Katamino Tower Review

boardgamequest.com:

Katamino Tower—a solo puzzle game by Marko Pavlović, published by Gigamic—is, without a doubt, and by far, the game I have found the most difficult to put away. Not so much because it was so fun that I could not stop playing, but rather because it is literally impossible to fit back into the box it comes with unless you solve one of the final puzzles.

This is problematic, in that Katamino Tower’s strength is in offering a series of increasingly difficult 15-minute-or-so brain-burning puzzles, which would be perfect for a one-shot session between work projects, or while waiting for family to be ready to go out for lunch, etc. But because it can’t really get put away (unless you get a separate shoe box to store the pieces in), it makes it hard to think of it as a filler game. Nevertheless, if you surmount this logistical conundrum, and if you like to feel really dumb for 15 minutes and then overly proud of yourself for the rest of the day once you solve a puzzle, you might really, really dig Katamino Tower.

Katamino Tower is simple in concept. The game comes in square box in which there is a cylindric cardboard tube, in which there is a natural wood-stained base with a dowel on which colored wooden pieces have been assembled to form a tower of 5 units in height. It looks fairly reminiscent of the Fisher Price baby toy we always called the Donut Tower, although the Katamino version is cylindric rather than pyramidic in shape. The game also includes a small rulebook and some rather cryptic cards.

Once you remove the cardboard tube and take the colored pieces off of the dowel, the cards start to make sense. They present a series of challenges, from (supposedly) easy to (in fact) very difficult.

In addition to identifying the puzzle by its difficulty (which is essentially the height of the tower you are being asked to build), the card also tells you which of the colored pieces to use. You then use these pieces to make a tower of the puzzle’s assigned height. If you have