Wandering Towers is the best new family game of 2023, and it’s not even close. It’s very easy to learn (or teach), visually appealing, and has the right amount of take-that to satisfy kids and adults—especially kids, who in my experience love the game’s main mechanic of trapping your opponents’ wizards under cardboard towers. It’s the latest game from the design duo of Michael Kiesling (Azul) and Wolfgang Kramer (El Grande), who’ve collaborated previously on games like Tikal and Torres.
The towers do, in fact, wander in Wandering Towers, although the main thrust of the game revolves around the various wizard meeples. Each player has five wizards and five empty potion bottle tokens to start the game, and the first player to get all five wizards to the castle Ravenskeep with all five potion bottles already filled wins the game. The board has a circular track with the castle on one space and several stackable cardboard towers on various spaces, with the wizards starting on some of the towers and on other empty spaces.
On your turn, you play a card from your hand to either move one of your wizards a fixed number of spaces clockwise around the board, or to move a tower with all of the wizards on it clockwise a fixed number of spaces. Some cards require you to roll the die to see how far you can move, and might give you a chance to reroll if you don’t like the first result. When you move a tower, if it lands on a space with wizards on it (on a tower or directly on the board), you trap them under the tower and then flip one of your potion tokens to show that it’s been filled. Those wizards then can’t move until the tower(s) covering them are moved somewhere else—and there’s no peeking, so you have to keep track of where your trapped wizards are.
If you can move a wizard the exact number of spaces to land on the space with Ravenskeep, you drop the wizard into the castle, where it will remain for the rest of the game. Then you move the castle itself a few spaces around the track, which inevitably messes up other players’ plans to get their own wizards there.
Once you’ve filled one or more potions, you can also spend them to use one of the game’s two spells (special powers), which vary from game to game. The two basic ones just give you a bonus move with your wizard or any tower, but you can choose other spells, some of which let you move a wizard or tower counterclockwise, swap towers, or free a trapped wizard. These are free actions you do in addition to your regular turn.
That is the entire game, yet it works extremely well. Trapping wizards is the best part of Wandering Towers, as you can pretend it’s not personal but we know it actually is, because it doesn’t matter who you trap; you can trap your own wizards, if you want, and still get to fill a potion, so why not trap your sibling or your partner or your dad who was nice enough to play the game with you in the first place? My niece compared the game to Sorry!, but said it was better (it is, by a lot), and also pointed out that in both games, you might say you’re sorry but really you’re not. The art is silly but it works with the theme, and there’s a certain satisfaction from moving and stacking the towers that’s absent from a lot of games.
I thought at one point that Wandering Towers might be my game of the year for 2023, but I think it’s too simple for that honor, and as much as I like it I don’t think I’d break it out for a game night that didn’t include any kids. Instead, I’ll just call it the best family game of the year. It sold out almost immediately at Gen Con and it sold out before the midpoint of PAX Unplugged. It’s perfect for conventions because it’s so eye-catching—you’re not walking by that table without stopping to see what it is.
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.