by Michael Heron
We had a ten year old boy in the house a few weeks ago. It’s okay, – it was with the full consent of his parents and I was supervised the whole time. I took the opportunity to try out a couple of games aimed at the younger end of the age spectrum. One of those was King of Tokyo, a game which I’ve seen many people rave about but had never had an opportunity to play as anything other than a two player tag team variant. That was okay, but the meat of King of Tokyo comes in with a proper all out fist-fight between three or more players. And the more, the better. I could see how its moving parts meshed, but I wanted to hold out on a review until I played it a few times under the right circumstances.
It turns out, the right circumstances are with an excitable child at the table living and dying with every roll of the dice.
King of Tokyo is so simple you can explain it in about sixty seconds. You each take a monster.
And then you roll dice until someone wins.
Huh, I guess sixty seconds is a longer period of time than I thought. What am I going to do with the fifty-seven seconds I have left? I guess I could elaborate. So I’ll do that.
The monsters in King of Tokyo have no special abilities – at least to begin with. They do though all have their own look and aesthetic appeal:
There’s a big rampaging bipedal lizard that is ABSOLUTELY NOT GODZILLA! There’s a massive ape, which is ABSOLUTELY NOT KONG! There is a bunny in a robot suit which is ABSOLUTELY NOT… well, I have no idea what may have inspired that. You’ve got aliens, and sea creatures, and the sinister looking ‘Meka-Dragon’. You have destructive capacity packed into a decent variety of uniquely designed vessels. You pick one, and that’s you! Then you take the elegantly designed character card for that monster. Each card comes with a wheel that is rotated to adjust health and victory points. You start off with ten of the former, and zero of the latter. The first to twenty victory points wins. That is, if they haven’t first defeated their opponents through martial mastery or violent pummeling.
To begin with, all of the monsters are outside of Tokyo, and as such they can’t hit each other. King of Tokyo is a King of the Hill system – everyone is fighting the monster (or monsters, in a larger game) in the city, and the monster in the city is fighting everyone else.
When a monster is in Tokyo, some special rules apply. You get a victory point when you take control of the city, and you get another two if you start your turn inside. But, and this is where the thinking comes in – you can’t heal while in Tokyo. And while in Tokyo you are the sole recipient of every single point of damage inflicted by every other player. Sure, you’re hitting all of them as well, but there are so many more of them than you.
That’s the strategy. But this next part is where the fun comes in – if you take any damage at all, you can choose to yield control. When you yield, whoever just hit you takes your place in the city. They get a victory point, and then they become the target of the merciless pummeling of everyone else. Including you! They don’t get to choose if they’re entering the city – they’re it. If you time it right, you can catch someone completely off guard and leave them stumbling into a city they’re completely unprepared to hold. It might seem like a good idea to kick several shades of snot out of the King of Tokyo, but you better hope you can follow through if they yield. How much damage can you inflict before they need to leave? Should you hold something in reserve? Should you go for a light attack and hope it’s not enough to force them out, or go for all-out attack knowing that at least they’ll be in no position to counter-attack on their turn?
But what if it’s not actually up to you, in the end?
Read the rest of this review here.The Meeple Like Us Geeklist is here.
