Return to Dark Tower
A cooperative or competitive sequel to the 1981 electronic board game.
Return to Dark Tower is a board game for one to four players, created and released by Restoration Games. It continues the story of the 1981 Milton Bradley title, Dark Tower. In this sequel, players either work together or compete as they manage kingdoms around a central Tower, using heroes to gather supplies, fight monsters, and grow stronger. Over the course of the game, the Tower spreads corruption across the land, which players must remove, while also trying to discover and defeat the enemy hiding inside the Tower to win. The game uses a circular mat split into four sections for the kingdoms, with a Bluetooth-enabled Tower in the middle that connects to an app controlling the game.
The design team included several well-known board game creators, such as Isaac Childres, who made Gloomhaven, and Rob Daviau, who co-designed Pandemic: Legacy. Development took three years before a Kickstarter campaign launched in January 2020. That campaign was a major success, collecting more than $4 million on an initial goal of $850,000. The game came out in 2022. A second printing in August 2022 raised $2 million through BackerKit.
**Gameplay**
The story behind Return to Dark Tower is that the Tower, once destroyed, has been rebuilt over many years by an unknown evil and now threatens to corrupt everything. The main goal is for players to fight off the Tower’s attacks, figure out which foe lives inside, and then break in and kill it. One to four players sit around a circular game mat representing the realm, with a plastic electronic obelisk—the Tower—at the center. This Tower uses Bluetooth to connect to an app, which makes it move during certain events and handles all the game’s organization. Each player controls their own kingdom, which takes up one quarter of the mat and includes fortresses, communities, and locations that can provide resources or serve as sites for quests and battles. Each player also controls a hero, who can move between locations each turn and starts with special items and abilities that can be improved, as shown on a special card. At the end of a turn, the player drops a plastic skull (representing corruption) into an opening on top of the Tower. When the Tower releases these skulls into a kingdom, that player must place them on their structures and use future turns to fight the corruption.
Quick Facts
- Designer
- Rob Daviau / Isaac Childres / Noah Cohen / Brian Neff / Justin D. Jacobson / Tim Burrell-Saward
- Publisher
- Restoration Games
- Illustrator
- Qistina Khalidah / Garrett Kaida / Jason D. Kingsley
- Players
- 1–4
- Playing Time
- 100–120 minutes
- Skills
- Tactics · Cooperation · Logistics · Resource management
- Genre
- Board game · Role-playing game · Cooperative gameplay
- Date
- 2022
Facts from the source article.
Lore & Background
Return to Dark Tower was developed by Restoration Games, a company founded in 2016 that specializes in restoring out-of-production board games with new features and technology. The design team included Isaac Childres, creator of Gloomhaven, and Rob Daviau, creator of Pandemic: Legacy, along with Noah Cohen, Brian Neff, and Restoration Games president Justin D. Jacobson. The game was in development for three years prior to its Kickstarter campaign, with an emphasis on modifying the rules to focus on cooperation and developing the game's technology. The tower design was led by Tim Burrell-Saward, designer of Beasts of Balance, and required extensive research and testing for interior chambers and hatches to store skulls.
Reader's Guide
Return to Dark Tower represents a significant revival of a classic electronic board game, updating the 1981 original with modern technology and cooperative gameplay. Its successful crowdfunding campaigns—raising over $4 million on Kickstarter and $2 million on BackerKit—demonstrate strong demand for restored and updated board games. The game's integration of a Bluetooth-connected tower and companion app reflects a trend in tabletop gaming toward hybrid digital-physical experiences. By involving prominent designers like Isaac Childres and Rob Daviau, Restoration Games leveraged the reputations of two of the most popular modern board games to attract backers. The game's release in 2022 was noted by Smithsonian as one of the best board games of that year, highlighting the enduring appeal of the original Dark Tower concept. Its cooperative and competitive modes, along with a standard playtime of 100–120 minutes, position it as a mid-weight strategy game for groups.
Did You Know?
- The original Dark Tower (1981) was sold at $55–$65, significantly higher than most board games at the time.
- The tower in Return to Dark Tower connects via Bluetooth to an app that prompts it to move and organizes the game.
- The game's Kickstarter campaign reached its $850,000 goal within four hours of launching on January 14, 2020.
- A second printing in 2022 raised $2 million on BackerKit.
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