Torres

Introduction

Torres (Towers in german) is set in a hypothetical medieval kingdom. The old magnificent Castile has been devastated by a terrible tornado with nothing but the foundation left. Each of the King's sons is given the task of building a new and even more magnificent castle within 3 years. The prince who builds the tallest and biggest castle will inherit the throne, and to ensure fairness may each prince only employ 6 of his knights to the task.

Mechanics

That is the story, but in reality ths very abstract game is played on a 8x8 chess board with square plastic tiles and wooden cones. The game is played in 3 rounds and the players scoring for having the biggest castles: The knight at the tallest tower multiply his level with the base area of that castle. The game begins with 8 castle pieces is already built, and each player places a knight on top of one of these pieces. The last player in the turnorder may also place the old King on one of the vacant pieces.

Each round has several phases depending on the number of players, and a randomly picked Phase card describes how many castle pieces each player receives and how these must be built into a tower (usually 4 pieces in the first and 3 in the later rounds). A player has 5 Action Points (AP) to spend per turn, which may be used to deploy a new knights, move knights, place castle pieces, or buy Action cards which will bend the rules in some way. These cards bring in a certain luck element into the game which can be removed by giving each player his own set of 8 Action cards. An interesting little feature is that the castle pieces had a gate on one side, and a knight standing next to gate may move "through" that gate and out of any other gate in the castle.

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