King of Tokyo Review
“We knew Yahtzee would not be the same. A few people cried; most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu takes on his multi-armed form and says, “now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”
J. Robert Oppenheimer; from the melodramatic trailer for King of Tokyo
Crazed nuclear accidents and testing has given rise to gigantic monsters and, as is traditional, they’ve descended on Tokyo to settle the age old question of who is the King! Obviously the answer is Godzil – I mean Gigasaur – and not that upstart ape running around calling himself that before the game has even started! The height of rudeness. He’ll be getting the claw treatment all right. Goodness, he’s gotten me so riled up I’ve developed a bad case of the nova breath.
Nobody would have believed that merely adding a coating of Kaiju, geek for gigantic Japanese monsters, to the classic dice game Yahtzee could have produced such a hugely entertaining game. But from the moment you pick up those big, chunky, custom dice you’ll have a grin on your face that won’t let up till their last clatter across the table.
The aim is simple: either gather together 20 VPs, tracked on the spinner in each player’s character board, or beat all the other monsters to a pulp, reducing their health (also tracked on those character boards) to zero. How to do this is also simple: roll the dice, and reroll any number of them until you’re either happy, or you’ve rolled three handfuls of dice in total (like I said, Yahtzee). Three sides of the dice feature numbers, 1, 2, and 3, and if you can gather a set of 3 identical numbers, you’ll gain that value in victory points. Any extra matching numbers you roll will add an extra victory point for each such number, so there is always value in chasing those numbers further. That’s the boring (but effective) part.
One of the other faces shows a fist icon. This will let you punch your opponent’s monsters! If you’re outside Tokyo, you’ll hit the monster(s) in Tokyo (and Tokyo Bay, the second region of the central board if you have 5 or more players). The player controlling the monster in Tokyo then has a choice, to retreat, allowing (or more interestingly, forcing) the attacking player to move into Tokyo, or to stick it out, possibly facing another round of punishment from the next monster. Why would you stay? Because if you are still stood in Tokyo at the start of your round, not only do you gain 2 VPs, anytime you roll a fist you damage every other monster at once!
This can be hugely powerful. So powerful that everyone should be trying to stop you pulling it off… and yet everyone will also be trying to pursue their own strategy. Maybe you can convince everyone else to invest the effort in beating up Tokyo’s current occupier, allowing you to steadily accumulate victory points off the dice. This ever-present temptation means that people just won’t act to the benefit of the group. You aren’t just playing a push your luck game with the dice, and your choice of re-rolls, you’re playing a push your luck game with the scheming monsters around the table, otherwise known as your friends.
It is this that raises King of Tokyo above being just a simple dice game. You can plan, you can scheme, you can try and convince your friends you need to gang up on that one guy or he’ll win even though, really, you’re in a much stronger position. You can try and guess what players are hoping to roll and use that. Can you draw a weak opponent into Tokyo to get pummelled by the others? Do you know everyone is too weakened to risk rolling fists, and that you can survive a full turn in Tokyo? But you can never relax because those dice are unpredictable!
“The arrogance of men is thinking dice are in our control and not the other way around. Let them fight”
Ichiro Serizawa; always a hoot at game night.
Of course, this game is subject to luck. It is unavoidable in a dice game! But the game is generally quick enough and light enough that there shouldn’t be hard feelings when the dice turn against you. Instead they offer the glorious highs of snatching victory from a near certain defeat, coupled with the terrible lows when a perfect plan unravels before your eyes. But that, dear reader, is entertainment! It also brings me to another element of the game, which might be a turn off for certain people: player elimination. The fact is, monsters are out of the game when they hit zero life. Having to sit around watching others have fun isn’t nearly as enjoyable. But I would argue that without such a threat, much of the tension and excitement that comes from taking risks might be lost. The game is also short enough that players need not be out of the game for long, and nothing stops them from trying to negotiate the downfall of their killer from beyond the grave!
Wow! I’ve powered through this review without even mentioning two sides of the dice: hearts that let you heal, but only when you’re outside Tokyo, and lightning/power, which lets you buy upgrades from a central market of cards. These upgrades range from the puny Solar Powered that keeps you from running out of lightning cubes up to the incredibly powerful Nova Breath that lets you damage everyone from the safety of outside Tokyo. These cards add a dollop of delicious sauce on top of the central core of the game, boosting particular strategies as well as being a possible strategy in their own right. They also make the above table negotiating and accusations even more potent, “you can’t let him live with that power!”
King of Tokyo is hardly a perfect game. It is as much luck as strategy. It does feature player elimination. The monsters are also all the same, at least, until you pick up the Power Up! Expansion anyway. But what it tries to do, to create an accessible game that is as fun if you want to manipulate and out play your opponents as it is if you just want to roll some dice and punch some monsters? There are no games out there that achieve this as effectively, and for that, King of Tokyo deserves to be known as a superb game.
Leave a Reply