Overview & How to Play

Godzilla! King Kong! Some Mecha Dragon!

Play as these monsters vying for control of the city of Tokyo. To do so, just roll 6 dice on a turn, re-rolling any of them, if you want to achieve more of the faces, then that’s a turn. Like, a Claw attacks other players, a Heart heals you, and Numbers give you victory points. Oh, you can choose to re-roll one more time if your first re-roll doesn’t go as planned.

But back to victory points, you can also win by getting victory points! Just get 20 and win the game. So another key way to get victory points is to be in Tokyo itself. If you enter, you get 1 point. If you start your turn there, you get 2 points.

The juicy part about being in Tokyo is that each one of your attacks will attack everyone else. Awesome! But then everyone else can ONLY attack you. And you can’t heal when you’re in the city! So be careful about deciding to stay there for too long.

One last thing: Powerups, which are cards you can buy after rolling a certain energy symbol on cards. These can give your monsters immediate benefits, like victory points, or permanent abilities, like letting you roll extra dice.

Pros

King of Tokyo just throws you into the simplistic fun with so many cute, bright, and functional components! The dice are all great to roll. Monsters have distinct looks and nice player boards. Powerups are filled with different art.

So now for the dice rolling, the meat of the game. This feels very well designed. The game feels well balanced around the probabilities of outcomes you can achieve, and the potential to get victory points by getting 3 of the same number feels just risky enough to invite careful consideration. After all, 3 is half of the total dice you roll.

This adaptation of Yahtzee re-rolling into a conflict heavy filler just works well, where players pass around dice, and excitedly bet on stronger re-rolls as they push their luck. Each turn mostly being dice-rolling helps to minimize downtime too. Plus, since other people’s actions usually affect you directly, you always want to be looking at other monsters’ health, points, Powerups, and locations during the game.

Oh, yeah the Powerups is where this game gets a LOT of flavor. These can lead to thoughtful eye-opening combos mid to late game, where abilities can be stacked up on certain monsters, letting them freeze others, or do extra damage. These aren’t unbalanced, due to their initial purchase fee—to buy them, you would be forgoing early actions in attacking others, getting points, etc. Like, you do not have to buy the Powerups at all sometimes if you don’t want to, and still hold a realistic expectation to win.

Cons & Nitpicks

Ack, but here we have to point out that this game doesn’t scale that well. King of Tokyo plays great at 3-4 players pretty much exclusively. 2 players will kill the vibe of a massive battle over Tokyo, where just having one other person to attack doesn’t really make sense with Tokyo city’s benefit of letting you attacking everyone.

Then, at 5-6 players, the game opens up a weird “Tokyo Bay” mechanic. This Tokyo Bay is a region for players to fight over, yet it is strictly inferior to Tokyo itself for points and just feels like a weird placeholder to hang out until expedite the game state until there are 4 or less players, at which then Tokyo Bay closes, and the normal dynamic resumes.

King of Tokyo does have some player elimination concerns as well, since the game can have variable time lengths of below or above 30 minutes. It is possible to get knocked out early due to crazy rolls.