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From:Rio Grande Games
Cost: $40
Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 60-90 minutes
Type of game: Family Strategy
Skill level: 9
Complexity: 5
Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 6.2 (22), January 2000
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When Games Magazine names its Game of the Year, you take notice. The award is one of the only major such honors in the United States. Regardless of whether or not you agree with their past choices, you take a look at what they’ve selected this time. For 1999, Games picked a title that should please most gamers.
Torres looks like an abstract game. An attractive game, with delightfully evocative graphic design and plastic pieces molded to look like parts of a tower, but abstract nonetheless. Then you notice the special cards, and the codex of action point costs, and the scoring track, and you start to wonder. By the time you’ve finished your first game, you don’t care. All you know is that you want to play it again.
Each player starts with a knight on a different one of the game’s eight castles. Players have five action points to spend to improve their positions, which frequently means building onto existing castles.
Castles can be built outward or upward, and many towers will rise to five stories or taller during the game. Castles are never allowed to merge with each other, so early builds tend to stake out territory before a neighboring castle encroaches. Games like Manhattan and Big Boss have used the third dimension in the past, but what’s refreshing about Torres is that the growing topography is not merely a scoring device- it affects other aspects of gameplay, like movement. New knights can only come onto the board next to but not higher than another knight of the same color. Knights can take superhuman leaps downward from any height but can only step up one level at a time.
Climbing up is vital to scoring. At the end of each of the game’s three rounds, players score for their highest knights in each castle. Their score is the height of the knight multiplied by the castle’s surface area (the number of spaces the castle occupies). Increasing a castle’s surface area therefore helps all players with knights in that castle, but getting your knight to a higher level helps only yourself.
One castle each round hosts the king, and having a knight at a particular height in that castle scores a bonus. This can be tricky, as the required height is always low and often requires you to bring another knight over so your higher one can stay where he is and score more points.
What really makes the game sing, however, are the Action cards. Each player gets an identical deck of ten, only one of which can be played (at no cost) per turn. They let players bend the rules in marvelously helpful ways, like gaining extra actions, moving a tower segment, and jumping a knight up an extra level. The player who best uses these cards has a terrific advantage, and executing a particularly good play with one is very satisfying. Go straight to the variant in which players draw 3 cards and keep 1 or, once all players are comfortable with the game, let everyone start with all cards in their hand. Reducing or eliminating the random element of card draw makes the game more strategic and closely fought.
Torres is just about the archetypal Teutonic game. It’s completely abstract with a thin veneer of theme pasted on- just enough to hold it together. The game progresses through a fixed number of rounds. On each turn players want to do more than they’re allowed and must choose among possible actions carefully. Points are tallied via the ubiquitous scoring track. About the only thing missing from the profile is simultaneous play- groups with slow players, take notice. Torres is certainly one of the best games released in 1999 and you could do a lot worse than giving it your consideration.