F@#$ King of Tokyo

King of Toyko

Plot:  You control the monster, like in Rampage, gaining VPs and doing damage to other monsters wandering around Japan.

Theme:  Decent implementation.  The artwork and power up cards work with the tongue in cheek feel of a monster parody, but the mechanics can be translated to a host of other genre's.

Goal:  You win either by being the first one to get 20 VP or killing all other monsters.




Mechanics:  On your turn roll 6 dice.  You get to keep whatever you want and re-roll the rest, for a total of 3 rolls total.  The results are:

Numbers 1-3:  these require a set of 3 to score VP.  3X1 scores 1 VP, 3X2 scores 2, and 3X3 scores 3.  Any additions to the set of 3 get you a bonus VP, or 4X1 gets you 2 VP, 4X2 gets you 3 VP and so on.

Lightning bolts:  You can buy power ups with lightning bolts, and some require lightning bolts to activate.

Claws:  Claws damage your opponents.  How many opponents depends on your current location.

Hearts:  Hearts heal damage but are location dependent.





Taking and holding Tokyo:

First one to roll a claw takes Tokyo automatically.  Taking Tokyo earns you 1 VP, yippee!
However, all damage rolled now hits you and you can't heal in Tokyo, bummer!
But after taking damage you can leave Tokyo and the monster that just hit you takes Tokyo.
If you start your turn in Tokyo you earn 2 VPs.
If you are in Tokyo, any damage you roll hits everyone else.

Power Ups:

These are just minor things that help you.  Ok, maybe not so minor.  Like rolling an extra die (Extra Head power up) is wicked good.  It also costs 7 lightning bolts.  In general they work like that, the better they are the more pricey they are.

Some other examples (names omitted because I won't remember them anyways...)

Get one of each result, that is 1-2-3-lightning-heart-claw, and earn 9 points.
If you don't do damage on your rolls, earn 1 VP.
Get 2 VP rinnow and discard this card.
Anytime you do damage, you do a bonus point.




Strategy and Tactics:  So much depends on your rolls and the power ups available, so no point in discussing them.  It helps to have a good appreciation on the usefulness of the available power ups.  It also helps to figure out how you are going to win, VP or bludgeoning by midgame.

Review:  This is a good filler style game.  It takes about a half hour to play and is paced well.  While the tactics and strategies aren't deep, they do exist.  It isn't simply rolling dice and hoping.  Having said that, luck does play a huge huge roll.

Nerdy Black Friday recap

Games played:

King of Tokyo - review coming this week
Ra
Macao - review delayed for at least one more playing.

Game 1 King of Tokyo

Darren won, huzzah!  I would say it was due to my incredible skill, except that I got 3 or 4 extremely lucky rolls.

1) getting enough lightning bolts to buy the extra head first
2) 5 of a kind 1's, or 3 VP
3) 5 of a kind claws, or 5 damage to Mike which basically eliminated him from contention
4) a pair of triples, triple 3 and triple hearts.  Or another 3 VP plus a not insignificant heal when I needed it.

Game 2 Ra

More pure skill!  Not!

I really have no idea how to win this game.  I play not to suck, and every once in a while things work out.  The secret to not sucking is to buy stuff, and it really doesn't matter what it is initially.  I had a terrific round one, including an 8 tile buy during 'guts'.  Those 8 tiles pretty much won me the game, despite a horrific round 2 where I lost 2 points.  Luckily, the people that had good round 2's were the ones that had awful round 1's.  The game turned on suns, which seems to be normal.  I won by 3 points, and I was 2nd lowest suns.  If I had lost suns, I would have lost by 2.

Game 2 Macao

I need to do a little intro.  I do not know if I like this game yet or not.  The primary mechanism is very clever.  There are 6 currencies of influence, each with a different color and a corresponding die.  The die roll is how much you get and how long you have to wait to get it.  However, there is a shit load going on, and at least for the first time I played it, pacing was atrocious.  Pacing did improve as the game went on, so maybe...maybe pacing will improve with more play.  NF will definitely find out.

Anyways, while my internal jury is out on whether I like this game or not, my experience Friday was bad.  I made a couple-three strategic errors really early, knew I was in big big trouble, but still had to get my ass kicked for another 2 hours.



Anyways, my strategic error was sacrificing the future for turn 1 and 2 builds.  You just cannot trade away that much influence for early builds.  I also built marginal, expensive things.  I was scrambling to avoid getting punishment tokens, and I got them anyways.



Juan won, by making very shrewd buys and getting great synergy within his cards.

Nerdy Recap

Broke out Samurai because it's underplayed, goes good with 3, and takes about 45 minutes which was important since Warren was arrived a bit late.

Mike won by getting two out right wins, but the game was much more competitive than that implies.  Mike and I both had 11 total captures.  Circumstances will probably say that we are done with that game for another 3-5 months.

I won 4 player Lords of Waterdeep.

LoWD is an unusual game.  It is about the simplest worker placement game EVER but there are quite a few subtleties that I am just now starting to grasp.  One thing is evident; this game has no run away leader problem.  I had about as poor of a start that you could have, and Ryan had about as good of a start as you can have.  I finished first and Ryan 3rd.  I turned it around with a plot quest that I thought I built too late, and one of the $8 awesome buildings.  I don't know if this is true in general yet, but this game sweeping the 4 quests showing and taking your pick of 4 new ones was a much better idea than taking an sub-optimum quest in order to gain 2 bucks or an intrigue card.

BTW, we had a rules clarification that's kind of important.  You can only complete 1 quest per action.  What does this mean?   You can't bank dudes for an amazing comeback late, you can't cascade new quests with adventurers gained as rewards, and mandatory quests are really really mean.

Two quick games of 3 player King of Tokyo was split between Mike and I.  No analysis here, except Warren, roll better or something.

I believe everyone won at least 1 round of  3 player No Thanks!  It's No Thanks, so nothing to offer here either