Welcome back to Board Game Radar. I’m focusing on another expansion this time, King of Tokyo: Power Up!. King of Tokyo and the new expansion are designed by Richard Garfield and published by IELLO. King of Tokyo: Power Up! is currently scheduled to be released at the Essen Game Fair. King of Tokyo is a yahtzee-style dice game of monsters fighting over Tokyo.
King of Tokyo hit my radar last year. I heard about a small game by Richard Garfield being released in Europe. At first, it didn’t do much to excite me, even though he has designed a couple of very cool games; Magic: The Gathering and RoboRally. I thought it was great that he had a new game coming out, but it sounded like a simple dice game that I wasn’t too interested in. As time went on, I started hearing good reports of the game. I ended up deciding to take a chance and got a copy. This turned out to be a great decision, since the first edition sold out and I loved the game! It quickly became my favorite filler.
In the game, you are a giant monster attacking Tokyo. The game plays out very similarly to yahtzee. You get three rolls of the dice, keeping any number of dice after each roll. Some rolls score you points, while other help you fight the other monsters. You can damage other monsters or heal yourself. Another die roll lets you build up energy, which lets your monster gain special powers. All the while, the monsters are playing a game of King of the Hill, with the hill being Tokyo. The game can end when a monster scores 20 points or eliminates all the other monsters. There’s really nothing special about the gameplay, but the game is just plain fun! It is one of those magical games that somehow become more than the sum of its parts.
Most of what I’ve learned about the expansion have come from the Three Donkeys podcast (http://www.threedonkeys.com/blog). Each of the monsters will get a personal set of cards that only they can use when they are able to power-up by rolling 3 hearts. The cards give each of the monsters their own personality, something that was definitely lacking in the original game. Cyber Bunny will have advantages while gaining and spending energy; Kraken will get healing and Cthulhu-flavored powers; The King will have advantages towards taking Tokyo; etc... Based on the cover image, it appears that a new monster will be joining the game, a giant Panda.
I thought the podcast was extremely interesting, especially when they talked about expansion ideas that didn’t make the cut. One idea was that rolling two 1’s would give you a small power and four 1’s would give you a major power. If you rolled three 1’s, though, you would get penalized. This is a neat idea that seems to borrow from the disasters in Matt Leacock’s Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age. Another idea was that each monster would get it’s own personal custom die. This seems like it would have been a really cool way to differentiate the monsters, but apparently didn’t work out well in playtesting.
Despite the game not having more cool custom dice and the curious choice of adding a giant panda (we already have an oversized mammal, The King; why not a giant bug or spider?), I’m really looking forward to this expansion. It is an auto-buy for me as soon as it is available. There’s very little that I don’t like about the base game. I consider it one of my favorite games, filler or not. I would be a little concerned that anything added could hurt the game more than help it, but listening to Richard Garfield puts my mind at ease. The amount of time and effort that he put into it really makes it sound like an improvement on the game, not just a quick cash-in.