Age of Towers First Impressions
In Age of Towers, your city is under attack.
Can you fend off the Monsters while messing around with the competition?
You’ve just found a mine filled with precious energy crystals! Precisely those you use for your daily magic. The problem here is that you’ve also stumbled onto a horde of monsters! And to make things even worse, three other cities seem to have discovered the existence of your mine as well.
As they rush into danger to mine the precious crystals, you have no choice but to join in the fray…
Age of Towers Game Play
This is a PvP tower defence game with a few key points:
- You can buy towers to place on your path
- Towers of different colours defeat different-coloured enemies
- You can extend the path to your city
- Event cards change things up from round to round
- It is VERY ‘take that’
This is a video overview from Cannes 2018 where they talk me through how the game plays.
Theme
It’s a nice fantasy theme. Monsters have a reason to attack thematically which is good. They’re not just mindlessly attacking because they’re monsters, their territory was invaded!
Humans are attacking humans because Humans can’t share…
Setup & Rulebook
The setup is OK, you put bits out and shuffle some things here and there, but nothing major.
The rulebook was VERY good, I had no issues with it at all.
Components & Artwork
Everything here is really nice. The tile, crystal and card quality is all good. The little plastic towers are really nice and the upgraded parts sit on top snuggly.
I love cartoony art like this, this is my kind of art.
Ease of Teaching & Accessibility
It’s very easy to teach and things make sense in-game and thematically.
It’s all open information so teaching wise it is accessible. But, tactically it’s actually quite hard and not playing well in this game will NOT be fun, not at all.
Age of Towers Summary
There are a couple of tower defence games with Bad Bones currently my favourite of all of them. Bad Bones has a bit of take that but nowhere near as much as Age of Towers, more on that in a bit.
I also have Kingdom Rush from Kickstarter on the way which could be good.
So take that, this game is FULL of take that. It’s really hard to kill a Monster and certain monsters, when killed, kill the tower that damaged it. Building a Tower is also hard.
So, being able to take one of these from your track and give it to someone else is HUGE. Almost game-breakingly huge. I’m all for having a tight economy and restricted actions but 2 actions a turn was nowhere near enough to make the game enjoyable.
In summary, I didn’t like this game at all. It was too unbalanced, not fun and no one around the table enjoyed it.
There are a tonne of expansions, do they fix it? No idea and I’m not going to find out.
Jesta ThaRogue
