Base price: $50.
2 – 4 players.
Play time: 30 – 45 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 3
Full disclosure: A review copy of Tower Up was provided by Monolith / Flat River Games.
Two teeny reviews for y’all this week. It happens sometimes. Thankfully, the games themselves are actually decently-sized, so there’s something to that. It’s been one of the first Hot Weekends in Seattle in a minute, so I’ve been running around outside getting, I think, sunburned, which is always annoying. Just barely not quite enough melanin to prevent that one. Alas. This also means that I now can only do photography work in the early morning or late at night, as my upstairs board gaming space gets way too hot once it hits over 80 outside (~27 for non-Fahrenheit folks). Heat rises and all of that. Speaking of rising, let’s talk about Tower Up!
In Tower Up, players take turns placing floors on empty spaces on the board to build towers. The only challenge here is that when you place a floor, you have to build every adjacent tower up too! Can’t place if you can’t build. As you do, you’ll advance trackers and work towards objectives, but you also want to claim towers as well! The higher the tower, the more points you’ll get. How you balance these challenges is up to you! Will you be able to reach new heights?
Overall: 8.5 / 10
Overall, I really like Tower Up! It took a minute to get into it, but that was mostly because I hadn’t read the rules and Board Game Arena doesn’t work on my laptop’s Chrome browser if I need to use WebGL (3D stuff). I’m not entirely sure why that is, especially since it works just fine on my coworker’s work laptop. I’m going to assume goblins, but I’ll update this post if I get any information to the contrary. Once I got into it, though, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a nice, casual game around the same complexity as other solid introductory games. I’ve heard it favorably compared to Ticket to Ride, and I think that they’re wildly different types of games, but similar complexity, yes.
Where Tower Up shines is that it is an extremely simple process. You either take a card or you place a floor. Easy. You can only place a floor if you can build on an empty space and on all adjacent not-empty spaces. That simple loop allows for a lot of interesting strategy to emerge. Are you trying to fulfill objectives quickly? Well, then you might be building lower-height floors on your towers. Are you trying to score lots of points? Well, you might want to focus on taller towers. Are you trying to block your opponents? Well, you might need to check on what they have and what they can do. How those disparate goals intermingle and overlap is what makes the game interesting, and watching players figure that out can be a really rewarding part of teaching the game. It’s not so complex that players are going to struggle with the core loops of their turns, but it’s not so simple that there’s nothing interesting happening. You can even place more starting towers to make the game tighter or use more complicated objectives to boot. It’s very neat! I do get the fear of God when I play since the towers aren’t, you know, locked into the board in any way, but I think that’s just the primal fear of playing board games with other people.
I do like this game a bit, and almost want to see what more complexity could look like. Something with the roads? Skybridges between buildings? It seems like an interesting system that someone could build on, pun fully intended. But in the interim, it’s a surprisingly pleasant warm-up game for a game night or a great way to introduce your friends to the hobby, particularly if they like building little towers. The ideal board game for your friends who play Catan but are building structures out of their settlements when it’s not their turn, really. They’ll love this one because they can still do that, but it’s also part of the game. I feel like the word diegetic almost applies in this context. Ludonarratively diegetic? Don’t know, but I wish that’s what it was. Anyways. If you’re looking for a nice gateway game, you enjoy a bit of verticality in your board games, or you just like tiny plastic traffic cones (they’re in there!), you’ll probably enjoy Tower Up! It’s a lot of fun.
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