Description

Description from the publisher:

Lucca is an abstract game where you play tiles (houses) in groups (blocks) and stacks (towers) to dominate the board (city). The board size depends on the level you wish to play - the bigger the board, the deeper the game.

You control a block by controlling the tower of the block and you control the tower by having the top house of the tower. On a standard 8x8 board, you win if, at the start of your turn, your tower is the highest and has a height of at least 8 houses. Alternatively you win by defeating other towers and taking at least 4 sets of prisoners.

Take turns to place one of your own tiles in an empty square or any number of tiles of any color beneath already placed tiles to build a tower.

There may only be one tower in a block and its colors must correspond to the colors of the block, i.e. two black tiles in the block allows two black tiles in the tower.
 
When two blocks grow together, an equal amount of tiles is removed from the two towers, leaving only the strongest tower but potentially with a new controlling color.

The challenge of Lucca is to time the tower building and removal so that your own color prevails in the end.

The unique mechanism of Lucca is the four dimensional thinking where not only the block area and the tower height must be taken into account but also the timing of the removal. All this is accomplished in a pure and elegant setting where luck plays no part.