Looking for a cooperative game that will test your sanity? Look no further than Tower of Madness! Get ready to hang on to your marbles…
Tower of Madness is a 3-5 player game designed by Curt Covert and published by Smirk and Dagger Games. A typical game will last anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes. Although this could end much, much sooner.
Tower of Madness: $60
Get yours for less at Miniature Market
Investigate Unspeakable Horror Without Losing Your Marbles
A three-dimensional clock tower stands fifteen inches tall, filled with marbles. Thirty other-worldly tentacles push through the tower walls in every direction in this high-tension dice game of Lovecraftian-inspired horror.
Each Location card has its own unique dice challenge. Utilize forbidden knowledge to gain the advantage; fail and you may slip into insanity – or summon Cthulhu and end the world itself.
Contents:
1 Tower
Plastic Base Tray
54 Cards
6 Tokens
40 Marbles
5 Custom Dice
30 Tentacle Sticks
5 Tracker Boards
TokensAges: 10+
Players: 3-5
Game Length: 40-60 minutes
Tower of Madness Review: Don’t Lose Your Marbles
In Tower of Madness, you are taking the role of an investigator trying to stop the great Cthulhu from awakening and unleashing great destruction and madness upon our world.
Tower of Madness features a clock tower standee that has a multitude of tentacles protruding from every side. Inside holds marbles of four colors each with a different effect. The players are taking turns trying to make successful investigation rolls with the set of discovery dice.
Each round you will visit a different location straight out of Lovecraftian lore. Each of the six sides on the dice represents either the Gate, Heart, Mind, and more. In order to have you investigation be considered a success, you must roll and lock the 1,2,3 and then the last two representing how well you uncovered clues.
The player who makes the highest discovery roll wins the location and play moves on to the next location. Failure to roll the gate, heart, and mind will force you to draw a horror which are the many tentacles in the tower. Drawing these horrors may cause marbles to drop from inside the tower and any that roll out go onto the active player’s dashboard.
The blue marbles are discoveries which will earn victory points. The white marbles are spells which let you draw more spells for amazing effects. Red marbles are Madness, you do not want these because having four or more causes you to go insane and you cannot win under normal circumstances. Finally, the green marbles are doom, when all three fall the game is over and Cthulhu is summoned dooming the world and giving the insane players a temporary victory before they too are consumed by the Great Old One.
Each Player also has the opportunity to gain unnatural influence by rolling exactly two fives during a discovery roll. These can have many effects such as saving you from a failure or turning your spell marbles into discovery marbles. Or even stealing spells from those untrustworthy insane players.
There is a lot going on in Tower of Madness, yet it is a very lightweight causal game. I like to think of this as Kerplunk with an H.P. Lovecraft twist. If you don’t get that reference Kerplunk was an older game from my childhood. It featured a tower with marbles held by a crisscrossing network of sticks and you lost if you were the one to set them free. Same basic concept but this game has a bit more gameplay and substance to it.
I very much like Tower of Madness and it was one of my Gencon acquisitions. My only beef with it is the win condition for the sane players. Only the player who has the most points will win despite working as a team.
I personally feel this game should have been fully cooperative. Although having talked to my friends I’m apparently in the minority in this opinion. The temptation to tank the mission and become insane in order to win is too great. Once you are too far behind in points it’s the only way to catch up. But beyond that minor gripe, the game is otherwise fine and enjoyable.
So if you’re not burned out on the Cthulhu mythos and the like, give this one a shot at your next game night, just don’t lose your mind in the process.
