Wander Lust?

While I went to Gen Con for work, I was able to pick up a few new board games to bring back home. One of the first that my group was able to try out is Wandering Towers.

Players control a handful of wizard meeples who are each moving around the spaces of a large circle. There are nine towers arrayed around the circle, plus one destination in particular that the wizards are trying to reach: Ravenskeep. On your turn, you play two cards, each one able to move one of your wizards clockwise a certain number of spaces.... or one of the nine towers. Towers stack on top of one another, covering wizards in the process. Any time you cover wizards, you fill a "potion" (flipping a token over); filling all your potions and getting all your wizards to Ravenskeep is the win condition of the game. But having your wizards covered is the real challenge of the game. A card that moves a tower can move an individual tower segment, or as many segments as you choose in an entire stack -- carrying with it all the wizards hidden inside. You must mentally track the locations of your hidden wizards, making the right moves on your turn to reveal them again and then pursue your goals.

I had heard some good buzz about this game before Gen Con, as the German language original has been around since last year. A few things in particular sold me on wanting it. First, it came from the design team of Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer, who individually have each created a number of great games and together created Tikal and others. Wandering Towers looked like an intriguingly more simple and fast-paced game, and was said to take up to 6 players. A reasonably strategic game that plays fast and takes a lot of players is a precious find for larger get-togethers.

On the other hand... I felt like there was a chance this game would go over in my group like a lead balloon. A handful of "memory games" have come and quickly gone over the years; they just don't get a lot of play in my group because the skill gap can be very wide in such games (with no real way to bridge that gap). It seemed like there wasn't that much to track here, and if the game's stated play time of 30 minutes was true, not much "agony" to be in if you weren't fully engaged. Still, I wasn't sure.

So far, I've only had a chance to play it a few times with four players. There at least, the game has been well-received. Indeed, the memory component is meaningful but relatively minor. Each player only has a handful of wizards (fewer at higher player counts), and you only have to remember the locations of some of those (the ones that have been covered, obviously). The game does indeed play in only half an hour, with the explanation to first timers taking only a couple of minutes. More than one declarative "I like this" was uttered over the course of our first play.

That said, I haven't yet "stress tested" this with the full 6 players. It might end up being that there's a little too much chaos with that many involved. Even with only 4 players, it's essentially impossible to do anything like "plan ahead" for your turn. You may know exactly where your wizards are, and have exactly the right cards in hand to move things how you need them to move -- but each player acting between your turns can easily foil that plan with moves of their own. Since any one player gets only two moves in a turn, it might even be that a player can be actively kept from winning by enough other players making moves to thwart an opponent's one remaining wizard. (Though that would probably require an awareness of other people's pieces that so far hasn't really happened in the plays we've done.)

Still, there's a role for a certain amount of chaos in most games, and I myself am more open to that in a game that takes only 30 minutes. So yes, I'm fairly positive on Wandering Towers myself. I'm eager to see what happens when we do get 6 players in it, and happy to play it on request in the meantime even with fewer. The game isn't an "all-timer," but it's clever, easy, and fast-paced, and turned out to be a good Gen Con pick-up. I give it a B+.