10 Minute Heist: The Wizard's Tower - Will You Make it Out with the Most Treasure?

Steal from a wizard and collect magical objects, while competing against your opponents to become the most prestigious thief in the land.

10 Minute Heist: The Wizard's Tower plays in ten minutes but packs a surprising amount of strategic choices into that time frame.

Gameplay

Players are thieves, stealing from a wizard’s tower. Each player is dealt a treasure card that they keep secret until the end of the game. The wizard’s tower is created by laying out eight rows of five cards each. These cards are placed face up, except for the card in the bottom right.

All players start on the top row of cards. On your turn you may move to a card on the row your character currently occupies or onto a card on any row below you. You may never move up a row. Once you move to a card, you collect it and add it to your haul. Your haul is always kept face up for other players to see. Some cards have actions that you take when adding it to your stash. Some cards also have a curse on them. At the end of the game, players can earn points for having the least curses and lose points for having the most. After you move and take a card, your turn ends.

On your turn, rather than moving to a card, you can choose to exit the tower in which case you remove your character from the tower and will not take any more actions during the game. Players earn extra points for being the first and the second person to leave the tower and lose points for being the last out.

There are five different card suits that treasure comes in (plus a wild suit). Each treasure also has a number value. Once all players have exited the tower, players score points for such things as having the most value in each suit, and for having the most items of specific value amounts. The player with the most points wins.

Review

10 Minute Heist: The Wizard's Tower plays in ten minutes, just as advertised. With one decision to make each turn, play moves quickly and you’re out of the tower before you know it, counting up your treasure. But that speed doesn’t stop your decisions from being weighty, as you choose which cards to move to and when to drop down to the next floor. You can skip entire floors if you want to, if there are some cards down below you think will help you, but you have to be careful since you can never head back up again.

Scoring is handled well. The fact that players always know which cards everyone has collected means you always know who is ahead in which categories and you can use that to help you make your decisions, but the fact that each player also has one card that is secret until the end of the game, means there can always be a surprise.

The card powers and curses add a nice extra level to the game, giving you some interesting extra choices to make as you go. Also, in a neat addition that allows you to customize the game a bit, there are two extra scoring tokens that you can write your own scoring goals on. Maybe you want to award extra points for collecting the most books, for example?

There’s a wide range of treasure cards, and you don’t use all of them each game so there’s going to be a lot of variety in the setup of the tower every time you play. The components do take up a lot of table space — otherwise, with its small box and short game time, 10 Minute Heist: The Wizard's Tower would be extremely portable and a great game to take on the go.

A great blend of quick gameplay and strategic decisions, 10 Minute Heist: The Wizard's Tower is both satisfying and fun.

Pros: Strategic decisions paired well with short game time, great scoring system

Cons: Space requirements keep the game from being portable

Disclosure: we received a complimentary review copy of this game.