Unleash Your Inner City Planner in the Terrific Board Game Tower Up

Tower Up is a city-building game, but so much simpler and more elegant than most games that take that as their theme—you’re not worried about entertainment districts and factories and pollution and you can’t type FUNDS to get more money. You’re building towers in four colors, doing so along with other players, trying to place them in a way that locks in more points for you and keeps you on top—literally.

Tower Up has a board with five districts, each with a bunch of spaces for towers that are connected by anywhere from one to five links to other spaces. Each player begins the game with one tower piece of each color, and the board is  sort-of-randomly seeded with a couple of tower pieces as well. On your turn, you can either place a tower piece in an empty space, or take a card to obtain more pieces. If you place, you must do so on a space that’s adjacent to at least one existing tower, and then you must add one matching piece to every adjacent tower—oh, and you can’t have two towers of the same color on adjacent spaces. That means you’ll be placing anywhere from two to six (I think that’s the maximum) pieces on any single turn, one for the empty space and then one on every adjacent tower. Then you pick any tower on which you placed a piece in that turn, place one of your 10 roof tokens on top, and slide your matching construction vehicle up its track a number of spaces equal to the height of the tower. If you placed the fourth level on a gray tower, you move your little gray truck four spaces. When all four of your trucks pass a marked line on your board, which happens every two or three spaces, you get to take an extra turn, one of the ways in which Tower Up encourages balance throughout the game. (Roof tokens do not ‘cap’ a building; anyone can place another tower piece on a roof token, and one tower can have several roof tokens within it.)

If you take a card, you’ll get one to four tower pieces, and might get to move a truck one or two spaces. Some cards give you the choice of colors but you get fewer pieces in total, while most cards give you pieces of specific colors. That takes up your entire turn.

The game ends once one player places their tenth and final roof tile. They then compute their final score before other players take their final turns. The player counts how many of their roofs are currently visible from above because they’re on top of towers and moves their little cone token that many slots on the bottom of their player board. Players score based on the progress of each truck, with a scale along the top of the tracks on their player board, and the progress of the cone along the same scale. There are three objective cards in every game, with each giving seven points to the first player to achieve it, five to the second, and third to the third and fourth. Then every other player takes their final turn, in order, scoring at the end of their own turn, because they may cover up roofs with new pieces and should be able to place one more roof token of their own. 

Co-designed by Sebastian Pauchon (the designer of my all-time favorite two-player game, Jaipur, as well as Yspahan and Metropolys), along with the co-designers of Botanik (another great two-player title) and Anhk’or, Tower Up’s brilliance is in the board and the rules about adjacency. You can’t play to a space unless you have the pieces to play on every adjacent tower, so you need to get those pieces, and you can also see what pieces other players have to determine whether they might be able to steal your spot. You also have to plan ahead more than just one turn—although you can do so to some extent because all information is in front of you. Once all spaces adjacent to one tower are full, that tower is completed for the rest of the game; you can’t play more pieces to it because there isn’t an empty space next to it, so if your roof is on top when that happens, that’s a guaranteed roof for game-end, and no one else can take it even after you’ve scored.

Tower Up plays in under 45 minutes with four players and I would bet two players could rip through it in under a half an hour. I’ve only played with three and four and neither game went past the 45-minute mark. There’s very little here in the rules that a younger player couldn’t grasp, although I haven’t tried it with kids yet; I can say it’s a great light game to play with adults who like a good spatial puzzle but maybe aren’t experienced gamers. It isn’t like King of Tokyo as a game, but I put it at a similar skill and difficulty level—you can teach these games really quickly, and both are fun for a wide range of players. And you don’t have to worry that the townsfolk are going to rebel.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.