Restoration Games are on Kickstarter right now as they delve into Return To Dark Tower which is an update on a classic board game which featuring an imposing electronic tower!

The game, for one-to-four players, has you taking on the role of mighty heroes who are looking to bring low the villainous entity which dwells within the Dark Tower. The game is controlled by both a companion app and the tower in the centre.

During your turns, you will be taking a number of actions, fighting foes and questing to cleanse the land of corruption whilst the app watches in the background. It will tell you what strange situations arise as you adventure around the world and keep track of combat against the monsters that you'll encounter.

The app then connects via BlueTooth to the tower in the centre of the board. During your turn, the tower will unleash bone-chilling sounds and perhaps take on a mind of its own, dropping corruption from one of its many doors into your kingdom, slowly destroying buildings that you are using to bolster your hero.

It will also glow and reveal glyphs across its many faces, making combat harder or throwing more spanners in the works as the game rumbles on. It can also rotate (inside) and move the glyphs around so you're never sure where the darkness is going to fall next.

I was somewhat wary of both the app and the tower, to begin with, but I have come round to their ideas now. The app itself takes away a lot of the bookkeeping and works nicely for a one-session format. Also, they have mentioned that they will continue to support it indefinitely plus they will make it open to others to take on and use in the future if they ever need to step away from the project.

Also, the tower itself might seem like an ostentatious dice chucker and in a way it is, but I think it has a rather unique quality to it and it genuinely seems to have a fun effect on gameplay whenever I've watched people play it in demos. So, big and expensive? Yes. Cool? Certainly.

Make sure to check out the rules for yourself HERE as they will give you an idea as to whether or not the game is for you.

Expansion Content

As well as what is available in the core box (which I think is more than enough) the folks at Restoration Games have also shown off some expansions. Firstly, we have the Alliances set which offers up two new heroes, new allies which will provide you with quests to undertake and more treasure to find on your adventures.

This seems like a pretty good little box which offers up some simple new options to expand your content. Obviously, we've not played the game with the original four heroes at all yet but it's always nice to have more options so it's not the same heroes battling against the Dark Tower each time around.

Also, if you just need more plastic then you can also get yourself the Dark Horde box which features miniature replacements for the tokens in the core box.

The miniatures are from the very talented Punga Miniatures who have been doing some wonderful work over the past few years.

I do like the plastic offerings they have thrown into the mix, especially since they are scaled to 28mm meaning they could be used away from this game, but I genuinely don't think you need to add more to the core game they have presented if you don't want to.

The artwork by Qistina Khalidah is absolutely superb across the tokens, heroes and such and so I don't think you need the plastic to replace them. But, it's always up to you!

So, could Return To Dark Tower be for you?