Tower Up Components Overview and Impressions

Tower Up was a game I first saw at Canada Plays 2024, behind closed doors with a few other media personalities. The game looked really interesting, but I wasn’t really wow’d by the presentation given to us at that time. Nothing against the presenters, I’m sure, but of all the games in that room that day, this was probably the lowest on my list of games I wanted to play.

Fast forward to this holiday season. We received Tower Up about two weeks ago and quickly got it to the table. From the box to the table was a breeze, thanks to the plastic inserts that serve a double purpose of being used for the game as well. The one plastic insert holds all the player pieces and a few of the cardboard tokens. Each piece has it’s own spot, and it fits really nicely with player boards and the game board stacked on top.

You could bag up everything in little plastic baggies and forgo the beautiful insert – this would allow you to store the game on its side on your shelf. If you use the insert like I am, however, you do NOT want to set this one on its side because everything will fall out.

As I noted earlier, half of hte insert will actually come out of the box and be placed on the table next to the board. This insert holds all the plastic brown, black, white, and grey building pieces you will be collecting and using, as well as the market cards you’ll be able to select during a Take a Card action phase. The insert has a spot for the draw deck, an upright “shelf” that will hold the three available market cards, visible to all players at an angle, and a discard area as well.

Unfortunately, our plastic insert looked to have been damaged during the shipping process, and we were not able to use the discard pile area as it was too small for the cards. That seems to be an isolated issue, as I spoke with others who said their products arrived just fine!

Regardless, having an insert that also doubles as a usable storage solution during the game is phenomenal – it makes setting up Tower UP a breeze. From unboxing the game to playing is literally a couple minutes, which is pretty good for a game that seems to have quite a few pieces!

The dual layered players boards are phenomenal, although they have the same issues that all dual layered boards do – they warp! Still, a bit of bending and pressing had them flattened out almost perfectly, and ready for use. Each player also gets 10 coloured roofs in their colour, which are all unique and wonderfully detailed. There are also 4 vehicles per player for their personal player board tracks. These vehicles – modeled after a roller, crane, bulldozer, and dump truck – look like they would be made of wood, but are actually little plastic pieces. They are brilliant! Each player also gets a coloured traffic cone that will be used during final scoring.

Overall, I’m really impressed with the production value of Tower Up. It’s a game we’ve tabled a few times and really enjoy. Be sure to check out our review as well!