LOTS: A Three Dimensional Game of Competitive Tower Building

A clever blend of light strategy and spatial puzzling, LOTS has players competing to score the most points with each block they add to the tower.

Roll the die, collect building pieces, and watch the tower grow! Earn points for grouping colored pieces together and completing floors.

Gameplay

The board is placed in the center of the table and players choose a footprint card to play with. These come in a range of difficulty, and each shows a pattern with boundaries within which you will be building a tower. No matter how high the tower grows, the sides of it can never reach out beyond this floor pattern.

Players put their meeples at the start of the scoring track that runs around the board and then separate the building blocks by color. Each player starts the game with one colored piece. On your turn you roll the die, which shows a colored piece that you then add to your supply. You must now choose which of your two pieces you will add to the building. If you knock over any piece while adding to the tower, you score zero points this turn. If you finish a floor (adding a piece so that there are no longer any empty spaces on a level of the tower) you score five points. You also score two points for each piece of a matching color that the new piece touches.

As you move your meeple along the scoring track, there are two types of rewards you can win for being the last meeple to reach certain spaces. You can gain a purple cube, which you can add to the tower on a future turn in addition to whichever other piece you add (purple cubes do not score points for matching colors). You can also earn a crew card which can be played at specific times during the game to earn you bonus points.

The game ends once one player reaches a certain number of points or once three of the five piles of pieces run out. The player with the most points wins.

Review

LOTS is a fun, light-weight dexterity game. The stacking element is satisfying but uncomplicated, and you have some legitimately interesting choices as you decide which of your two pieces to use each turn, and often whether to attempt trickier stacking attempts for more points or settle for an easy, guaranteed move.

The catch up mechanic of earning cards or cubes helps to keep the game interesting for everyone. They’re effective bonuses but not overly so, so that it still feels satisfying to win if you’ve earned them and doesn’t feel unfair to the players who are in the lead. There can even be some strategy involved in whether you attempt to hang back to claim them or try to maximize your potential points. It is possible to just run into some bad luck when it comes to dice rolls, or be presented with a turn in which you just don’t have any particularly interesting choices, however turns are fast and you won’t be spending a lot of time waiting for your turn to roll around again.

The game takes up minimal table space and the box is fairly small, making it surprisingly portable for a dexterity game. We also really appreciated the artwork, particularly the inclusion of a disabled character on some of the cards. It’s becoming more common to find board games that include a wide range of genders and ethnicities, but artwork that includes disabilities is still fairly rare.

There are several ways to adjust difficulty, from multiple footprint cards (some of which are quite challenging and really test your spatial sense) to tips for playing with younger children. There is also a solo mode that was quite enjoyable.

LOTS is intuitive to play and teach, has fast setup times, and is a fun addition to the dexterity genre. Its gameplay is enjoyably tactile, and is a good fit for families.

Pros: Good catch-up mechanic, ability to adjust difficulty, fun solo mode

Cons: Due to luck you can have a turn with nothing interesting to do

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