Review: King of Tokyo:: Quick mini-review of King of Tokyo: to keep or cull?

by yellowblueplaid

We're trying to make sure we have space on all of our shelves for the collection of games we most want to play and trying some games after a long lull in playing to see if we want to keep making space for them or let them go. So we pulled out King of Tokyo which had not been played in a very, very, very long time to see how we felt.

I'll be honest, speaking just for myself, I am not generally a very interactive gamer, and I don't always like area control or games where i fight other players/win by attacking them (although I will also admit I am a person of contradictions because I got Dice Throne: Santa vs Krampus for christmas this past year and have had SO much fun playing that). Anyway, King of Tokyo has never really landed for me, but I usually just feel like I'm missing something because so so so many people love it, rave about it, and it's obviously been incredibly successful. So I went into this thinking, it's been so long since I've played, I definitely enjoy throwing some dice (see Dice Throne) and I love player powers and doing cool things.

The dice are big and chunky, we got our monster pads out (I played the Kraken, my opponent played the Gigazaur) and started rolling. Full disclosure: i lost both games badly, and I'm not sure two player is the best player count for this game -- seems like it's probably more fun with more people going after whoever is in Tokyo -- and we rolled the six dice yahtzee style, taking points (if we had three+ dice showing the same number), energy cubes (for every lightning icon), healed (for hearts showing if we were not in Tokyo), and attacks to the other player (for every paw print/claw icon).

It was OK. I... don't feel motivated to attack the other player and always go for points, which of course means I lose by being attacked a lot in Tokyo because i never seemed to roll a lot of energy cubes (or points) -- at most I was able to get two powers before my opponent defeated me on points.... I don't know. I just didn't get into it, there wasn't enough getting of powers, and I just don't feel like using the attack dice -- I always wanted cubes or points instead. We're going to let this one go -- we have dice throne and quite a few other games that let us roll dice and do cool things and I just don't see myself ever wanting to play this although in a group I wouldn't refuse to play it or anything. it just doesn't need to take up shelf space here.

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