How to Play Towers (or a version of it) with a Standard 52 Card Deck

[Mattel]

3 hours ago, Dalluminum said:

I'm going to propose that everyone who wants to should write their own rulebook for the game. It's kind of confusing to list out every rule you were playing with in a play test, and Towers has a lot of variations. It seems to me that many of us are going to have different preferences on gameplay for a while, so individual rulebooks for this early testing phase might be good: then we can combine/revise them to make a more common ground rulebook we can spread around.

Feel free to shoot down this idea. It just seems like we all have our own take on the "official" rules we currently have, and it's faster to revise your own rulebook and share your ideas after testing it out.

Overall, I love the way this is coming along!

Yeah... Looking back at the novel I wrote, I can definitely see that it is better to either individually write out our rules in a Google doc or something, and then maybe work together to compose a "comm ground rulebook" as you put it. It definitely does seem like we all have different ideas about how this should work, but then also different ideas as to how we want this to work. Yeah, when I have the time I'll try and put all my stuff into some sort of document and share that.

[NotLiamRoss He/Him]

16 minutes ago, Mattel said:

Yeah, when I have the time I'll try and put all my stuff into some sort of document and share that

Hey Mattel, love the enthusiasm! I'll write up some responses to stuff that you wrote in your large post as I think there's some stuff that warrants responses. There is the current working rulebook which I've shared in the main post and like I've said it's a living document! Currently, I'm holding onto editing privileges for now just to keep it from getting into a "too many cooks" situation, but I'm trying to incorporate feedback when I can. From skimming the discussion since the last post it seems like things that people are confident they want updated are:

1. Number of cards drawn each round
2. Having a separate terrain deck
3. Adding some idea of a point value to each piece (this is referenced in relation to scoring in the text so I agree something needs to happen here, but I'm not sure if it should apply to combat as well)

I'm up for all of those changes and they should be relatively quick to make. As for the other stuff, I also have thoughts and will respond shortly, hopefully before end of day.

[NotLiamRoss He/Him]

22 hours ago, Mattel said:

Option Three: you place some of your cards into the draw pile and then shuffle it up, and draw the right amount of new cards. This would mean you still maintain some of your cards, but your opponent doesn't know everything that you have

I think that having more information about what is in your opponent's hand makes the game more tactical and interesting, but I'm open to hearing playtest feedback if this makes things too "boring". After all, in chess, you can see all of the pieces at all times, so both players have perfect information about the state of the game and it still isn't boring (if you ask me anyways)! I think I'm going to leave it that no cards are exchanged with the deck for now, but change the drawn cards between turns because people are saying that makes a big difference.

23 hours ago, Mattel said:

In my mind, Towers seems to be very similar (in the book) to how attacking and movement is in the game Civilization... In it, each type of unit has a set number of movements, generally two or three, and after you choose whether or not to move, you can attack, with each having a set number of distance for how far away they can attack

I actually played a variant like this with a friend as well. Infantry and Archers could move a single cards-length, Cavalry could move three, and Shardbearers could move two, with Shardbearers also being able to jump over other non-Shardbearer units. It was pretty fun and served to slow the game down a bit and make things a little more tactical. I'm open to hearing what people have to say about more restricted/tightly defined movement overall! 

23 hours ago, Mattel said:

Did we decide whether or not you could pull out several troops during the "deploy" part of your turn? I feel like you should have the ability to pull out all your troops at once and "retreat" in one turn if it finally comes to that. In the Google Files sheet it says you can only pull one troop out at time, but I prefer you being able to remove several

Right now I think we're leaning towards single deploy/retreat, but Infantry being able to retreat a whole Formation at once if the entire formation is within your Deployment Zone

There are some other comments in here related to retreating units from the middle of the battlefield. With Rules as Written (RaW), troops can only be retreated or deployed from the Deployment Zone as @Ishikk pointed out. I think with that outlined as the rules it should shore up some of those problematic situations you described.

