The Joy of an Unexpected Tower-Building Gem

Designers: Frank Crittin, Grégoire Largey, Sébastien Pauchon

Artists: Nadège Calegari, Laurent Escoffier, Geoffrey Stepourenko

Publisher: Monolith Board Games

Once in a while, a game comes out of nowhere and leaves you amazed at its brilliant design. For me, these are games with all the right elements: short, easy-to-teach rules and quick turns, yet they present players with a deep and sprawling decision tree that changes with every move. This makes every turn incredibly challenging and full of angst. In 2025, that game is Tower Up.

In truth, this is the second game of the year, following Agent Avenue, that has really lit up my gaming radar. That’s a significant statement, as my radar has been quiet for the past couple of years. It’s not that the games I’ve played haven’t been good—they have been. It’s just that true greatness is a rare find for a hobby veteran.

My family and time constraints have pulled me back to the “OGs”—the original German-style designs from years past. I’ve spent more time exploring older games in the genre than buying newer ones. These games tend to be more abstract, focusing on a single core mechanism and usually involving a shared space that promotes player interaction. They often feature fewer, less flashy components and a light theme. Tower Up checks all these boxes and falls squarely into my wheelhouse.

Core gameplay: Building a Shared City

Tower Up feels old school in several ways, but its most striking feature is the huge central board where all players contribute to building a shared city of towers. The game’s entire focus is on this shared space as everyone tries to find an edge for placing their blocks. The core rules lean toward an abstract design, but the game is much more than its simple rules. There are many emergent aspects that pull a player in multiple directions, and these game properties only surface after repeated plays—they aren’t described in the rulebook.

The objective is to score the most points to win. Players are builders who must construct tower blocks on empty lots linked by a network of roads. These lots are distributed across the central board and clustered in different districts.

There are four different types of tower blocks, each with a distinct color. A tower can contain as many blocks as its lot has connections to adjacent neighbors. In other words, the maximum height of a tower is limited by the number of roads that link the lot to its adjacent neighbors. Importantly, towers can only be a single color. Throughout the game, these monochromatic towers will rise slowly, and by the end, the entire board looks quite impressive.

Actions and Choices: Replenish or Build

Action selection in Tower Up is a simple two-choice decision: players can either replenish their supply of blocks or erect a new tower on an empty lot.

• Replenishing blocks is straightforward. There’s a deck of cards that dictates which blocks are available for pickup, with three cards displayed at all times. Each card features 2-4 blocks of different colors, as well as bonuses for track movement (more on that later). On your turn, you choose one of the three available cards, take the corresponding blocks, and then draw a new card from the deck to replace the one you took.
• Building a new tower is the more involved and mind-warping exercise. To start a tower, you must place a single block on an empty lot while observing two restrictions:
  1. The new single-block tower cannot share the same color as any adjacent towers linked by roads.
  2. An additional block of the appropriate color must be added to all preexisting towers that are adjacent to the new site.

Note that you cannot simply add a block to a preexisting tower. The construction must first happen on an empty lot, and only then can additional blocks be stacked on adjacent towers, helping the neighborhood grow. Once all the tower blocks are placed, you must choose to cap one of the towers that received a new block with a player-specific roof. Because towers can continue to grow taller as long as adjacent lots are vacant, placing a roof doesn’t automatically stop a tower from growing. The tower may continue to add additional blocks on top of the roof, but a small sliver of the roof will always remain visible to denote your presence.

Scoring: Modern Mechanics in an Old-School Game

While the gameplay is reminiscent of classic German games, the scoring in Tower Up reflects a more modern approach with each player having an individual scoring board.

Your player board has five separate scoring tracks. The first four correspond to the four block colors. Each time you place a roof on a tower, you move your marker forward a number of spaces corresponding to the tower’s height. For example, a newly capped brown tower with four blocks will advance your marker four spaces on the brown track. At the end of the game, each track is worth a specific number of points. The further your marker progresses, the more points you earn, as scoring is non-linear—movement in the last few spaces is worth significantly more than the starting spaces. This incentivizes players to push for forward progress on one or two tracks rather than making equal progress on all four.

