 'Towers of Babel' by placing cards on top of their own or another player's pile subject to the only proviso that the card played must be the card that beats the current top card on the pile.
There are no turns: you keep drawing cards as you play so you always have a hand of three cards. Some players will inevitably play faster than others but no matter, that's all part of the game. When the deck runs out, the number of cards in each pile is totted up and the win goes to the player with the highest tower (ie: most cards in their pile). Except... Except that these represent the Biblical Tower of Babel and if a tower is more than two cards higher than the next highest Tower, their Tower offends God and is eliminated. That would give the win then to the Tower in second place, unless of course that Tower was also three or more cards higher than the next biggest...
You can see then that tho' you want to add cards to your Tower it can also very much be in your interests to boost the height of other players' Towers so that they are eliminated in end-game 'scoring'. Very often it will actually be the shortest Tower that wins! That means in most games players will mostly be playing their cards to other players' Towers...
All this makes for an ultra-simple but frequently frenetic family-friendly card game that you can expect to play in no more than 5 minutes. And, as a bonus, this game should help to hone children's estimating skills - as, in-game, you'll be estimating rather than measuring the relative heights of each other's towers and whether or not they are within three cards of one another.