23 hours ago, Mattel said:

I'm kind of more in favor of having hexagon or square pieces. This would make it so much more clear about how movement works relative to one another. Even if we don't do this (which I get why we wouldn't, you would have to custom make pieces, and generally every household has a deck of cards) I do also think I personally would prefer having a board, or at least having some way of setting up a grid

I think Hexagon pieces are out for now just because the text states that the game is played with cards and we have no indication that these cards aren't square. It also makes it harder to talk about Surrounding in the case of the Shardbearer in a way that I think might be hard to balance. For the grid, I'm still open to the idea of at least some variants being playable on a grid, but I keep coming back to the scene in the bunker where they play without any mention of a board or grid and only play with the cards. I think that's enough for me to keep the dream alive of playing with just the cards.

Square pieces however are definitely supported by the text at least somewhat, using the cards only to represent Troops in hand, and deployed Troops being rendered by pieces of some sort. For sure this is a way to play which the text supports, but again I don't think it should be required as outlined by the text.

23 hours ago, Mattel said:

How do the formations for ordinary infantry work? Specifically, how do they work when pieces are diagonal to each other? If their corners are touching, is that enough to form a formation, or do they need to have some piece connecting them along a side? I looked at your specific message about formations @NotLiamRoss and you said that a formation is formed by "adjacent infantry" but with rectangles how do we decide that? Again, I prefer squares and above that hexagons for something like this.

I think adjacency requires cards to be completely aligned along one of the 4 orthogonal sides. Since I think we're moving away from the idea of rotating cards, this should be fine and clear enough to adjudicate, either short side to short side (top to bottom) adjacent, or long side to long side (right to left) adjacent. In this case, diagonals or partial adjacencies would be right out.

23 hours ago, Mattel said:

Did we decide whether or not you absolutely started with the shardbearer or not? It seems like an unfair amount of randomness for your opponent to possibly draw a shardbearer card and you not, yet always starting with it feels sort of... cheap. I dunno. What are Sharders thoughts on that specific question?

Other people can chime in on this, but in my playtesting, always having the enemy Shardbearer to contend with as a threat, and your own as an asset/liability (you lose the game if it's captured after all!) means that you never feel too stuck with a bad draw, or like you can just steamroll your opponent. In games where both players didn't start with a Shardbearer in hand, the player with the Shardbearer almost always won handily, which wasn't very fun. I'm not sure what you mean by "cheap" here as well. Maybe you can elaborate on the feeling for me to understand better? 

As for comments about Troop point values and how they would affect combat, I'm going to leave that discussion to happen separately. I'm all for Troops having some sort of point value associated with them, but I'm not sure about that value affecting combat just yet and need to think about it a bit more.

In the meantime thanks for your thoughts! If people want to start up their own rulebooks go ahead! I'll keep updating mine and we can use it as a reference while deciding all this stuff. I continue to look forward to the stuff people come up with!!

[JellyPanda1741]

Hi all! I noticed this thread a few days ago when I was talking to a friend about WaT, and we both really enjoyed the towers bits. I didn't actually make it to the end of the thread (because it's quite long for me to read in a day), but I had a few ideas.

• I think a board would be best, even for the down sides, you could even just grab a few extra cards as a measurement tool or something akin to that. 10x10 is best because vorinism, and it's a nice board size.
• For drawing after rounds I think it would be interesting to draw until you have 10 cards in your hand, it would even the playing field until the last round where if you lost too many troops in earlier rounds you wouldn't have the full deck.
• The orientation idea is fun and interesting but when it comes down to it, it would just get annoying to deal with I feel.

After looking at this thread I also decided to make some chip pieces with symbols on them for each card, and also a board. I designed the terrain pieces with the ability to put pieces in them (even if the terrain doesn't allow for that, I like consistency).

Honestly I'm just here for the ride of creating a fun board game based off a book I love, and hopefully official rules will be released eventually, but until then I'm excited to see this threads progress.

I attached all the .stl files for my 3d models, I will also be splitting the board in 4 eventually just to make the print easier.

High Ground.stl Mountain.stl Cavalry.stl Chasm.stl Infantry.stl Archer.stl Shard.stl Board.stl

Edit

I just remembered a few things I wanted to add right after posting. The wording in the google sheet is a little confusing on when a shardbearer can be killed, I was playing with my brother and we had no clue how to say when we could kill each others shards. And if we did do a board instead of an open table then for flanking and shardbearer killing, would the wall/border count as something, so could you just corner their shard or no?

Edited January 14, 2025 by JellyPanda1741
Forgot to add information

[brce08]

Hey guys, I’ve been skimming through this thread for the past 30 ish minutes and there are a few things that i think would benefit from being discussed and if not adopted i might make a separate version of the game based around siege warfare.

1. Again, I skimmed, but I haven’t seen any discussion on how many terrain cards are played each round. Going with the google sheets there are 10 cards out of the 32 going to terrain, and only 3 rounds. It seems like only 1 terrain card can be placed per round (from what little is in the sheets document), that seems a bit of a waste for nearly a 3rd of the deck.
2. What is stopping me from placing chasms/mountains right in front of the other player and preventing them from progressing/no way to retreat? Though if you’re only able to place on your side, it does seem a bit easy to give yourself high ground and protection for free. What if you flip a coin to decide the first person to place down their terrain and troop cards at the same time and the other person gets to respond to their setup and place their terrain and troop cards afterward. After that the winner of the previous round places their cards first and the loser goes second. (this makes going second preferable which i think is pretty cool)
3. I think that only being able to have straight lines in your infantry is a bit restrictive, how about  having one card’s corner placed slightly on top of another (to where the number or letter is completely covered) counts as “in formation”, if rotated the gap created is made up for by the overlapping section of the cards and has soldiers in it even though it doesn’t look like it. This goes along with the adjacent side rule, either a corner is covered or a side is adjacent to make a formation, giving you more options.
4. I think that having a front/back/left/right to each card brings a lot of interesting scenarios into the mix. The facing of a card would be based on the card art, for example a shardbearers front is the direction the top of the symbol is facing (i’m not entirely sure what the case scenario would be for the front and back of diamonds but i’m sure if this is taken into consideration we could figure it out). Infantry and archers fronts would be the long side logically so the right side of the symbol would be forward. This then prompts the idea of orientation in the turn process, my idea would be you take orientation either before or after you move and as part of your movement step. (I added some photos if the front/back thing was confusing)

Next, I was thinking of making a version of the ruleset based on siege warfare that has players work together to create a city’s terrain. Also variants of the troops being kings, pike and shield walls/seige infantry, archers and medics. Also a mechanic using dice to track food and supplies as well as some of the terrain cards being used as supply and merchant lines. This would be a much more complex version of the game but i think it would be very fun.

Thoughts?

[MaybeAWindrunner]

hey im new to this thread, but i had one idea for the rules. maybe instead of the radomly chosen person for the first trun, its the person who most recently finished a book. maybe even Brandon Sanderson book. anyway, im going to try this with friends! 

[MaybeAWindrunner]

On 1/13/2025 at 9:36 PM, JellyPanda1741 said:

Hi all! I noticed this thread a few days ago when I was talking to a friend about WaT, and we both really enjoyed the towers bits. I didn't actually make it to the end of the thread (because it's quite long for me to read in a day), but I had a few ideas.

• I think a board would be best, even for the down sides, you could even just grab a few extra cards as a measurement tool or something akin to that. 10x10 is best because vorinism, and it's a nice board size.
• For drawing after rounds I think it would be interesting to draw until you have 10 cards in your hand, it would even the playing field until the last round where if you lost too many troops in earlier rounds you wouldn't have the full deck.
• The orientation idea is fun and interesting but when it comes down to it, it would just get annoying to deal with I feel.

After looking at this thread I also decided to make some chip pieces with symbols on them for each card, and also a board. I designed the terrain pieces with the ability to put pieces in them (even if the terrain doesn't allow for that, I like consistency).

Honestly I'm just here for the ride of creating a fun board game based off a book I love, and hopefully official rules will be released eventually, but until then I'm excited to see this threads progress.

I attached all the .stl files for my 3d models, I will also be splitting the board in 4 eventually just to make the print easier.

High Ground.stl 17.07 kB · 5 downloads Mountain.stl 14.54 kB · 3 downloads Cavalry.stl 29.28 kB · 3 downloads Chasm.stl 15.12 kB · 1 download Infantry.stl 43.05 kB · 0 downloads Archer.stl 21.86 kB · 0 downloads Shard.stl 26.55 kB · 2 downloads Board.stl 90.22 kB · 1 download

Edit

I just remembered a few things I wanted to add right after posting. The wording in the google sheet is a little confusing on when a shardbearer can be killed, I was playing with my brother and we had no clue how to say when we could kill each others shards. And if we did do a board instead of an open table then for flanking and shardbearer killing, would the wall/border count as something, so could you just corner their shard or no?

i like this idea.

