Ah the eternal question: form vs function. We all want our board games to play amazingly, but many of us also value a great table presence. In the past, we’ve covered games that have amazing production values (Cthulhu Wars, Fire in the Hole), including some that took that to a fault (Tang Garden).
Today, we are looking at a dexterity game that seeks to be a display piece in your home. Something you can keep out of the box 24/7 on display because it just looks so pretty. Moku Tower, published by Mokuomo, successfully ran a Kickstarter for their wooden stacking game back in 2021 and it’s now in backers hands. So how does this pretty wooden gameplay? Let’s find out!
Gameplay Overview:
The goal of Moku Tower is to be the first player to 25 points. On your turn, you must draw a Starting Position card, which will determine the blocks you need to stack on the platform. You can also, optionally, turn over any Extra Pieces cards or Super Jackpot cards. The extra pieces card does just what it sounds like, giving you more pieces to stack and more points to earn. The Super Jackpot Cards are a bit wackier, causing you to take your turn with various hindrances, such as using one hand or standing on one foot.
Oh, and you have to do this all while a 1-minute sand timer is running. If you manage to stack everything perfectly, you flip the timer over and it’s the next player’s turn to do all of that. If you fail, then the cards you were working on are discarded and the next player goes.
Finally, each player starts with 2 “special function cards”, which introduce both ways to mess with your opponents and also ways to make things easier for you.
Game Experience:
The box of Moku Tower is labeled “Game With Art” logo, and that’s pretty spot on. Moku Tower looks beautiful. From the irregular wooden blocks, to the artfully designed sand timer, to the minimalist-looking cards, everything about this game gives off impressive visuals. So on that front, the publishers succeed. You’d have no issues leaving a tower of these wooden blocks on your end table. Well as long as you don’t have little kids like it do, in which case the pieces would go missing in about 30 seconds.
Unfortunately, despite amazing visuals, the gameplay in Moku Tower struggled to keep up. The first issue we ran into was deciphering the rocks. The game comes with 10 wooden rocks, made of 7 types of wood (3 are duplicate materials, but in a smaller size). The game asks you to use specific blocks when you are building the tower, but good luck figuring out which is which, especially while a 1-minute timer is running. The wood types are just too similar. We had 3 people spend about 10 minutes debating which wood was which before we played and still weren’t sure if we got it right. The publisher really needed to either carve/burn some insignias on the rocks for easier identification or use wood with drastically different visuals (zebra wood, ebony, cedar, etc..). As it is now, we just had to house rule to grab any block when stacking, because we had no idea what they all were.
But once you get into stacking, the game is a lot harder than it appears. The rocks are all irregularly shaped, so getting one to balance on another is no easy task. And if you happen to turn over an Extra Pieces card that gives you 4 more to add, you’ll be in for a rough go. I think the combination of a short timer, wood identification, and trying to find a level side of an irregularly shaped piece is probably already overkill. But then you add in the Special Function cards and everything goes out the window. Get ready for a healthy dose of “take that” in a game that really doesn’t need it.
While the different decks of cards were a good idea, we also felt that they added a bit too much unnecessary randomness to the game. The Extra Blocks card might give you 1 to add, or 4. The Special Function Cards can be as benign as giving you extra time, or as broken as taking all the points your opponent just earned. In one game, I managed to stack a 7 point tower, only for my opponent to steal all of those points with the play of a card. That was almost 1/3 of my score.
Finally, we ran into quite a few production/translation issues with the game. It was clear that English wasn’t the game’s first language, which normally isn’t an issue, but the translation left us scratching our heads at times as we tried to figure out what the game meant. The rulebook was also a bit vague in areas, causing us to take our best guess in certain areas of the game. And as a random aside, the logo on one box side is printed backward, which I assume was an accident?
Final Thoughts:
In the battle of form over function, form clearly wins out here. There is no doubt that Moku Tower looks fantastic. But the gameplay just doesn’t hold up. With the rules as written, we were barely able to even play the game. Deciphering the wood pieces was next to impossible, and some of the cards left us trying to figure out what we were supposed to do. This is a game that clearly could have used some more development time. Which is too bad, because deep down, there is a fun game here, it’s just buried by all the missteps along the way.
Final Score: 2 Stars – A great looking game that’s close to unplayable with the rules as written, but a few house rules can at least let you get a feel of what it could have been.
Hits:
• Beautiful looking pieces
• Challenging gameplay
Misses:
• Very hard to identify the wooden pieces
• Too much randomness
• Confusing cards and instruction
• “Take That” mechanic is not necessary
Source: Board Game Quest
