Tower Up
Designed by: Frank Crittin,Grégoire Largey,Sébastien Pauchon
In Tower Up the players are city-builders and on your turn you can either gather blocks from the supply, or play them to the board.
Each player has their own board with four tiny vehicles you’ll move up their matching tracks, and at the end of the game the position they’ve reached will define the points you score.
Everyone begins with some blocks and, as noted above, on your turn you can either take more blocks from the supply, or place blocks on the board, which is split into various building locations with paths between them. Each block represents the floor of a building, and when you place a block you always put it into a new location. However! Your new building must be adjacent to at least one existing building, and you have to add a block onto every adjacent location with a building in it. Once you’ve done that you add a roof to any of the buildings you’ve just contributed to: the one you started, or one of the adjacent ones you’ve just made taller. Note that a roof can still be built over by new blocks (and indeed, new roofs).
Whichever building you cap off with a roof, you now move the matching-coloured vehicle up it’s track on your personal board: one space for each floor of the building. If it sounds like you always want to be adding roofs to the tallest possible buildings, that’s true to some degree. But the game also gives you a couple of other things to consider: one is the objectives, which give you points for your buildings meeting a certain criteria: one of your roofs on a building of each colour, say, or a building in each of the board’s five ‘boroughs’. Being first to do these gets you more points than doing so later, but there’s another consideration too: the game will end when someone places their last roof (-everyone else gets one final turn) and everyone will score points for every visible roof they have at the end of their final turn. This can be a big points swing for someone if they’ve been clever with their placement – capping a building with a roof when it can’t be built over (because there are no more empty locations next to it) can be a winning move, especially if by doing so you’re building over other player’s roofs at the same time.
Most points: wins!
Sam says
Despite the theme and intricate little pieces, this is more an abstract area-control game than a story of city-building. If you want to hear the diggers, taste the dust and feel the sombre ambience of an architect listening to muzak on the phone whilst in an interminable queue for the city planning office, Tower Up isn’t that game. But it is a canny abstract, and despite the tendency towards thinkiness, one that moves reasonably fast and plays well with 2, 3 or 4 players. I’ve enjoyed quite a few plays of it and will happily revisit on a regular basis.
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Take That!
Present without being overwhelming. There’s indirect interaction in both the building blocks and nabbing of objectives.
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Fidget Factor!
Tower Up demands a bit of tactical engagement, meaning you really only make that final decision based on the board state when your turn actually arrives. So players need to be okay with a fairly leisurely pace.
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Brain Burn!
Present and correct, but about those spatial decisions rather than remembering itty-bitty rules.
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Again Again!
If you want to feel like you’re really building a city, Tower Up doesn’t really scratch that itch. But as a multi-player, interactive puzzle that doesn’t take forever to play, it really does keep things interesting for multiple visits.