[Anselm]

Hey all. I’ve skimmed this thread, and I’d like to add my take to get some feedback. The way I view Towers is far more akin to wargaming than a standard card game. There’s quite a few games with similar ideas, off the top of my head Bolt Action is the best comparison. The idea of the game is tactic training, so terrain would be determined before play, as would most battle conditions (How Adolin gives himself various handicaps would likely be reduced battalion counts, reduced training, supply shortages, etc). I think that while a “board” is excessive for the expected use case (war camps and campaigns abroad), there are likely either paper topography “boards” or terrain markers as opposed to actual cards. Mostly just wanted to write this down somewhere

[I am Adonalsium He/Him]

Hi guys. I am new to this community, but saw this and it interested me, so I typed up a variation of my first thoughts of the rules kinda working off of what you guys have. Tell me what you think please! 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-wEIv8VI8XqgonopQXlLOB9Ogbbu2h83o9S66pbk2H4/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Thanks for this work on this. It is amazing!

[Dalluminum he/him]

On 3/3/2025 at 4:02 PM, I am Adonalsium said:

Hi guys. I am new to this community, but saw this and it interested me, so I typed up a variation of my first thoughts of the rules kinda working off of what you guys have. Tell me what you think please! 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-wEIv8VI8XqgonopQXlLOB9Ogbbu2h83o9S66pbk2H4/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Thanks for this work on this. It is amazing!

Glad you're enjoying the thread! If you could give me access to the document, I'd love to review what you've got.

 

Sorry everyone, I've been kind of absent for a while; life gets crazy sometimes.

[al_lan_mandragoran]

I have been reading this thread for a while, and I've played the game as per the current rules. I'd like to as a few questions.

When cavalry attacks, is it like the Shardbearer in that it is occupying the same spot as the enemy piece, or is it the next piece in the straight line that it attacked on?

Can the Shardbearer go through friendly pieces? Can he end in another piece?

Do archers on high ground still have a bonus against other units on a different high ground? (i.e firing from one hill to another - is in any difference than firing from level ground?

How exactly does the whole "Shardbearer capturing another Shardbearer" work?

Can a Shardbearer alone hold a battlefield - the win conditions says that you have to be the only one on the battlefield with troops, but remember, Adolin says several times that "Shardbearers can't hold ground" (I think he says it in RoW when they are trying to retake Kholinar and... well, it doesn't matter. you get the point). 

And... I think that's it. apart from that, it's a great game. Oh, and it would be nice if @I am Adonalsium let me view his google doc.

[NotLiamRoss He/Him]

Hi and welcome to the thread. I'll answer your questions one at a time.

1 hour ago, al_lan_mandragoran said:

When cavalry attacks, is it like the Shardbearer in that it is occupying the same spot as the enemy piece, or is it the next piece in the straight line that it attacked on?

Attacking in my mind works the same way as chess for everyone except for Archers, if a capture happens, the unit occupies the same spot as the enemy piece

1 hour ago, al_lan_mandragoran said:

Can the Shardbearer go through friendly pieces? Can he end in another piece?

I answered this in another reply, having the Shardbearer able to "jump" friendly pieces seemed pretty fun and intuitive from my limited playtesting so I think it makes sense. There's no way in the current rules for a unit to end its movement in the same space as a friendly piece, and Shardbearers are no exception.

1 hour ago, al_lan_mandragoran said:

Do archers on high ground still have a bonus against other units on a different high ground? (i.e firing from one hill to another - is in any difference than firing from level ground?

Hadn't thought about this edge case, but my gut tells me that it would cancel out. But then again it could be pretty tricky to dislodge an archer from a fortified high-ground position, so maybe for balance it would be better for high-ground archers to be able to take each other out. We'd have to playtest both variants to see which is more fun would be my guess.

1 hour ago, al_lan_mandragoran said:

How exactly does the whole "Shardbearer capturing another Shardbearer" work?

The same way any other capture would work. If one player has only a single Shardbearer on the field then that Shardbearer can be captured by any other player's Shardbearer as though it were any other piece. Is there some particular part of that rule which confusing to you? I'm happy to clarify if something's not making sense.

