Teeter Tower

• Designers: Aaron Crow and Ryan Scott
• Publisher: Gamewright
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by Gamewright
• Amazon affiliate link – https://amzn.to/3EF02H4

Teeter Tower is a cooperative dexterity game where the team works together to build a tower made up of tiles and dice.  There is a bag of 42 dice, 14 of each color (green, red, blue).  There are tiles for each color – some of which might be placed on a twisted (more difficult) side. The tiles are stacked by color.  The base block is placed on the table.

On a turn, a player draws 4 dice from the bag and then rolls them.  Examine the roll and then choose which of the 3 available tiles works best.  The rest of the team can surely chime in here with their opinions as well.  When you pick your tile, place it on the tower (if it’s the first card, place it on the base block).  If the previous card was a twisted tile, then you have to place the card so that it matches the twisted dashed outline instead.

Now, place your dice on the tile you just laid.  Spaces with numbers can have dice with the matching number placed on them.  Colored spaces can have dice of matching color placed there – the number doesn’t matter.  If a die matches both color and number, it can straddle the line.  You must place at least 1, but can place up to all 4 dice, on your turn. 

Then, the next player goes.  The team wins if they can build the whole tower (place all the tiles) and place the capstone pyramid on the top.  The team loses if the tower falls down or you run out of dice.  There are four levels of difficulty – modifying both the number of tiles as well as how many of them are on the twisted side.

My thoughts on the game

Teeter Tower is a fun/spontaneous dexterity game.  It is labeled as a cooperative game, but honestly, it can be played and enjoyed all the same solo (trust me, I know, as I’ve dont it that way).

The game provides you with an interesting puzzle at times, as you have to make the best of the dice roll each turn; trying to make the best play to give you a stable base for the next level of your tower.  Ideally, you’d like to have enough dice on the card to provide a stable base – but you also would like to have them in the right orientation to allow the weight of future levels to balance.  Of course, you probably don’t want to use all the dice each round as you need to have enough to make it to the end of the game.

Early on, the game is interesting as you have plenty of options – as you generally have three stacks of cards to choose from.  Additionally, if you play on a more advanced level, the cards played askew add a nice touch of difficulty to the process.  However, once one of the decks is exhausted, things get a bit dicey. (see what I did there?!)

The endstage of every game that I have played then comes down to the dice roll.  It is quite possible to roll the dice so that there is no good way to place them to allow stacking of further cards.  The game doesn’t provide any provision for re-rolling or mitigating a bad roll.  So, the ability to complete the tower feels a bit anticlimactic – if the dice work out, it’s generally a no-brainer on how to place the dice to allow you to continue stacking; and if the dice don’t work out, there’s simply nothing you can do.  That being said, it’s a fun activity, and one which we’ve pulled out a few times so far this fall – when we roll well, we win, and when we don’t, we all crawl around on the ground picking up the dice from wherever they have clattered to.

Amazon affiliate link – https://amzn.to/3EF02H4

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor