About Tower of Mages
Tower of Mages is a one-page dice game by Robin Gibson, who publishes as metalsnail and also made Hall of the Dwarven King. Three wizards with short attention spans are trying to build a mage’s tower before the solstice. Each of your three dice is one of them: you choose the order in which they work, and each die counts down a list of rooms, a sort of rondel, so the room you get depends on the order you pick.
The tower gathers light, fire, air, earth and water energy, and the value of each element moves up and down on a market as the game goes on. You can build valuable rooms, knock down rooms whose element has crashed, and cap off parts of the tower to score them early. The sheet is version 1.0 from August 2017 and includes a variant for two players. It suits solo players who liked Hall of the Dwarven King and want another one-sheet puzzle, this time about drawing a tower.
How to play in one minute
- Before you start, roll three dice to set the first values in the elemental market, and roll one die to mark your starting row in the room list.
- On each turn, roll three dice and use them one at a time. For each die, count down that many rows from the last room you built (wrapping round to the top) and draw that room on the building plan.
- A new room must sit on a connection point of an existing one, must not overlap anything and must not touch a room of the same type. Special rooms can replace the indicated one.
- Cross off time on the track; on market turns roll three dice and update the element values.
- The game ends when you build in the top row, fill the time track or cannot build. Score your element rooms; 50 points is a good first target.
What’s in the PDF
- A single Letter page in landscape, black and white, with the full rules and every play area.
- For two players, each player uses their own sheet and the dice are split between them each round.
- A cover image is also on the itch.io page. You add three dice and a pencil.
In the PDF
- One-page game sheet with the rules, the room list, the building plan, the time track and the elemental market (Letter, landscape)