1 hour ago, al_lan_mandragoran said:

Can a Shardbearer alone hold a battlefield... Adolin says several times that "Shardbearers can't hold ground" (I think he says it in RoW when they are trying to retake Kholinar and... well, it doesn't matter. you get the point).

This is what we were trying to get at with making Shardbearers vulnerable if they are the only piece remaining on the battlefield. They really can't hold the field without support, as they become much easier to capture in this state.

Let me know if there's anything in the rules doc that needs clarifying to make this make a little more sense. As I've said it's a living document. Thanks for your interest and taking the time to comment on the thread (and actually playtest the game :D)

[CoderDrag0n8 He/They]

Just came here, this looks cool! I'm reading through the rules right now! The first time towers came up in the books, I was like, Can I play that?

[Elite01]

Okay I've fallen behind on keeping up on this forum but was rereading SA5 yesterday but found a line where Yanagawn beat Adolin and said "You only pulled disadvantage cards though" so it sounds like there is some kind of chance deck that players pull from to either get disadvantages or advantages. 

Not sure if any of the rules have incorporated that yet 

Found on pg 1086

[NotLiamRoss He/Him]

27 minutes ago, Elite01 said:

"You only pulled disadvantage cards though"

You're right, I think this was missed. Any clue how we might incorporate advantage/disadvantage cards? Perhaps cards that can be pulled from the terrain deck that instead change how units work somehow? We could also fall back on that they may have been playing a popular variant in that passage if we want to keep the rules simpler for now. I'm definitely open to ideas

[Elite01]

Yeah that’s fair, adding disadvantage/advantage wouldn’t work well with a standard deck of cards.

just brainstorming 

you could draw a card at the beginning or end of turns

some kind of “event” like every other turn, or halfway through a game, every 5 turns etc

you could draw a card based on capturing or losing certain units

Edited March 28, 2025 by Elite01
improve

[jan_Komawi]

Anyone willing to do a gameplay video?

[CoderDrag0n8 He/They]

16 minutes ago, jan_Komawi said:

Anyone willing to do a gameplay video?

oooh good idea

[jan_Komawi]

If not a gameplay video, maybe a play by play script of a game describing how it works?

 

There are many things not clear to me after looking at the rules spreadsheet.  There are cards for high ground, mountains, and chasms, but what about flat lands with no advantages or disadvantages?

[al_lan_mandragoran]

There is one big issue that I've found playing this with other people: due to it's abstractness, people find it confusing, and hard to understand what is going on. 

What I mean by that, is that it isn't visual enough. I found it hard to explain the game to one of my non-cosmere friends, and they found it very difficult to understand what was going on. 

In response to this problem, I have decided to make a deck of cards. Half will be black and whit vector images, the other half will be white and black images (the first ones, just inverted)

So, tell me what you think. Some of the images have multiple, and just tell me which one is the best of them. Oh, and just to clarify, I got Chatgpt to make them

 

Spoiler

 

Edited February 3 by al_lan_mandragoran

[jan_Komawi]

Spoiler

okay...will tell you what I think....I do not like it...maybe because it's chatgpt...maybe because it is un-usable as is anyway. 

 

Here is a quick one I did myself in procreate using glyphs to represent Shardbearer ,archers, cavalry ....

Edited April 4, 2025 by jan_Komawi

[Dalluminum he/him]

3 hours ago, jan_Komawi said:

okay...will tell you what I think....I do not like it...maybe because it's chatgpt...maybe because it is un-usable as is anyway. 

 

Here is a quick one I did myself in procreate using glyphs to represent Shardbearer ,archers, cavalry ....

Beautiful. Please tell me I'm not the only one who gets it....

Edited April 4, 2025 by Dalluminum
Removed image

[jan_Komawi]

Spoiler

 

Here is some more...and a blue team....could easily make other colors if needed.

Edited April 4, 2025 by jan_Komawi

[Dalluminum he/him]

You know, sitelen sitelen might work pretty well... sitelen pona looks a little too simple for Rosharan glyphs.

 

Also, as a maintenance thing for everybody: maybe put big images in spoiler tags so they don't take up so much space on the page.

Edited April 4, 2025 by Dalluminum

[jan_Komawi]

sitelen sitelen gives me a headache. lol.

 

how about using a historical sketch and a new one trying for that style....

Edited April 4, 2025 by jan_Komawi