Our occasional boardgame group got together again on Monday after what felt like a fairly long hiatus. Rather than fighting off the plague infested hordes of undead, we decided we would go and stomp on Tokyo instead.
Enter King of Tokyo!
This is a fairly simple dice game, with the addition of some very basic board game elements. Each player starts off with their monster and a score board*. The aim is to either kill all your opponents, or score 20 victory points through various means. Each turn you take it in turn to roll the 6 black dice and do whatever it says on the faces. You can re-roll up to three times, holding back symbols that you want to keep in order to get the most effective combo for that turn.
There are (unsurprisingly) 6 symbols that are either Attack, Heal, Power up or victory points (1, 2 or 3). Each Attack symbol causes 1 damage to whoever is currently in Tokyo (or everyone else if you are in Tokyo). Heal repairs one point of damage if you are not currently King of Tokyo and Power Up grants you little crystals that can be spent on the upgrade cards. To gain victory points via the dice you need to have rolled three or more of the same number.
Those are basically the rules in a nutshell. I'm sure some people would play this strategically; plotting the downfall of each others creatures, but we have a 13 year old in our group which throws out any strategy as he's all out attack, even when down to 1 wound. Unsurprisingly, this disrupts everyone's plans and makes the game far more fun. We are notoriously slow when it comes to playing games, but even we managed to get through 4 games in 2 hours.
If you get the chance, I can highly recommend this game, especially for larger groups. It suggests that it's possible to play with 2 people, but I can only imagine that it's rather dull as there's no backstabbing and banter between those players not in Tokyo.
* In the base game the creature doesn't matter which creature you are, but in the expansion there are specific mutations for each creature.
I picked this up a year ago but never got a chance to play it. Now that I know its good I'll have to dig it out and force some people to play a game.
ReplyDelete