Monolith are best known for their games built around miniatures - notably Conan, Mythic Battles and Batman: Gotham City Chronicles - so the first surprise when you open up the box for Tower Up is that there's nary a miniature in sight. Mind you, there are some great-looking stackable blocks...
Tower Up is a city builder game designed by Frank Crittin, Grégoire Largey and Sébastien Pauchon where the 2-4 players are taking blocks in four different colours; each turn either selecting a card from the display that will give them blocks or placing a block out on the board at a new location. A blocks can be placed out on the board next to any existing building but they cannot be adjacent to a block of the same colour. When you place out a block to start a new building, the price you must pay is that you have to add a block to all the towers to which it's adjacent. You then add a roof of your own colour to any of the towers where you've placed a block and you move the corresponding coloured truck marker forward on your player board the number of spaces equal to the number of blocks in that tower. You get an extra turn whenever all four of your truck markers have passed a star on your tracker and it's how far your trucks have progressed that scores you points for that colour when the game ends, tho' you also score points for the number of buildings that have your roof on top. In addition, there will be three objective cards that give you points when you meet their requirements. They are available to all players but you get more points if you claim them ahead of other players.
Tho' Tower Up is competitive, the actions players more often than not enhance the options available to the other players. It's the opposite then of a 'take that' game; you just hope the benefit they gain isn't quite as much as you got.
Tower Up is very well produced, with plastic tower pieces that are satisfying to stack: art is by Nadege Calegari, Laurent Escoffier and Geoffrey Stepourenko. Title notwithstanding tho' it's not necessarily a game about building the highest tower: you'll mainly be scoring points for advancing the trucks on your player board and the choices you make over where to place your roof direct which trucks move and how far. You may be tempted to go for the highest tower so that your truck of that colour shoots ahead but the game design cleverly incentivises more even progress by offering those extra turns...
Turns in Tower Up are quick and the game ends after a player has made 10 builds, so even with four players it's unlikely that the game will run to much more than 40 minutes. With just two players you use the half-size board on the reverse of the main board, keeping the gameplay tight and offering the potential of playing in a filler-length 20 minutes. And this is a game that hits that sweet spot of being accessibly easy to learn, to the extent that it can be played as a family game or gateway game to introduce to non-gamers, while at the same time it offers enough to engage seasoned gamers.
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