Cloudspire is about as close to video games as a board game can get, and something publisher Chip Theory Games is really good at. Cloudspire is a tabletop tower defense game that sees players upgrading units, moving across a map, and taking down opposing enemies. The question is… is it is any good?
Cloudspire is a game for 1-4 players with each player playing as a specific faction that has its own abilities, troops, and more. Players will spend turns deploying troops, upgrading troops and towers, and pushing forward across the map attempting to take over an opposing players fortress. Each faction is asymmetrical, which means factions have unique buildings, unique units, unique abilities and more.
While there are solo and cooperative scenarios in the box, I’ve purely played this game competitive. The game is typically played across 4 waves, or when one player takes over another player’s fortress. The game is made up of hexes across multiple neoprene mats, and these hexes have roads for traveling on, spires, landmarks and more. The beginning of each round is purely preparation: read an event card, collect your resources for that round, purchasing items from the market (items, minions, schematics (blueprints), and new earth tiles you can use to change the landscape of the world), and build out onto the board.
Building will take up a lot of your playtime, and this is where your very detailed player reference will come in handy. Advancing your fortress – getting upgrades essentially – is really important and can provide you with a ton of benefits down the road. After building, you will prepare your troops using a set amount of Command Points each round. These can be spent to deploy your hero or troops, either as individual units or as groups.
What makes this game a bit unique is that some of the game is self-driven. While your heroes are free to move around the map as they see fit, your minions/troops move along rounds a set number of spaces, always pushing towards an enemy’s fortress. Players will be able to engage with spaces and chips on the board, but ultimately want to move towards their opponents and capture their fortresses.
Cloudspire is an incredibly expensive game, coming in at $149.99 USD for just the base game. A recent crowd funding campaign has just ended, adding even more content to the game that you can purchase from Chip Theory’s website. We will be reviewing those factions soon. For now, though, let’s focus in on the base game.
This is an incredibly tactile and strategic game, with little room for luck and lots of room for strategic movements. Knowing when to advance, when to defend, when to build, and when to save is incredibly important to your overall success. How you use your faction will also influence the game you play, and while that is going to be attractive to a lot of people, many will find this overwhelming.
As with any game that has asymmetric factions, having a good understanding of all the factions in the game is really important to winning. Unfortunately, the reality of this type of game is that it is not enough to just understand what your faction can do. Without knowledge of other factions, how can you properly prepare? This problem isn’t too big of an issue when everyone playing has the same level of knowledge, but when you mix Cloudspire super fans and new players, it will result in a pretty unbalanced and uneven experience.
With that in mind, this is one of those board games where you get as much out of it as you put into it. Cloudspire is not a one-and-done board game experience. Not only are you spending a pretty penny to play this, but you really won’t experience everything this game has to offer until you’ve played numerous games. Each faction feels wildly different, which definitely adds to the replayability of the experience; it also makes it more complicated, though, so doing pre-game research on other factions is almost a must if you want to really enjoy your time with this one.
None of this is to say that Cloudspire isn’t a fantastic experience, and the phase-to-phase moments aren’t actually all that difficult. Teaching HOW Cloudspire works isn’t the problem – it’s the strategy that is going to overwhelm many. For those up to the challenge, however, there is a ton here to dig your teeth into. The forced movement of troops towards enemy fortresses is brilliant, and definitely impacts how you play the game, when you deploy, etc. Pair that with your more free-moving hero, and you can really do damage when synched properly.
I also love that this system forces conflict to happen; so often in these types of games, conflict only happens when players want it to happen, and at times, that means games lack elements that make it the most fun. With forced conflict, it changes how you think about the things you are building, the resources you are spending, and the command points you might be wasting. Cloudspire is almost all strategy, and almost no luck – that’s what I want from my heavier games.
This is a great experience, and worth every dollar you’ll spend if you like what it delivers. With such a high cost of entry, it’s worth exploring reviews and videos to see if it is something you would like. For me, it was an instant hit, and one I’ll hold onto for years to come.
Adam has been writing about video games since 2014 and board games since 2018. If he's not rooting for the Toronto Maple Leafs or Toronto FC, he definitely has a controller in his hand - probably playing on a Nintendo platform - or is sitting at a table playing a board game. Adam also has firm opinions on a few key topics: there are much better board games than Settlers of Catan, and Nintendo doesn't need to compete with Sony and Microsoft.
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