The first thing 5 Towers reminds me of is Lost Cities. You have five suits, and you must play your cards in a specific order, with no turning back. However there are several important differences, so 5 Towers delivers a different play experience. You can build up to five different towers, each a different colour, and you most likely will. Building a tower means playing cards of the same suit in a column. The numbers must go from highest to lowest. At the end of the game, each card scores 1 point, but if you cap your tower with the 0 card, the tower scores double. 

 

 

You don’t have any hand cards. You gain cards through a bidding mechanism. Every round, the start player reveals five cards from the deck and declares how many he wants to take. If anyone wants these cards, they must declare a higher number. This goes on until everyone has had a chance to declare a number, and the one willing to take the most cards must take that number of cards and add them to his play area. Naturally if anyone is willing to take all five, he immediately does so and the bidding ends. 

 

Cards at the centre of the table are not always good for you. Ideally you want to build your towers slowly, letting them grow one step at a time so that you can have many levels in every tower. If you take a card which makes you jump from a high number directly to a low one, you are forgoing the opportunities to build many levels in between. 

 

 

One important difference between 5 Towers and Lost Cities is you can renovate your towers. Once per round, you can remove the topmost card from one tower. This means it is possible to go backwards. You can remove one card to make space for other cards. However there is a cost associated with every card removed. You keep them in a rubble pile, and at the end of the game you lose points for every card there. The first card costs you 1 point, the second card 2 points, and so on. So renovation is not something you take lightly. 

 

The game is played until the deck runs out twice. Then the highest scorer wins. 

 

 

Playing 5 Towers you will constantly be torn between grabbing points and sacrificing opportunities. Unless you get lucky, most of the time when you take a card to play, you will skip some numbers. These are the opportunities you will lose, unless you renovate. You must constantly evaluate how useful the set of cards at the centre are to each of your opponents. If you want the cards and they are also highly desired by others, you probably need to bid a high number, or even take all five. However if the cards are bad for everyone else, you can safely bid to take only one or two that you really want. 

 

Player tableaus will quickly develop to become quite different, so the set of cards at the centre will often be of different values to everyone. It is always interesting to analyse how good that set of cards is for each player. You are often in dilemma about whether to take the cards, and how many to take. In an ideal world, you are able to build your towers one step at a time, wasting no opportunity. But life is not perfect, and we have to choose our imperfections. That’s life. It’s about the choices we make.