I hated this game. It was boring. It didn’t make sense. I understand that the game creator, Richard Garfield, is a mathematician, but that doesn’t mean I should be subject to countless probabilities and rules during a game. The player card rotated like a DJ board though which was cool…I guess. This simply doesn’t seem like a game that should be so complicated. It does too much, and I hate it for it.
King of Tokyo is a unique tabletop game where you play as a monster/ related science fiction entity with the goal of subduing your enemies or becoming the ‘king’ of Tokyo via destruction (gaining 20 victory points). Each player takes turns rolling 6 dice three times (with the choice to keep some dice and not roll them again), granting players attack points, health points, victory points, or energy. Energy can be exchanged for power cards that can help you in your pursuit. Only one player can be in Tokyo at a time, and that player will be targeted by the others and unable to heal for the benefit of receiving extra victory points
Sounds easy right? No. The instructions were too long and even a YouTuber detailing how to play the game was insufficient. And the rule book itself was so dense, with everything being scrunched together. I don’t like how figuring out how to kind of play this game took much longer than actually trying to play it.
notice how compact and hectic this page of the rule book is. it is quite simply too much and distracts me from the rules. I would rather a more compact rule set that better explains the game.
There are way too many pieces in this game. There are 28 tokens included, but without utilizing the power cards, they have no purpose other than just being there. I feel there are too many handheld pieces (dice, power cards, energy cubes, cardboard figures, tokens) for a game that should take around ~30 minutes. If the game limited the number of tactile objects so that I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by their existence, it could’ve been better.
Additionally, the existence of Tokyo Bay is annoying. Tokyo bay is only used when there are 5-6 players so that there are two players in Tokyo at once. I understand that this leads to whoever is in Tokyo to not be targeted by all 4-5 players, but it’s annoying to have it be there if you are only playing with 1-4 players. It’s just confusing and not being able to use it annoys me.
I did not feel immersed at all in this game. I felt very distanced from my character and just wanted to get through the game just because I had to. Quite frankly, I did not care. The narrative potential for this game is big as you are literally a monster who can destroy Tokyo and your fellow players, but due to the countless pieces and rules to keep track of, I was more led to focus on siphoning through the rules rather than actually enjoying the game. This led to it being harder to create a narrative, making the experience less meaningful. On top of the density of rules making narrative formation harder, I also feel like the game didn’t have anything at all to encourage a player-driven narrative either, further discouraging its creation. As one who values narrative above all else in a game, I am distraught.
I assume there is a strategy to playing this game, but I also didn’t engage in it at all. Again, since the game was so confusing and complex for a ~30-minute game, I felt upset and discouraged and just wanted to be able to make the wheels on my player card move. Moving the wheels on the player card is essentially all I cared about King of Tokyo, and I refuse to compliment anything else because it quite frankly does not deserve it.
