Wednesday, 21 October 2026

Wandering Towers

Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer · 2022 · CreativaMente

Players

2–6

On the box

30min

At our table

25–30min

Weight Light· 1.60 out of 5

Text in the game None

What it is

Wandering Towers is a family game of racing and memory, set in a world of wizards. Everyone has a group of wizards to bring into the Raven Castle, which sits on a ring-shaped path full of towers. And the towers never stay put.

With your cards you move your own wizards or any tower at all, even one with other players’ wizards on top. When a tower lands where wizards are standing, it traps them underneath: they stay stuck until someone moves that tower again, and whoever trapped them fills one of their potions. Full potions pay for spells, which move wizards and towers when you need a hand.

To win you need two things: all your wizards in the castle and all your potions full. But the castle moves every time someone gets in, and the towers keep stacking and shuffling around, so you have to remember where your wizards ended up. There’s plenty of interaction, with a mean streak, because to fill your potions you have to trap someone, and often it’s someone else’s wizards.

How it plays

We’re seasoned players, so we went straight for the expert wizards variant. There are more spells on the table, you can use one for each action, and if the active player doesn’t use one, someone else can cast it, even before their move. At that point you’re not just moving a tower or a wizard: you’re trying to block the others, bury their wizards and spoil the move of whoever was about to make the right one.

Fill your potions early. At the start there are lots of wizards around and they’re easy to cover; later only a few are left to trap, and anyone with empty potions struggles. Filling them early also means casting spells sooner. Play it with a crowd: with two or three it loses a lot, with six it gets gloriously rowdy, and every time it’s your turn you have to find your wizards again in stacks that have changed in the meantime.

The nugget

Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling, the two designers, spent the nineties working together long-distance, Kramer in Stuttgart and Kiesling near Bremen, with hours on the phone and faxes metres long. In those years they had met in person only once, at the Essen fair, over a coffee. Kiesling, by the way, is also the designer of Azul.

At our table

We took it seriously, playing the expert variant right from our first game. I move a tower, but meanwhile I’m trying to block you and cast the spell before you do!

25′

30′

at twoat five

Median of our games, by player count. The dashed band is 30′, what the box says.