by Alex Awesome
Hello,This is a small review about the things I didn't like about the game and is mainly a basis for discussion, sharing my experiences with the game and to give further thought for those that might want to pick this up (you totaly should, its a great addition to most collections).
First of all - I fell in love with the game from the first playthrough. It is a great game. It plays quick, the mechanics is smooth and any kind of gamer likes it that Ive played it with so far. My two personal favourite reviews of this game that cover much, much more than i intend to do here is these two:
King of Tokyo, a detailed review
Superfly Petes excellent review
As previously stated - I enjoy this game loads! But here is a few things that I found that disturbs the force:
2-player isnt optimal.
The game play simply isnt built for two so this was a real bummer for me,since I want a game to whip out to play before bed time here at home. Some variants suggested is merely trying to band aid this but doesnt really work out (for me atleast). The variant where both players simply pick more monsters just makes the game overly messy IMO - oh noes now im attackingmy own monster when im in tokyo and so on.
A lot of the magic with this game is trying to race for the win and its totally lost in a duel. A runaway leader can get smashed or out-raced with more players whereas with just one opponent this gets a whole lot trickier. Not to say a whole bag of unfun.
There is great engines, sadly they are too few.
The cards that you can buy in the game is very nicely done and gives the game so many options that no two games play alike. Some are very straight forward like the one that gives you an extra dice, or the jet pack.
What I personally like the best though is the ones that sort of interact with each other and create an engine that can stear you into awesomeness during game play and when these clicks together is when I had the most fun in the game (besides smashing face RAWR!). Sadly the basic game has too few of these little engines. I know that this would clutter the main deck too much and is more fitting for an expansion, the base games cards are cool enough as is, but I assembled a set of three cheap cards and they rode me to victory once and it was hard to let go of the "wow, that was fun, I want more!"-feeling.
Getting an overview of the state of the game.
Even at only three players this minor problem became apperant. The monster-dials doesnt lend itself to taking a glance at the other players and making calculations on where you stand in the game. We usually play on big tables so we constantly had to ask each other how many hearts was left on player X or how many VP's player Y had since the monster-dials was too far away. On one hand this ups the player interaction in a natural way, but this isnt the kind of player interaction I really want.
I guess making a custom character sheet for each monster that is more visible or victory point/heart tokens could make this a non-issue (including this in the base game would probably make it way to expensive). I have not played King of Tokyo in 6-player mode yet so if anyone have experience here please share
Some sessions is over too quick.
yep, this is a filler game and each single game is not supposed to span several hours of epic struggle, but its so darn fun and the build-a-monster aspect of the game where you start to get really attached to your humongous, two-headed killer bunny that rains destruction on everybody really lends itself to this.
Here's to hoping the next expansion and other possible future ones will expand this game into a full monster-building game.
Thank you for your interest in this semi-review and hopefully it gave you some food for thought. May all your dice be claws, even when you need hearts =P