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Quick Look: TOWERS OF XANDERMERE : A GAME OF CONQUEST
Designer:Ron Ashton
Artists: Ron Ashton
Publisher: R Dash Studios
Year Published: 2023
An Exciting Race
Towers of Xandermere is a classic roll-n-move tabletop board game. Luck, strategy and sabotage are all part of your journey. Use dice and cards to race your tokens across the vast 24″ x 36″ game board in an attempt to be the first player to declare victory by conquering your opponent’s tower!
Ease of Play!
Easy 90 second set-up and straightforward rules make this game simple to get playing quickly.
The game is designed for 2 or 4 players with two play time options. Play the full 180 minute game or choose the shorter 120 minute version.
Review:
Overview:
There are times when me and dice games don’t get along, and sometimes I get lucky. I’m sure many of you can relate. So, I wasn’t sure how I would do playing a roll-n-move game. Thankfully there are 3 pawns to move, so you can be strategic with how you use the value you rolled. The game is very reminiscent of the Hasbro game of Sorry, with a starting location and a destination location. Getting to the end can be tricky at times, and with some luck making risky decisions can really help or hurt.
The rule book is several pages, but is not complex or hard to understand. Included in the rule book are descriptions of the various locations on the board and their actions. Also included is a description of the various Quest cards and their actions.
The setup is simple and not time consuming. For a 2 player game, players choose colors that are in opposite corners of the game board. For a 4 player game, all 4 colors are used. Players take 3 pawns and place them in their associated start location. The Quest cards are shuffled and placed in the draw deck location on the game board. Players perform a high-roll where the player with the highest value is the start player. That player then begins the game.
In Towers of Xandermere you are the Lord of a tower who wants to take over a rival tower. Your goal is to send your pawns across the board and onto the opposing tower to gain control of it. In the short game, you just need a single pawn to control the tower. In the long game, you need all 3 pawns to control the tower.
The mechanic of the game is simply roll-n-move, with some location and card based actions. Each turn you roll a die and move a pawn a number of spaces equal to the value rolled, unless you hit a Stop location, which halts your current movement.
Starting a pawn and having a pawn enter the end location both take a value of 1. If a player rolls a value of 6 on their turn, they get to roll and go again. Players may affect gameplay by playing cards at the beginning of their turn. Some cards help the player and other cards penalize another player, but the only way to get cards is to land on the spaces on the board that give you cards.
The designers present players with a choice for game end. For a shorter game, it only takes a single pawn to control a tower and win the game. This is good if you don’t have much time but want to get a game in. For a longer game, when you have some time to play, you only win by getting all 3 of your pawns to the finish area to control the enemy tower.
The game can be very slow to start or end. Players do not start with an active pawn, and the only way to get an active pawn is to roll a 1. So, if rolls are unlucky, it can take quite a bit of time to start the game. Several times I played we just gave up and let everyone start their first pawn and then proceed from there. It also takes rolling a 1 to move your pawn into the finish area, and if it is your last pawn and the rolls are unlucky, it will take a long time to get in, which gives other players a chance to catch up.
The only way to get cards is to land on a square on the board that gives you a card, which means you have to be lucky with your rolls. If you don’t get the right rolls, you will get few cards, and cards can be powerful in the game.
The game is either 2 players or 4 players, and even the 4 player game is really two 2 player games being played at the same time. There isn’t a great deal of interaction between players other than card actions and the occasional lucky roll that puts pawns wanting the same space. In a 4 player game, playing cards and affecting the other 2 players is not key to making your goal.
Overall I enjoyed playing Towers of Xandermere. As I said before, me and dice games don’t always get along. I typically had good enough luck to get cards most times, but also had poor luck when making risk decisions that had negative consequences. The 2 or 4 player limitation made it a little harder to get it to the table since most times I had an odd number of players (we tried an odd number, but that didn’t really work out well). I will keep it around as a simple, lite game for times when I don’t have a long time to play, but I probably won’t be getting this to the table most game nights.
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Thomas Shepherd- Reviewer
I grew up loving to solve puzzles, play games, and have fun. In my younger years I had fun playing pencil games, enjoyed the creativity of playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends, and generally hanging out with others. My favorite thing to do was to make puzzles of all kinds, mazes, word games, picture games, etc.
Sadly my career took me in a different direction, solving computer problems rather than gaming problems.
Gaming came back into my life, though, in a big way about 15 years ago, and I have held onto it since. I still enjoy designing games and have 9 published titles, which I did through my own game publishing company, Toresh Games, prior to the Covid pandemic. Sadly I was not able to sustain the company through the pandemic.
I highly encourage people to play games, make friends, and have fun. As a game enthusiast, I would love to see a return to games as the best social media platform for the masses.
All of Thomas Shepherd’s reviews can be found HERE.