Wizards of the Coast’s latest set of Dungeon Tiles—DU4 Arcane Towers—released yesterday, and adds the long-awaited curved tiles to the Dungeon Tiles lineup! Aesthetically, this set matches any of the other Dungeon Tiles sets that WotC has produced; unfortunately, its utility is marred a bit by sometimes giving you only half of what you need to produce a functional round tower.

The Good: The tiles are, as usual, drawn and accented beautifully. The set adds curved and rounded tiles to the existing Dungeon Tiles mix, making it probably the most innovative set to date. Arcane Towers also adds something else not seen in any previous set: an elevator. The new set also expands the selection of 3×3 tiles and arcane accents, and features rooftop tiles with battlements. The spiral staircase tiles might seem redundant at first, but when you notice the subtle differences, you see how nicely the artist has executed these tiles.

The Bad: On a few tiles, the obverse and reverse seem redundant. Specifically, I don’t understand why you would need identical ladders on the opposite sides of a 1×1 tile.

The Ugly: You need two sets to build any but the most basic complete circle. All of the “sample dungeons” on the inside back cover require two sets.

This new set adds a few innovative features and offers a lot of interesting details to spark your imagination and decorate your gaming table. I highly recommend that DMs who use the Dungeon Tiles line purchase two copies each, to give you maximum flexibility in tower design—one copy only gets you halfway there (accounting for the lack of a fifth star), but a third copy adds little value. ★★★★

I won’t take the time here to go into a lot of detail about individual tiles, because I’ve already listed their various features on my Dungeon Tiles Index—check it out for a tile-by-tile description of this set’s contents. Here, I’ll just highlight a couple of the set’s strengths and weaknesses, and identify my favorite tiles.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first: in order to build any of the sample dungeons printed inside the foldaround cover, you’ll need to buy two sets of Arcane Towers. The big hype about Arcane Towers has been, as you may know, the inclusion of curved pieces. Specifically, one set gives you four 90° arcs (defining one-quarter of a full circle) with six-square sides, such that placing all four corner-to-corner yields a circle 12 squares (60 feet) in diameter. You also get four curved pieces tracing 90° arcs, but only two squares wide, so that placing all four end to end yields a hollow circle two squares wide with a 12-square hollow space in the middle.

You can build these layouts with just one set of Arcane Towers

When I pulled the shrinkwrap off my Arcane Towers yesterday and started looking through the tiles, I was delighted to see the battlements on some of the round tiles, and I thought the tiles with windows were a nice touch, as well. However, you can’t build a complete circle of either type using just one set of Arcane Towers, because you generally only get two copies, not four, of any one design.

You need two sets of Arcane Towers to build either of these layouts

This shortcoming does not sour me on the set, because I usually buy two copies of each Dungeon Tiles set as a matter of course. However, I do think it’s the sort of thing you might want to know about before purchasing the product.

WotC wisely included four tiles—two “right-oriented” and two “left-oriented”—that make it easy to link the rounded tiles to squared-off ones. At first, seeing two tiles with spiral staircases on obverse and reverse just elicited a “Huh?” from me, but upon a second look, I realized that each spiral staircase tile offers an “descending” staircase on one side (with the stairs curling around below one square of stone floor) and an “ascending” staircase on one side (with great use of transparency to show the staircase’s ascent to the next level)—and that one tile has the staircases going clockwise, the other counterclockwise. I was very glad to see wooden staircases offered in this set, though they reminded me again of how much I want WotC to produce a set of wooden interiors. At first, I wasn’t too keen on the tiles that show “pre-search” on one side and “post-search” on the other, but they’re growing on me. My favorite tile in the set, though, has to be the elevator tile; one side of this 3×3 tile features a metal elevator platform, complete with winch, while the other side features an empty elevator shaft. I could probably have lived without the tiles that just sport arcane runes—but then, the set is called Arcane Towers, and not everybody who buys Arcane Towers already owns Arcane Corridors, and the runes are 3×3 … okay, I can see the point of including the runes.

This set really adds a lot to my Dungeon Tiles collection; if you already like Dungeon Tiles, you should certainly love this set, unless you’re really put off by needing to buy two sets to make a 360° crenellated tower.