by Alex Brown
I used to think being in Tokyo sucked. It doesn't.If you are in Tokyo and no one is making a concerted effort to hit you, you will win. Really you need two people trying to hit you for it not to be worth it, and depending on player count or metagame, this is sometimes a hard decision for those players to make.
This notion you should just jump out at the first hit is ridiculous. If your going from 10-9 or even down to 7-6 you've got a good chance of collecting two points, having a swing at everyone, and then leaving next hit.
After around thirty or forty games I realised being in Tokyo has a lot to do with leveraging turn order and working out whether other players will just start hitting you if you want to stay in. Those same players who think that Tokyo is useless don't usually switch to attacking threats early enough. They tend to think they are gaming the system by letting other players do the work.
Now, because the game has such simple metrics, it's possible to work out that 2VP might not be as appopriate as 1VP a turn, or 1 Energy a turn, or some such instead. However, while the default strategy is to stay out of Tokyo at the start of the game, that has much more to do with the uselessness of multiple claws than Tokyo being bad in itself.