What brings back fond childhood memories of imagining you’re an architect building with various wooden shapes and blocks, but minus the dread of stacking Jenga?
Introducing TowerBrix, a cooperative block-stacking and balancing puzzle recommended for up to six players with the punchline of “One team, One tower… One plan?”.
Construction Overview
Your party plays as a group of architects tasked to build a single tower. You are dealt your own hand of condition cards but you are not allowed to share them with one another. Building together without discussing or directly assisting is not as easy as it seems.
The goal in TowerBrix is to fulfil each other’s requirements as the tower rises. You will somehow learn of everyone else’s conditions based on what the other players get prickly about when you happen to move certain pieces around. The varying degrees of difficulties ramp up the challenge, and push your cooperation and creative thinking further than you’d expect. Watch out, this will also test your patience.
Blueprint Design
The box contains 9 wooden bricks (2x Blue, 2x Yellow, 2x Red, 2x Purple, 1x Grey), and there are 110 condition cards which are distributed into Greens (2pts & 3pts), and Pinks (2pts & 3pts), as well as 3x Zone cards that serve as foundations to lay the blocks on. The Green cards are intro-friendly conditions utilizing 8 bricks, while the Pink ones add the Grey brick for a bit of a challenge.
As a first impression, the components for TowerBrix almost look too simple, and you’d think this is a pretty straightforward game of JUST stacking. While each card on its own clearly illustrates and instructs you on how every piece is to be placed on the tower, the arrangement that comes from the combination of conditions received by each player sets the tone of the construction.
So the question is… Is it still One plan?
Building Project
There are three rounds for each game, and each round follows four phases: Prep, Build, Evaluate and Clean Up.
Prep phase: The difficulty level is decided on how you would like to play the round; Easy is 12pts or less, Medium is 13 to 19, and Hard for 20 or over.
The points are determined by the 2 or 3 printed on the back of each card, and you draw the total value according to which difficulty you’re going for as a team. This may sometimes result in one player having more cards in their hand.
Build phase: Keeping your own cards a secret, players must fulfil the condition on their cards while building the tower together. Plus, talking is not allowed during the Build phase. While the guide encourages signalling thumbs up or thumbs down, the interaction we had as a family is nowhere near silent.
At the slight touch of a certain brick, disapproval will be voiced out as a chirp or a hiss or a mimic of buzzer sound. Occasionally, my team of architects remembers how to be civilized and will instead respond with “Nope, that breaks my condition” or “I’m still good”. As there are no specific player turns, it’s all hands on deck. Expect some chaos.
Evaluation phase: Once everyone’s condition is met and are happy with how the tower stands, each player reads their cards and has everyone inspect the tower if it actually fulfilled the blueprint. Total points are calculated based on the cards, plus bonus points:
+3 if the tower is higher than the long side of the TowerBrix box,
+1 if it’s higher than the short side,
+2 if two or fewer bricks touch the playing surface.
However, if one or more conditions are not met, the round is unsuccessful and the condition cards are forfeited. New cards will be drawn to repeat the building phase.
Clean Up: After recording the score, all used cards go to the discard pile. The current tower is dismantled, and a new round starts with the Prep phase.
At the end of the game, the points are added up to tally the final score, and the guidebook provides a scoring table to congratulate the team’s achievements as budding architects or pro league.
Relaying Foundations
Apart from the Intro mode that gets players to warm up to TowerBrix without worrying about scores, there are two Base game modes using either Green or Pink cards, and 14 Creative challenges suggested on top of the Base game. All the conditions even have illustrated examples of how the blocks can or cannot be stacked, making it easy to teach younger children of where the blocks can potentially go, and clear enough for grandparents who forgot their reading glasses.
Our favourite challenges are the ones that use the Zone cards (bridge over river, and tower over swamp) as they give off game board vibes to any playing surface. These cards force a specific foundation shape for the tower, adding an extra visual condition to be fulfilled and with it, a much higher chance of things wobbling into instability.
We even replayed the same conditions on each Zone card and were quite pleased with how different the tower turned out every time. While the decks already provide endless ways to stack the tower, we wished there were more than just three Zone cards to choose from.
It will be quite some time until we can exhaust the Green and Pink decks just to see what else we could build with only 9 blocks.
And if you’re up for a Solo run, the gameplay simply follows the same rules and scoring as the Base game.
Final Premise
For a game this compact, TowerBrix towers well above its size (see what I did there). The author, Simon Thomas, takes something as simple as nine wooden blocks and turns it into a tactile mess of creative stackwork. Whether you’re 10 or 80, it is easy enough to grasp the rules in one intro session, yet clever enough to keep everyone, regardless of age, on the edge of their seat round after round.
Be it stacking solo or bickering with a full table of six, one thing’s for sure, the tower rarely turns out the way you’d expect. And honestly, that’s the fun of it. That’s the One plan.
