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Sometimes, though, we get fooled by superficial characteristics into making comparisons that upon closer inspection make little sense. Yes, Villa Paletti and Menara both have wooden vertical columns that hold up horizontal floors, but the similarities between the two games ends with that sentence.
In Villa Paletti, which won the Spiel des Jahres (Germany's game of the year award) in 2002, you start with all of the columns in play, and you're trying to make it difficult for others to place and move columns as more horizontal floors are added to the growing structure; you want an opponent to make a mistake, knock the whole thing over, and lose so that you can win.
In Menara, each of up to four players has a personal supply of columns, and you introduce them into the structure a bit at a time based on challenge cards that you choose to reveal, with players trying to collectively manage their column supplies and the growth of the structure so that you can keep growing with little chance of the tower taking a tumble.
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Thus, in some ways, Menara is like a cooperative hand-management game, but with players holding columns instead of cards. You never want to be stuck in a situation in which you can't complete the challenge because then you — all of you — will be forced to make the tower one level taller in order to win. You can trade columns, which come in five colors, with one another through a central camp, possibly increasing your odds for having something playable in hand and possibly tanking those odds when you face a challenge that requires you to move columns within the structure instead of adding to it. (You can read about the history of the game in Richtberg's Menara designer diary on BGG News.)
While the game is simple at first glance — place columns on floors, then add new floors, then more columns — the considerations you must keep in mind during play multiply quickly: You want columns in hand to place on the matching open spaces of the floors, but with thirty yellow columns and only six blue, you won't always have what you need. You want to be able to complete at least one floor as some of the challenge cards require you to do this. You don't necessarily want to complete a floor because the floors are double-sided, with different arrangements of colored building spaces on each side — and given your current column holdings in the game, requiring you to place, say, four red columns might be as difficult as shoving said columns up your nose.
All of this column management talk says nothing about the need to build something structurally stable enough that you can continue to build upon it in future turns. You start with the challenge of building a tower 3-5 levels high, but each time you fail a challenge or fail to place a floor above ground level, you must go one level higher — and merely reaching that height isn't enough as the game doesn't end until you run out of floors or columns or challenge cards, and only at the point do you see whether or not you win.
The one flaw in Menara as published is that the game also ends if a floor is knocked out of the tower, but losing a floor doesn't automatically lose you the game. If your tower is still tall enough, then you win. This situation has happened to me twice in seven games played on a review copy from Zoch, and I've seen it happen two other times. Players are shocked to discover that they still won despite part of their tower collapsing as the feelings created by those two situations — failure and victory — mix like chili and ice cream. Sure, both of those foods are wonderful, but you don't want to experience them together.
Richtberg told me that this rule exists because Zoch aims its titles at a family market, and they want to increase the odds of a family winning at the game despite the unsteady hands that younger players might bring to the table. For gamers, though, he recommends that a dropped tower equals an immediate loss. Fallen columns can and should be replaced, and as long as you do that, you can keep playing, but when a floor hits the floor, you're floored.
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