When you first see the game 5 Towers, it might remind you of another popular card game called Lost Cities. Both games involve playing cards in a specific order without looking back. However, 5 Towers offers a unique twist that makes the experience quite different. In this game, your goal is to build up to five different towers, and you will likely try to build all of them. Each tower represents a different color or suit. To build a tower, you must play cards from that same suit in a single column. The numbers on the cards must go down from highest to lowest. At the end of the game, every card you have played scores one point. But there is a special bonus: if you finish a tower with the zero card, that entire tower scores double points.
Unlike many other card games, you do not hold a hand of cards in 5 Towers. Instead, you get cards through a special bidding system. Every round, the player who goes first turns over five cards from the deck. They then announce how many of those cards they want to take. If any other player wants those cards, they must bid a higher number. The bidding continues until everyone has passed. The player who is willing to take the most cards must take them and add them to their play area. If someone bids to take all five cards, they get them immediately, and the round ends.
The cards sitting in the middle of the table are not always good for your plans. Ideally, you want to build your towers slowly. You want them to grow one step at a time so you can fit many levels into every tower. If you take a card that forces you to jump from a high number directly to a low one, you miss out on the chance to play the cards in between. This means you lose potential points and tower height.
One major difference between 5 Towers and Lost Cities is that you can renovate your towers. You are allowed to remove the top card from one tower once per round. This means it is possible to go backward if you need to. You can remove one card to make space for a better card later. However, there is a cost for every card you remove. You put these removed cards into a rubble pile. At the end of the game, you lose points for every card in that pile. The first card you remove costs you one point, the second card costs two points, and the cost keeps going up. Because of this, renovation is a serious decision and not something you should do lightly.
The game continues until the deck has been exhausted twice. Once the deck runs out the second time, the game stops, and the player with the highest score wins. The game is a constant balance between grabbing points and sacrificing future opportunities. Unless you get very lucky, taking a card usually means you will skip some numbers. These skipped numbers represent lost opportunities unless you decide to renovate. You must constantly evaluate how useful the cards in the center are to your opponents.
If you want the cards and other players also desire them highly, you will probably need to bid a high number or take all five. But if the cards are bad for everyone else, you can safely bid low and take only the one or two cards you really need. Player tableaus develop quickly and become very different from one another. This means the set of cards in the center will have different values for everyone. It is always interesting to analyze how good a set of cards is for each player. You will often face a dilemma about whether to take the cards and how many to take.
In an ideal world, you would build your towers perfectly, one step at a time, wasting no opportunities. But life is not perfect, and neither is this game. We all have to choose our imperfections. The game is about the choices we make and how we adapt to the cards we are dealt. You have to decide when to push hard for a tower and when to let an opportunity pass by. Every decision matters in the race to build the highest towers.
