Review: Tower Up (Monolith)

In Tower Up from Monolith, two to four players take the roles of construction companies expanding the city’s downtown.

Everyone agrees the area needs new buildings, but where should they go? How will we follow all the rules the city council put in place to maintain the area’s charm? And why can’t we find building materials in the colors we want?

Yes, you face a lot of challenges, but there’s a lot of money on the table for a savvy builder who can balance careful planning with flexible execution. Let’s see if you have what it takes as we start assembling the top five things you need to know about Tower Up.

Loving the Toy Factor

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Tower Up delivers a gorgeous and functional table presence from setup through game end.

The game makes setup easy thanks to an organizer tray that goes straight from the box to your table. The tray holds the materials cards and the plastic floor tiles. It even has a built-in display rack for the materials market and space for discards.

As you play the game, you create and expand buildings by placing a floor tile on a construction site, adding floor tiles to existing buildings, and adding your personalized roof to various buildings,

Easy Play, Challenging Choices

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On each of your turns, Tower Up gives you an easy decision: draw a materials card or start a building. If you draw a materials card, you get one or more building floors to add to your supply. Some materials cards also give you scoring bonuses that move one of the markers on your personal board.

Once you collect enough floor pieces, you’re ready to build. To do that, you choose any construction site that’s next to an existing building and place a floor tile on it. Easy, right? Well, maybe or maybe not.

Color Me Strategic

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According to the game’s story line, the city council says you can’t put two buildings of the same color next to each other. Again, that doesn’t sound too hard. After all, there are four colors to use. How hard can it be to find a spot and build?

Honestly, it’s more challenging than it looks. After the first game we played, I learned to stand up before starting a building (which turned into standing up through the whole game) so I could clearly see where all the roads connected. The more buildings on the board, the more important to check your building spaces.

Oh, and there’s one thing. When you start a building, you have to add a floor to every neighboring building. Since no two buildings of the same color can be next to each other, that means your supply needs an increasingly broad mix of colors as the game goes on. You might want to start a white building over there, but then you realize it’ll take one white tile, two gray tiles, and a black tile. Which you don’t have. Oops.

Putting a Roof on It

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After placing a floor tile on each neighboring building, you must place one of your roofs on a floor tile you just added to the board. You can put it on the building your started, but you’re more likely to put it on a neighboring building because it’s taller, and taller buildings give you more credits.

Every player has a personal board that tracks your progress in the game. The board has four scoring tracks (one for each floor color). You also get four cute chunky meeple vehicles to put in each track.

Scoring is easy to grasp. If you put your roof onto a building with four floors, you move the vehicle marker that matches the building’s color ahead four spaces. If you’re careful about the colors you build, you can even earn an extra turn (or two or more).

Getting All the Money

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You need lots of income (victory points) to win the game. You already know about getting points by putting your roofs on tall buildings, so let’s explore the other two ways: objectives and having your roof on top of a building at the end of your final turn.

You get points for completing the city council’s objectives. At the start of each game, you randomly put three objective cards face-up on the board. Then, you put two to four scoring tokens next to them, depending on the number of players. The game includes 10 objectives, so there’s plenty variation each time you play.

When you finish your final turn in the game, you score points for the number of buildings with your roof visible on top. Mark the total on your personal board by putting your traffic cone meeple in the appropriate space.

Total the points for each of your four color markers, your completed objectives, and the buildings with your roof on top. Whoever has the biggest total is the winner!

Verdict

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Tower Up pulls off an amazing trick: it’s a thoughtfully deep, yet beginner-friendly, strategy game. And that’s no simple combination.

The game is easy to learn and fun to play. The components feel wonderful in your hands and fit together very well, which is particularly important since gameplay involves stacking things on a crowded board.

Tower Up earns our highest recommendation — it’s staying on our shelf.