by klainis
Ever since I was a kid playing Rampage in the arcade I’ve been fascinated with the idea of donning the mantle of a giant monster to destroy a city and eat all the people. I’ve recently taken up the practice of creating small towns and throwing the cat at them to satiate my monster cravings, but now I finally have a something to properly give me that good ol’ destructy feeling.
King of Tokyo is a 2-6 player game where you control one of six monsters trying to do as much damage as possible. You do this buy rolling a set of six dice (more with the proper cards) that give four possibilities: health, attack, energy, or victory points. There are two ways to win King of Tokyo, be the first to 20 victory points or be the last monster standing.
The rules for King of Tokyo are very simple, you roll the dice up to three times keeping any dice you want between rolls. If you roll three of a kind with numbers 111, 222, 333 you get victory points based on the number. Any additional matches give you one more victory point per match. Rolling energy will give you one energy per energy die, health will give you one health per die (max of 10 total health), and attack will allow you to attack another monster with one damage per matching die.
Being in or out of Tokyo determines who you can attack and who can attack you. Throughout the game the monster in Tokyo will change multiple times. Energy can be spent to purchase power cards. These cards can do anything from giving you extra victory points to completely changing the rules for the game.
For having so few rules and being mostly random King of Tokyo is really fun to play. Nearly every turn you are forced to make the hard choice on which dice to keep. Sometimes rerolling that guaranteed victory point to get a couple more hearts will save you the next round or choosing to knock out another player instead of getting that extra bit of energy can be tough.
The only complaint I have about King of Tokyo are the rules for when a monster is killed. That player is now out of the game while the rest of the group continues on. When playing we decided that any monster killed during the game comes back as a guardian monster. They are no longer allowed to win the game, all they do at this point is try to make the game more difficult for the remaining players. I felt this added a nice little spin to the end game as the guardian monsters have no fear and will attack anyone.
We all had a lot of fun with King of Tokyo and I would suggest you give it a look especially if you have children. I will give this little bit of warning though, while the game can be played 2 player, it is not nearly as fun as with a group.
Thanks for reading, and if you found this review useful, check out some of my other reviews at http://www.monkeyinthecage.com/category/lame-reviews/roberts...