Boardnado revisits: King of Tokyo

 

... At the same time ...

 

... And they didn't exactly like each other ...

 

... Or any standing buildings in Tokyo for that matter.

 

This is, I believe, the premise for 'King of Tokyo'. A game where you are a giant, powerful beastie set on total destruction and some good ol' fashioned monster bashing.

 

Now I very much like this game. I know my sister doesn't, but you shouldn't listen to anything she says anyway! Let me tell you a little bit more about why I think it's good and what you can expect when you play this yourself.

 

 

 

The goal of the game is, of course, to become the ultimate and undisputed 'King' of Tokyo. You do this by either proving you are the most adept at destroying things (aka. Be the first to achieve 20 destruction/victory points) or killing your competition. Yes, this sadly means that we are dealing with an elimination game and sometimes that can be a little frustrating. I find however that 'deaths' often happen near the end of the game and that most people stick around to root for their favourite 'monster-that-is-not-yourself'. You can keep score on your own personalised scorecard and the card is quite efficient at doing what it needs to do. You end up having to add and substract a lot of points during play and it's quite nice to not have to do it on a piece of paper, but rather on something artsy.

 

When it's your turn you roll the black set of dice up to three times and see which symbols you get. There are 6 symbols: Hearts, Points (1.2 and 3), Energies and Claws. They're pretty straightforward: 'Hearts' heal you up and give you life back, 'Energies' allow you to buy cards which give you special abilities or indicate events, 'Claws' indicate damage you do to another player and if you get three of the same number you get that many Points. It's fairly simple.

 

What's not simple is actually throwing the dice you need, keeping those you want,  re-rolling the ones you don't want and having that fit into your strategy .... all the while dealing with other players that want to kill you.

 

Or sometimes you end up as one of my friends who consistently threw all the hearts and claws he needed and refused to die! Damn him and his consistant dice-rolling!

 

After throwing your dice, you resolve your outcomes and decide whether you want to buy any ability cards. There are two types of cards: those with active abilites and throwaways that you have to immediately use. The active ones are usually special traits that you can give to your monsters, like wings, telepathy or a dedicated news team. The throwaways indicate special events that occur like an evacuation or a pair of fighter jets that you demolish.

 

You usually want to keep an eye on which ability cards are on the table as they can sometimes give you the edge you need. You can also refresh the pool by paying two energy. One of my favourite abilities is 'Total Devastation' which gives you an insane amount of victory points IF you can manage to throw all 6 dice results perfectly (I'm still trying to achieve this mystical dice-rolling feat).

 

The game further revolves around the little gameboard in the centre depicting downtown Tokyo (and should you play with more than 4 players: Tokyo Bay). Your creatures are arrayed in a circle surrounding it and are considered to be in the 'agglomeration' of the city, doing their destructive stuff and hanging around with the locals. The first person to roll a claw gets to move to Tokyo and immediately gets a victory point for doing so. Furthermore if that monster stays downtown for a full round it gets 2 more points. The problem with that sweet deal is as soon as you enter the centre of the city you become a target for all the other monsters and every time THEY roll claws you get a hit to your lifepoints. You also can't heal while you're down there. To balance this out you get to do damage to every single monster in the agglomeration whenever you throw a claw.

 

So staying in the middle is usually something you want to think about and a lot of players I've met try to avoid it, which might be odd for a 'King of the hill'-styled game. You can only leave whenever you take damage and then whoever dealt that damage to you will take your place (and will start to accrue victory points). This can lead to some clever strategising on when you want to be in Tokyo and who else you want to go there if they so happen to (accidentally?) attack you.

 

 

 

Now I've read other reviews that at this point say that you will have no fun whatsoever if you are all conservative players. I respectfully disagree with that. After playing over 50+ games and showcasing the demo at one of Outpost's many events I have yet to find a player who is so conservative that he or she doesn't want to mess at least a little with his/her friends and fellow participants. Even if you could find such players we once had a 'let's see how long we can stay out of Tokyo'-match and we had loads of fun with that (the record stands at 7 rounds if you want to know).

 

This game does have a few 'flaws' which show up when you buy the standard game. It's very luck based: If you're not into the theme or don't like having all your decisions dictated by the roll of the dice this is not for you. Additionaly our trusty movie stars Godzilla, King Kong and Cthulhu .... I mean, erm, Gigasaur, The King, Kraken and others (licensing!) aren't 'special' in any way. There is nothing to differentiate one from another. The good thing about this is that it doesn't really matter which one you have, but when you get attached to your beastie you do want it to be special in some way. Sure you can buy ability cards but they aren't really 'tailored' to your monster. Throwing hearts is often meaningless since you can't heal while controlling the centre or when on full health making it the most frustrating icon to get sometimes.

 

 

 

They did address the latter two issues in the 'Power Up!' expansion. It adds a small 'mutation' deck to each monster with themed abilities and every time you roll triple hearts you get to pick a 'mutation' to improve your monster. They're all pretty well balanced and very different, for example Kraken becomes a healer who can avoid and absorb a lot of damage. The King gets a lot of cards to instantly jump to Tokyo city and keep it, Alienoid is a master at acquiring ability cards, etc.

 

The expansion adds another layer of depth since the mutation deck increases your choices and makes it less painful if you happen to roll a lot of hearts at a bad time. As a bonus you get a giant panda-monster, which is pretty cool. There are various ways to draw cards from the mutation deck ranging from blindly drawing one, to picking one of two or just tossing them all into a pile .... depending on the level of chaos you want.

 

Honestly, I would have liked if this mechanic had been included into the base game from day one because it is a very subtle way to improve the game without messing with player interaction or the luck-based mechanic of it. It's easy to learn too since all you add is two extra rules. I highly recommend getting this if you are a fan of the base game.

 

Since we're talking about it: the second expansion, which is Halloween themed, adds 'costume' cards to the ability deck which give your monsters something to dress up in and extra power (For example while wearing the zombie outfit you cannot die). It has a similar mechanic to 'Power Up!' where you can 'steal' a costume from a monster if you happen to throw triple 'claws' and are able to pay the energy cost for it. There are also two very cool 'creepy' monsters (Pumpkin Jack and Boogey Woogey) included which come with a 'mutation' deck so you can play them if you own the first expansion.

 

If you're a fan of Halloween like me and you want some cool extra baddies to play with this is of good value to you, but it isn't really as 'required' as I think the first expansion was.

 

 

 

Even if you don't go for the two add-ons 'King of Tokyo' is a solid addition to any board game collection. Me and my friends usually go for it if we're interested in playing something 'more' than a filler game, but less than a really time-heavy investment. It creates a whirlpool of dice-throwing chaos and sheer dumb luck with a touch of strategy added in and it allowes you to mess with your friends as giant, powerful, bad-ass monsters all the while grinding Tokyo into a fine layer of dust (Poor Japan!).

 

And isn't that what life is all about?