You folks have no idea how much I had been anxiously awaiting this one. I backed this beast of a game on Kickstarter in late 2022 and finally received it (Second Edition) late 2023. Oh, it didn’t disappoint! I only backed the core game as I wasn’t sure in 2022 if I would have liked it enough to invest hundreds of dollars into all of the expansions. Part of me wishes I had but alas, I was unemployed and awaiting a decision on my disability case (still am). Any-who, for the uninitiated, let’s take a quick look at what makes this game tick.
1-4 Players, Ages 14+, Average Play Time = 1-2.5 hours
Components & Setup
The box is large and contains a variety of components. As much fun as I’d have with my tendonitis listing out each component and describing it, I’d thought I’d refer you to the screenshot above. It’s taken directly from the rulebook and for your convenience, I included a link to that below.
Rulebook: https://restorationgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/RtDT_Rulebook.pdf
To quickly sum up the game setup, each player will choose a character sheet (of which there are 4 with different abilities). The board is placed between all players with each player being assigned a home kingdom, whichever of the 4 quadrants of the board is closest to them (identified as North, South, East, and West). The gigantic, functional tower is placed in the middle of said board with the 12 seals in place. Buildings are placed and various cards, tokens, markers, and other components form the supply. There’s also an App setup which you can do via phone or tablet where you’ll pick your difficulty, main goal, adversary (main boss), and foes (minions). There’s more to it than that, but that’s the jist. Check the rulebook above for specifics.
Gameplay Overview
The game is broken up into months (rounds). Each round contains an unknown series of player turns. The game will decide just how many player turns encompass a month. For the first month, each player gets a single turn. Starting with the second month, the app will assign out companion and adversary quests for the players to complete. While you’ll want to do these, you may not have the time to complete them as they go away at the end of the round.
On a player’s turn, they’ll:
1. Take a banner action (optional) – Each character has a unique banner ability that will help them out.
2. Perform actions (optional) – This involves moving, taking a heroic action, and reinforcing, done in any order. Heroic actions involve cleansing a building of skulls, battling enemies, and resolving a quest. Players can only perform one heroic action per turn. Completing a heroic action rewards you with 2 spirit, which is used to provide various rewards for your character. Reinforcing allows a player to use the building space they are on for its free or (at the cost of spirit) enhanced effect. Each building type has a different effect. Players can use the haggle die to test their luck and possibly get more (or less) reward out of the reinforce action.
3. Drop a skull into the tower (mandatory) – Skulls are bad. If the supply runs out and someone needs to drop a skull, the game wins. Skulls will sometimes pop out of the tower immediately and some hang around in the tower to be ejected later. These skulls clog up building spaces. 4 skulls on a particular building is enough to destroy it, which again is bad because buildings allow players to take unique reinforce actions. When a building is destroyed in a player’s home kingdom, that player also gains a corruption (debuff & also part of the lose condition).
The goal of the game is to complete the main goal and then defeat the adversary. Players can lose a variety of ways…when a player gains their third active corruption, when the sixth month ends, or when you need to take a skull from the supply and can’t. While by default a co-operative game, the game does have an optional competitive mode which has a separate win condition.
The above is an oversimplification of the rules, but should hopefully give you an idea as to how the game is played.
Review
“Return to Dark Tower” took us on what felt like an epic adventure. I haven’t had a chance to try all the different main goals and adversaries but I want to and can’t wait to get to them. At first, Aidalee thought that the tower was simply a non-functional prop. Imagine her surprise when she saw the thing light up, spin its compartments, and actually emit various sounds. While I wanted to invest in the minis (Horde expansion set) and neoprene mat after the fact, it was simply too expensive for me to justify on my budget. I’ve seen others use them at my local game store and they look glorious.
I was impressed by how easily the game flowed despite how intimidating it looked. The app did a wonderful job in keeping everything organized and moving. If I were to make any changes to the app, I’d include a beginner difficulty that gave players 1-2 wild advantages to use or lose each round. I implemented this house rule the first time we played and it made the game much easier to learn and play. As it stands, it’s very easy to make mistakes your first time out and in a game where action economy & efficiency are paramount, mistakes can be very punishing.
I loved the random events and the quests the app threw at us every round. Like “LOTR: Journeys in Middle Earth”, we wanted to do everything but had to accept that we couldn’t due to time constraints. Some characters are strong at cleansing skulls while others can move around quickly and so on, so we had to play to our strengths and sometimes miss out on these extras. To address the difficulty again, I wish that the app would allow us more control over how much the foes leveled up during the game and how often tower slots were removed. In the case of the latter, more open slots means more cursed glyphs see their way out to affect players. As a house rule you could, of course, ignore glyphs…I won’t tell and the app doesn’t know any better.
It took me a while to wrap my head around combat. In 95% of the games I play, you defeat an enemy by forcing their life points to zero. Here, you run out the foe’s cards they have and so as long as you aren’t eliminated from the game (gaining too much corruption because you couldn’t apply effects, typically), you win the battle. Each battle is a gauntlet where negative effects are applied and your ability to satisfy those negative effects determine whether or not you gain corruption. Luckily, advantages can be applied to lessen the difficulty of a particular card (the difficulty ranges 1-5). These could be terrain advantages, foe type advantages, and so on. Wild are the most useful, grab them when you can.
I found it really neat that you could explore dungeons in this game but because time is often so tight I typically shy away from them. I wish the game would give us extra time to explore them as time spent in a dungeon poking around the different rooms on your app’s grid is time not spent cleansing skulls and battling surface foes. Sometimes you get lucky and find the dungeon’s goal room quickly and other times you’ll go through what feels like an extended gauntlet to find it.
While you can buy expansions that include more character sheets, in most cases you’re required to use them for the expansion in question. The Alliance expansion characters should be used when using said expansion, and so on. I wish there was a separate & cheap purchasable expansion of 8-12 character sheets that you can use with any version of the game. After a while, the 4 original characters start to feel same-y as you’re playing to their strengths 99% of the time.
I also wish you could hold more treasure cards (you can have 4), but I can see (for balance reasons) why you can’t as they can be extremely powerful. It was fun earning separate gear cards and growing my army of warrior tokens, as if I was Théoden attempting to amass a large army to take on the Lord of the Nazgûl. Unlocking virtues (also unique to characters) was interesting as well and to this day can’t decide which ones I should be unlocking first.
While I appreciate the optional competitive mode, I haven’t and probably will never play it. Given the option, Aidalee and I prefer co-op over competitive. This game screams co-op and some games should simply remain that way…could you imagine if “Pandemic” had a competitive mode? No thanks! Along those same lines, this game has an incredible table presence. The tower, while massive and impressive, needs batteries on a regular basis. I highly suggest investing in a rechargeable battery pack.
All in all, this game is amazing and one of the best game investments I’ve ever made.
Watch the video below for a visual overview & full playthrough!
Box Quote: “Return to Dark Tower” is a dark, intense, and incredible co-operative adventure.
—
Score: 9/10 (Outstanding)
—