The fifth scoring track calculates the number of visible roofs you have at the end of the game. Each player starts with 10 roofs, and the game ends when one player caps their final roof. This signals the last round of the game, and scoring is carried out sequentially after each player’s final turn. Because scoring is sequential, players later in the final turn can manipulate the board without disrupting the scoring of players who have already completed their end-of-game scoring. This final track can be a game-changer, especially if a player is able to dominate the number of visible roofs. I believe players also have an advantage if they can push the pace of the game by placing all 10 of their roofs, as not every player will get a chance to place all of their pieces.

Final Thoughts: A Simple Game with Deep Choices

First impressions are important. When I played Tower Up for the first time, I marveled at how simple it was to teach, yet I struggled to absorb the nuances of my actions. While the rules are clear, certain aspects of the gameplay didn’t reveal themselves until midway through my first game. I’m still in the discovery phase after a few plays, which bodes well for the longevity of the game in my collection.

Clear Trade-offs Define Every Decision

The key design element I love most about Tower Up is the constant push-pull between decisions. Every action has an opportunity cost; when you choose one option, you sacrifice another.

Take, for example, the public objectives. At the start of each game, three public objectives are revealed, which contribute to overall scoring. These objectives are optional, but they offer bonus points on a sliding scale for those who achieve them first. While the point difference between first and last place isn’t huge (7 points vs. 3 points), achieving these objectives isn’t always convenient and often runs counter to other strategies. Because they are time-sensitive, you must decide early on whether they are worth pursuing. However, completely ignoring all objectives might not be a great idea, as you would be leaving points on the table. Deciding which objectives to pursue and in what order is a huge part of the game.

Another obvious trade-off is deciding which tower to cap. The most apparent incentive is to cap the tallest building to advance your individual scoring tracks. Yet, this deceptively easy choice is made harder by other considerations. For instance, fulfilling public objectives often means capping a different tower than the tallest one, as some objectives require your presence in towers at specific locations (e.g., near gardens, in a specific district). This means forgoing capping the tallest tower in favor of a smaller one. The trick is to align public and private objectives, and a player who can do that repeatedly will earn more points throughout the game.

Timing is Everything

It may not be obvious in the first few moves or even in the first game, but you can only place on empty lots, and the board shrinks dramatically over time as choices become more restricted. One of your main goals is to cap towers at the right time so that no new blocks can be added, ensuring your roof remains visible for end-of-game scoring. This often requires you to time the placement correctly, using the last empty lot adjacent to the tower you are capping. This requires luck, exquisite timing, and the ability to forecast where other players will go next.

Moreover, wanting to build on a particular empty lot requires having the right assembly of colored blocks. In the early stages of the game, this isn’t too difficult as the map is still sparse. Late in the game, each tower is flanked by other neighboring skyscrapers, and the cost of building on an empty lot gets steeper over time. This push-pull of deciding where and when to build, or when to replenish your blocks, makes the brain hurt in the most wonderful of ways.

Is This a Family Game?

I think Tower Up can be a family game, but it requires patience. The learning curve is steep—perhaps too steep for kids under 12. They can certainly play the game, but whether they can grasp the nuances behind each move will depend on how experienced a gamer they are. Adult hobbyists will have a clear advantage over kids, and for that reason alone, Tower Up may not be immediately suitable for family play. Repeated plays will help them ramp up their understanding, but for now, I’m a little reluctant to pull this out with my 10-year-old. There are just other choices out there to slowly increase the difficulty level of games before tabling Tower Up. That said, I look forward to the day when that is possible.

Impressions:

Great! I enjoy it for many reasons, but first and foremost, the game is simple yet deep; easy to teach yet hard to master. These qualities make up what I think is a very good game, and one that will remain on my shelf for a long time. The push-pull of decision-making is emergent as the game progresses, occurring in multiple contexts and layers, making the game painfully delicious to play. Don’t be fooled by the boring theme; yes, this is another tower-building game, but it’s aesthetically pleasing with top-notch components, and more importantly, it’s accompanied by stellar gameplay. While not immediately accessible for kids or family play, I think Tower Up will be a good game to slowly introduce more nuanced concepts to challenge kids (and some adults!).