Published by Bright Eye Games, Termite Towers is another insect-themed game from designer Mike Nudd and artist Sabrina Miramon - the team behind the new revised edition of Waggle Dance. Obviously, this game substitutes termites in place of Waggle Dance's bees, and there are similarities between the two games but Termite Towers certainly isn't a mere reskin.
In Termite Towers, the 1-4 players (yes, this game incorporates a solo mode) are using dice as worker and soldier termites to collect wood and use it to build towers on their individual player boards. As in Waggle Dance, you can place out dice at wood locations with the matching number and, again, you are competing for area control of that location. In a rather neat device tho', you can extend the location by building tunnels to take you to further rows of cards that will give you more wood. You can take blueprint cards that let you drop your wood cubes into your tower Tetris-style. This builds the tower and whenever you complete a row in your tower you get an extra ability; for example, access to more nest space for storing eggs and wood cubes. Crucially tho', fulfilling the blueprint cards is a key way to score points. You can additionally earn points by being the first to meet the open objectives set out on cards.
You can add eggs to your nest which you can hatch into more termite dice. You can also create soldier termites. These are represented by larger dice; they can bump other dice off from locations that would otherwise be 'first come, first served' and for area control purposes they count as two termites. You can pick up queen termite cards to give you a single-use ability. These give worthwhile bonuses to your actions but they do rather suffer from confused iconography where it sometimes seems that the illustration shows cubes when the intention is that these should be dice. It's this confusing iconography that lets down what is otherwise a very well produced game that makes use of some interesting ideas.
If you can get over the iconography issue, there's a very good game here. We particularly got a kick out of the tunnelling and the Tetris-style scoring. If you enjoyed Waggle Dance, then you'll definitely want to check out this sister game.