Can You Build the Katamino Tower? It Won't Be Easy!

Pick a challenge card, select the necessary pieces, and see if you can build up the colorful, wooden tower.

Katamino Tower is a puzzle published by Gigamic, designed for 1-2 players with a time given on the box of 20 minutes (although this time will vary a lot based on how tricky you find it!).

Gameplay

The game consists of a peg attached to a circular base and fifteen pieces of five different colors. Each color has a ring piece and two pentomino pieces (a shape made by joining five squares together).

There are three ways you can play the game. In beginner mode, you take all pieces of two colors and try to fit them around the peg so that it builds a perfect (no gaps) two-level tower. Next, you take three colors and do the same with a three-level tower. You can continue to increase the difficulty by adding another set of colored pieces and another level to the tower until you have completed a perfect five-level tower.

In expert mode, you take a challenge card. The challenge cards come in levels of difficulty which correspond to the number of levels in the tower. The challenge cards tell you which pieces of which colors you must build the tower with, and has a solution guide on the back of the card.

The final mode is a cooperative mode for two players. The players take turns adding a piece to the tower. Once a piece is placed, it cannot be moved. A complete tower level (with no gaps) is worth one point. Players score an additional bonus point for each subsequent level that has no gaps.

Review

Katamino Tower is a simple puzzle, in the sense that it’s simple to know what you’re supposed to do. But the puzzle itself can be quite challenging. Different brains work differently, so it’s possible someone can approach this and find it much easier than we did. But hard isn’t always bad, and it was a fun evening spent with this.

The cooperative mode wasn’t very enjoyable, however. Working together to solve one of the challenge cards was more fun, although this game works best as a solo endeavor. It can be pleasant to work on a challenge card while listening to an audiobook or watching a movie. It fits nicely as the same kind of activity as a jigsaw puzzle. In that mode, it was quite engaging to work on, and I enjoyed the challenge more.

The biggest annoyance about the game is the box. It’s designed for the tower to fit in perfectly, but only when it’s been put together. This means that you either have to force everything in there a bit messily and throw out some of the inserts, or use one of the challenge card’s solutions to put it together perfectly, which isn’t all that easy in itself. Trying to decipher the solution keys is not that intuitive given that it’s a 3D object.

Overall, Katamino Tower is enjoyable, colorful, and quite tactile. The pieces are really well made. It is satisfying when the tower finally comes together — so, if you enjoy tough puzzles, you can have a lot of fun with this one. But it’s best as a solo endeavor.

Pros: Nice wooden pieces, quite challenging, nice solo activity

Cons: Solution key is not easy to read, box is terrible, cooperative mode isn’t necessary

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