LogFAQs > #932569558

107. Fire Tower (2019)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Take-that, card game
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 30-40 minutes
Experience: 2 plays over 2 sessions with 4 players (2019)
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Each player holds a fort in the corner of a square forest map, and there's a burst of fire in the center of the forest. The goal is to play cards to manipulate the wind and spread the fire so it burns down everyone else's tower. Last man standing wins. There's also a mechanic where eliminated players get to play as the "spirit of the forest" and spread extra destruction.

Experience - The super-nice couple who designed Fire Tower demoed it to me and my girlfriend at Origins on the first day, and it was our most pleasant and enjoyable demo of the weekend. The game resulted in a spirit-of-the-forest victory, which is apparently quite unusual. This was the purchase that the girlfriend was most enthusiastic about, by far, so I sprung for it. We broke it out once more during that weekend with friends, and the game didn't seem to quite have the legs we'd hoped. But it's sitting here, waiting to be played.

Design - Fire Tower doesn't have a lot of variation in its appearance, but the components it does have are beautiful - namely, the fire tokens and the map. It's tactilely satisfying to spread the fire, and the contrast of the red on the green-and-black forest is striking. FT's also got a unique theme (you WANT to burn down the forest?) going for it.

the game itself is pretty solid, but not super-inspired. Decisions are fairly straightforward; you look at your limited hand and see what best moves the fire away from you and toward the person you've decided to beat the crap out of. Minor alliances can take place where sometimes the northeast and northwest players might try both to spread the fire south; the southern players can either try north to avoid eating it, or push it sideways.

That said, the amount of control you have over the general inferno is relatively limited. Much more effective seem to be cards like the dozer line, which lets you block the spread of fire, for example, or the fire extinguisher, which lets you put out fires (but not in your own tower). Timing of card draws can be pretty swingy and can kind of frustrate you when you think you're about to bring someone down.

Future - The biggest obstacles to bringing Fire Tower to the table are 1. that there are better options as a game; the experience range seems to vary and 2. it's clearly by far the best at four exactly. But given these constraints, I'd love to get some more value out of my game. I've never offloaded a game, and I don't necessarily want to begin with my haul from Origins.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness