Right from the get-go, Wandering Towers sets a joyous tone. The Tall box art depicts a witch on a hill, holding her wand aloft, causing a stack of towers to rise from the earth below, as a woodland animals flee in bug-eyed horror.
In Wandering Towers, you play as procrastinated wizards. The goal is to fill your potion bottles and get all the wizards of your house into castle Ravenskeep. Players can either move their wizards, or move the towers on the board, which may stack up and trap wizards on the lower levels. Trapping wizards under towers allows you to bottle their magical essence and fill your potions, which furthers your victory conditions. Players can expend full potions to activate some magic spells to tip the scales to their favour.
The titular towers are made of cardboard, and must be assembled prior to the first play. These are thick cardboard pieces that fit very snugly together, but the box easily accommodates them in their assembled state, removing the need to disassemble them between plays. Thank goodness!
The wizards are custom meeples in 6 different colours, but not all wizard clans are equal. There’s 5 yellow and blue wizards for 2 player games, 4 red and green for the 3 and 4 player game, and 3 orange and purple for the 5 and 6 player game. I dislike that I can’t choose to be purple when I want to play a two player game, it feels really cheap to skimp on the number of wizards for each colour.
Designers Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer have a long a storied history of creating excellent games, both as a collaborative duo, and as solo designers. From 6 Nimmt! to Azul, to Vikings, to Downforce and El Grande, these two designers have proven time and again that they know how to make great games. And Wandering Towers is perhaps a bit of a departure in terms of theme, but in the quality of the gameplay, their polish and experience shines through.
The board is a circular track on which all the towers sit, some towers and board spaces have an eagle crest that dictates where castle Ravenskeep will move to, but other than that, the board is just spaces to move on. Each player is given 3 cards, and on any given turn, a player plays two of their cards, carrying out the depicted moves, then draws back up to 3 cards. Everything moves in a clockwise direction, and the first player to fill all their potion bottles and drop all their wizards into the tower is the winner.
The artwork and aesthetic of Wandering Towers is light, breezy, and whimsical, kind of like a Studio Ghibli movie. It’s childlike in the joy that comes from clamping a tower down on your opponents. Very quickly, Wandering Towers turns into a shell game. You’ll think you have a bead on where all of your wizards are, but then two tower shuffles later, and you’ll be left wondering where all your friends have gone off to.
The core gameplay and strategy of Wandering Towers is fairly simple. But the fun isn’t in peeling back layers of depth, it’s found in dropping towers on your friends heads. Round and round you’ll go moving your wizards or clamping down a pile of picks, trapping your friends. Because you need to trap wizards 6 times before you can attempt to win the game, everyone will get caught several times. It’s take-that, but it ends up feeling evenly distributed. And yes, you do need to move that tower off your head before your wizard can continue on their journey to Ravenskeep, it doesn’t feel horrible, because you can remember where they are. Right? And no matter how many towers are stacked on your head, it only takes one action to move the tower along the path, so you’re never buried in a way that makes you feel like it’s impossible to catch up.
There was one game where my partner boldly declared “my wizard is right there”, and pointed halfway up a small spire of cardboard. I nodded, believing her as I was focusing on remembering where two of my other wizards were, and we continued to play. A few turns later, she played her a card to move towers and said “I’ll reveal my last wizard here, and then I’ll move it into the keep for the win!” as she lifted the tower, she was greeted not with the friendly blue wizard she was looking for, but with my yellow wizard instead. We were both shocked. We were both positive that her wizard was indeed in that tower, the final blue pawn was now lost, potentially under any tower on the board.
It’s those lapses in judgment that bring a smile to my face. The unexpected shock of discovering your memory is fallible. The frantic shuffling of towers, making all the other hidden wizards revealed, or hopelessly lost.
At the end of the day, Wandering Towers is a quick and light game. It’s fun, it’s interactive and combative without feeling like you’re being directly attacked, and never makes you feel like you’re out of the running. The tactile nature of stacking towers is satisfying, and the attempts at distracting your opponents in the hopes that they’ll forget which level their wizard is on brings a smile to my face. The production is lovely, and it’s just a fun toy to play with.
