Tower Up

• Designers: Gregoire Largey, Frank Crittin, Sebastian Pauchon
• Publisher: Monolith Board Games
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 30-40 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by Flat River Games
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3ZoBKgg

Congratulations! Your architectural firm has been selected to renovate the city’s downtown…but you’re not the only ones. To pip your opponents at the post, you need to manage your resources and carefully plan your constructions. Be careful not to leave too many opportunities to your competitors!

Place the gameboard on the table on the appropriate side for the player count.  Each person gets a personal board, puts one vehicle of each color on the appropriate track and takes one floor of each color as a starting supply.  They also take the 10 roofs in their color.  The supply container is placed near the board and the top three Materials cards are flipped up to form the display.  The bottom floor from each card is taken from the supply and placed on any three spots on the board.  Three bonus cards are set up at the top of the board and the appropriate bonus tokens are placed next to each card.

On a turn, the active player has two options – either take a card or build/score.  If a card is taken, the player looks at the roofs/vehicles on the card.  He takes matching roofs as shown and moves the matching vehicle one space forward on the corresponding track for each vehicle seen.   

If the player chooses to build, he takes any color floor and places it on an empty space; though buildings of the same color can never be directly adjacent.  Now, you must then expand every building which is directly adjacent to your build site by adding a floor to each – this floor must match the color of the building.  In essence, all buildings will only ever be a single color.  Finally, you place one of your roofs on top of any floor you placed this turn.  You then move your vehicle that matches the color of the building where you placed your roof – a number of spaces equal to the number of floors in that building.  If you are unable to pay the expansion costs, you may not start a building.  After you build, check to see if you have accomplished any of the objective cards; if so, claim the highest available point token for that objective.

As you move your vehicles forward, they will cross the four colored lines/columns on your board.  Whenever all of your vehicles cross a line, you immediately get an extra turn.

The game end is triggered when a player plays their final roof.  At the end of that turn, count the number of roofs visible on the top of a building.  Mark that number with your traffic cone at the bottom of your player board.  All other players take one final turn, and at the end of each turn, the active player marks the number of visible top roofs at that moment.

The final scores are now calculated.  Each of the four vehicles and your traffic cone score points equal to the number at the top of their column.  Added to this are any points from objective completion tokens.  The player with the most points wins.  Ties broken in favor of the player with the most floors left in their supply.

My thoughts on the game

Tower Up is part of the growing trend of games that really feel old-school.  In fact, when I was reading the rules to this one, I kept thinking that I had played it before!  Well, I hadn’t  – this is a new game – but the simple rules and classic feel reminded me of the games I grew up on (figuratively speaking).  [In retrospect, I think that I was thinking of one of their previous designs, Wangdo…]

I have always been a fan of games from this trio, and IIRC, at least one of the game designers is a mathematician.  [Copied from a BGG designer diary I found later: “ One of them is colorblind, and the other is a mathematician, so they obviously had to use the Four Color Theorem to create a board game. This theorem, one of the most famous in mathematics, states that you need only four colors to color any planar map (a mathematical representation of a map with countries or regions) so that adjacent regions are always of different colors. This holds true no matter the shape of the regions. (I promise, you can try it!) Interestingly, the proof of this theorem requires using a computer to list all possible configurations. This leads some purist mathematicians to claim the theorem isn’t truly proven.” ]  As a result, the games often concentrate on topography and strong analysis of the board state – and I like those sorts of games.    

Here, you only have two options on a turn, gather resources or use those resources to build buildings.  Timing is key here – as you can only build on empty spaces, you can’t wait too long on a particular location if you really want to build there.  Sometimes, you want to build in a particular location in order to place a roof on one of the adjacent buildings.

After you gain some experience with the game, you’ll also see the importance of playing in particular locations in order to lock in a room on top of a building. Of course, these sites often end up being expensive because they have multiple adjacent sites that are already built upon.  Once a building has all of its adjacent spaces built upon, there is no way to build a room of that building.  And, given the scale for points at the end of the game for roofs on top; it’s a good strategy to find some buildings where you can lock in a roof on top.

You will also have some difficult decisions to make on certain turns when you have to choose between two good options on where to put a roof.  The game wants you to have a balanced scoring approach – and it rewards you with extra turns for doing so.  But, you’ll end up scoring more points if you specialized in one color and maxed it out as opposed to doing three colors mildly.

Playing with the goals adds a nice added dimension to the game – increasing the number of strategies to pursue.  The reward for finishing a goal first is 7 points, and this is not an insignificant sum when a good score is around 50.  As you draw random goals for each game, it also injects a bit of variety into each game, persuading gamers to try out different plans in each game.

The components are decent.  I do like the floor pieces, and the molded vehicles for the scoreboard are nice.   I am less a fan of the actual scoreboard tracks as I would have preferred there to be specific spaces or perhaps alternating raised and lower spaces.  It is not uncommon to bump your board and the vehicles can slide around on their track, leading to possible changes in player scoring.  I also really like the idea of the molded plastic piece that serves as the supply – but it’s hard to see into the wells to see how many pieces are left, and the solid display actually makes it a bit harder to see the cards for players who have an obstructed view.

Despite the city building theme, this is obviously a fairly dry abstract game.  There is only indirect interaction between players – as they compete for building spaces, resource producing cards and the goals.  Most turns do not take very long (you already know your available resources for your next turn at the end of your previous turn), and oftentimes players already have a plan in place when their turn starts.  

For a 30-40 minute game, Tower Up gives you a challenging game of resource management and tactical building. Many turns will be quick with obvious plays, but there will certainly be a few critical turns where you can maybe lock in a huge score or guarantee a top roof or perhaps block an opponent from playing in a spot they dearly want.  I really liked the game on my first play, and it has improved with successive plays.  By the end of the year, it could be on the I love it list!

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3ZoBKgg

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Eric M.: I’m baffled by Dale claiming that Tower Up features only indirect interaction. You build in a shared space in which your actions affect what your opponents can do and vice versa. You can claim a spot that someone else wanted, you can increase the costs for them to build where they want to go, you can make it impossible for someone to build because the cost now includes a color they don’t have, you can take a resource card featuring the color they need, you can claim a goal a turn ahead of them, you can cover their roofs to knock down their endgame points. If that’s not direct, I’m not sure what else would qualify except maybe using blocks to put out their eyes…

Justin B. (two plays): Tower Up is fantastic, easy to teach, features a lot of interaction (particularly the way that card sniping changes a round, or when a player builds in the exact location you want to build to maximize a move on a particular track), and plays well at both two and four players. My four-player game took about 45 minutes, just like it promised on the box, and everyone loved it. The traffic cone icon used to track roof scoring might be the cutest component of the year and end-game scoring is so easy to compute. I am excited to get this in front of my family soon because Tower Up has a ruleset that can be taught to an eight-year-old. I wish there were more milestone scoring cards in the box, but otherwise I’ve really enjoyed the snappy nature of my plays.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Eric M., Justin B.
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral. Steph
• Not for me…