It’s Tower Time!

Builders are hard at work crafting the greatest tower known to the world. As one of those builders, you’re out to prove you’re the best one on the job! Upgrade your warehouse, get your elephants from your camp to the tower as often as you can, and strategically place your building materials on the tower in order to outshine your opponents!

*Note: I was given the Legendary Box for review, so I will be showing the deluxe components here.

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What Is It?

✨Theme – Ancient Builders
🎯The Goal of the game is to score the most points
⚙️Deck Building – Players can add cards to their starting decks to grant them various actions
⚙️Tile Placement – Players will place their resource tiles on the towers which may earn them instant bonuses, and will score once the towers are full according to each resource’s unique scoring pattern
⚙️Variable Player Powers – The Fall of Man Expansion adds unique abilities for each time a player lays a worker down on the council board, and more abilities players can earn as they upgrade their leader boards
⚙️Variable Set-Up – The Foundations Expansion introduces 2 new board set-ups to play with. One makes it so players don’t clear the tower between rounds, so players can try to set up larger scoring opportunities for later rounds. The other has players use only minor towers, which they’ll add more of throughout the game, and they allow players to score sets multiple times, if they are able to expand them

Who Is It For?

👥1 to 4 Players – For me, it’s a little too much set-up and upkeep for solo. It’s a bit tight at 4 players, but also feels like it take much longer to fill the towers with only 2 players, so I think 3 is the best count
👥Ages 14 & Up – There’s a lot going on and a bunch of mechanisms, so I think teens and players who have played a fair number of games with varied mechanisms and can learn rules easily
👥Fans of variable set-up, tile placement, and deck building

PROS

🟢Aesthetics – Looks great on the table
🟢Iconography is clear; I thought once you started playing the bonuses all made sense
🟢Components – The deluxe components are very nice quality. The tiles have a great feel
🟢Most “one-use” or “weaker” cards have some instant points, which makes them more enticing and can keep the market moving
🟢Fall of Man made deck-building much more viable; I felt like it was much easier to afford the pricier cards throughout the game
🟢Legendary Box offers a good amount of variability, which increases the replay value
🟢Rules are overall well written

CONS

🔴Components – While the deluxe pieces are nice, they could also be distracting at times, and get in their own way. (I.e. with more players, some had trouble seeing parts of the board because of the 3D pieces, the elephants could be a bit wobbly, etc)
🔴Storage for the Legendary Box – everything needed to be put away very exact in order to fit
🔴Can feel a bit long
🔴I didn’t feel like I could deck-build enough in the base game because I felt like cards were too expensive/gold was too scarce — it was just about getting upgrades and moving your elephant quickly, meaning players utilized Jobs and Teamsters more than the other market cards
🔴Timing of rounds can feel really random/”lucky,” particularly in a 4-player game.The first 2 rounds aren’t equal turns because they get interrupted for scoring, and then it feels like one player just gets to benefit more from the board wipe than others

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Final Thoughts

After a bunch of plays, and trying the different expansions, I felt like there was definitely something good here, but it didn’t always land perfectly for me. The base game alone was okay, but I felt like gold was too scarce most plays, at least with how the people I played with approached it, so if the market flooded with more expensive cards, it’ll take a while to clear.

I liked the Fall of Man expansion because it made deck-building a more viable strategy, and I liked the little bonuses you could get with your people. But this one also adds a lot, with another whole player board to focus on, so I definitely recommend it once you’re more familiar with the game.

Foundations added more variability (and there already is a good amount in the game which is nice), but I thought it could be too easy to block players out of larger scoring opportunities, even if it meant you just had to play a “sub-optimal” tile or two, which felt like it negated the whole point of the unwiping or expanding boards.

Overall, I do like the game. I think I’d always play with Fall of Man, personally, because I like the deckbuilding aspect, and I did it the most with that, and I did like the leader boards/special abilities.

If you like tile placement and high player interaction on a shared board, it’s definitely worth checking out!

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Additional Information:
My Final Rating – 6/10

Designers – Ivan Alexiev, Elijah Morar
Artist – Andrew Bosley
Publisher – Bedouin Games
MSRP – $175 (deluxe); $49 (base)