King of Tokyo Tournament

Snakes & Lattes is holding a tournament for the new game, King of Tokyo, today at 6pm. I'm planning on heading down and giving it a spin despite barely knowing how to play and with no expectation that I could win. (See, I play games for fun, honest!) King of Tokyo came out this year and is riding the wave of 'dice games' that have seen success recently. It is designed by Richard Garfield which is a good indicator that the game should be fun.

Now, I've always had a thing for rolling dice. I played an awful lot of Titan in my 20's and a lot of that was the desire to attack with a serpent. (Serpents tended to only hit on a 6 but you got to roll EIGHTEEN dice when you attacked!) From Kismet and Yahtzee through triple-WotC and into the more recent dice games like To Court The King, Ra Dice, and Roll Through The Ages... I love rolling dice.

King of Tokyo doesn't disappoint in that aspect since on your turn you roll six dice and can re-roll any number of those dice twice. It's not quite attacking with a serpent but you can roll eighteen dice on your turn if you want. Instead of rolling normal d6s you roll special dice with weird symbols on them that let you either score points, accumulate power-ups, deal damage, or heal damage. I have no idea what the best plan of attack is and I have hopes that it depends on what the rest of the table is doing. I think you probably want to be doing things they aren't doing. Unfortunately since you're rolling dice with very different possible results it seems like you can't actually plan on doing something specific...

The interesting twist to this game compared to other dice games is there's actually two ways to win. In pretty much every other dice game you're just playing solitaire. Sure, there are some interactions, but you're all just racing to get the most points in the same ways that everyone else is scoring points. King of Tokyo has a standard 'first to 20 points wins' goal but it also features player elimination. You have a fixed amount of health (one of the die faces will heal you) and if you run out you're eliminated. Be the last player standing and you win! This means that accumulating points is good if you can both get to 20 first and survive long enough to get there... But otherwise they're pretty much worthless. If you're trying to just kill everybody then buying powerups and doing damage seem like the ways to go.

Player elimination is a mechanic that has pretty much been eliminated from games I play, and with good reason. Telling someone who made a mistake early that they can't win anymore is one thing, telling them they need to sit and watch for an hour is something else entirely. I don't get to play Titan anymore since if people are going to drive an hour to get to my place they're going to want to play games the whole time. Not some of the time and then just watch for most of the time. I worry that it makes King of Tokyo fun while you're playing and a bit of a bore after you lose which is not good, but maybe the interesting tension in game of the two winning conditions makes up for it.

I'm not sure if the game will work well as a tournament game because of the player elimination. But I guess I normally play games really fast and finish before everyone else does so I have waiting around built in to tournaments anyway...