Reply: King of Tokyo:: General:: Re: This is why I don't play luck-y games

by apocalyp

sparr0 wrote:

Hockey Mask wrote:

You shouldn't have been down to one health.

No shit. I kept every heart that I could roll in my last two rounds.

a1bert wrote:

If you have one health left, you are almost dead anyway. If you go to Tokyo with one health, it will be a miracle if you survive, and it will be a good tale to tell for the foreseeable future.

I would have greatly preferred to NOT go to Tokyo, one health or not. Being forced into Tokyo is part of the luck aspect that I did not enjoy.

stevelabny wrote:

That's not luck. That's playing too risky and losing before you know you lost.

I was not playing risky at all. See above.

stevelabny wrote:

If you had one health and hadn't rolled the claw to enter Tokyo... the player in Tokyo still could have killed you on his next turn.

If neither of the players between us attacked him, which they likely would have done.

stevelabny wrote:

If you were one turn away from winning...why would the other 2 players decline to attack you first?

If you were one for sure one turn away from winning, not dependent on the luck of the dice rolling points... you needed the 1 point from Tokyo and 2 points for keeping Tokyo to win. If you hadn't entered Tokyo you wouldn't have been assured victory on your next turn.

So you had 17+ points and 1 health which means you absolutely had too many points for your hit points if there were still 3 other players alive.

Or I had plenty of energy and 15 points, with a 2 point card showing to be bought, that no one else could afford, and a 2 point card on top of the deck, that only I knew about, and a card to give myself an extra point (can't remember which one).

stevelabny wrote:

Accept some responsibility for your prior actions rather than blaming the claw you rolled.

Three rounds prior I had 9 health, and I took the least-risky course of action at every juncture. None of my actions were responsible for my loss. Hence my complaint about the luck-ness of the game, especially when it boiled down to the roll of a single die at least once and probably twice.

jonahmaul wrote:

Did you not roll any hearts in the same roll that you were going into Tokyo?

That is correct. Again, damn the dice.

As I said in my original post, a single die roll making the difference in first and second is annoying, but understandable in a game with randomness. I've lost one position in a game of Settlers of Catan over a single die roll. Ditto for a single tile draw in Carcassonne. But I've never intentionally [re]played a not-filler game before where the difference in first and last came down to a single random event. I could engineer a scenario where this might happen in On The Underground, but it would be vanishingly rare in practice. Reading a few session reports for KoT, it seems like this sort of thing happens frequently. I'm happy to play games that are as random as KoT as filler. No Thanks and 6 Nimmt and Category 5 all have high random factors, but they are all fun to play for the 5-10 minutes that they take. Having that same amount of randomness in a 30 minute game is far less appealing.


To everyone who keeps calling this a "risk taking" game, I disagree. In a [typical] risk taking game, you have choices about when to take risks, and how much risk to take. I don't have a term for the kind of game that KoT is, but if the situation I've encountered of "you have to roll, and if you roll X then you lose" is "risk taking" then so is LCR.

To be clear here and I could be wrong since I didn't investigate the rules to be sure but with King of Tokyo you either win or you lose there's no first or last place. In all the games you mention there's no player elimination and maybe that's the aspect you hate more. So say you didn't die there and someone else won then guess what you would have been last still.