The more insightful of my readers should have realized, after studying the rules, that playing Tower Dream involves a lot of natural number counting. You have to count Landmarks to determine Company Level, Floor price, and Owner Bonus, and count properties to determine Line Ownership, Line Fee, and Company Ownership. You also have to sum up property values to determine total Wealth. And you have to do these not just once; you need to do it all the time. You want to know how far you are away from Line Ownership, or how much you are ahead above the Company Sub-Owner, before making one of those important game decisions. It can easily be imagined that all this counting would bog the game down and render it unplayable with conventional board game equipment.
Of course the SuperFamicom version does all this counting for the players. The computer counts and summerizes the information in a neat presentation, easily available at the touch of a button or so. For example, when the player is choosing the location to place a Landmark or build Floors, he can move the cursor off the Lands onto a Road space, and the property count of all four players on the Line will be displayed.
Also, the number of players in this game is very inflexible. Tower Dream is designed to be a four-player game; changing the number of players would disrupt the fine game balance. Adding more players will, in the least, increase Line Fee income while making Company Ownership more difficult. (You can’t, say, lower the Line Fee rate to counter that; that would make Line Fees less effective in depriving opponents of fluid cash.) For this reason, computer players are a welcome option. By the way, the computer players play a decent game, though they do not always have the far sight of a human player.
Please do not try to make your own equipment for this game. That is not the purpose of my presentation.
Readers in North America who really want to try the game have several options: