King of Tokyo (2nd Ed)

I’d rather be playing Axis and Allies, or even one of the versions of Risk, but with my most regular opponents being my 9 and 11 year old children, sometimes, one just needs to find a simple, fast, fun game, and King of Tokyo 2nd Edition (aka: KoT), most certainly fits that bill (5 minutes to teach, 30 minute game sessions).

I’d not played this game before, but a lot of reviewers on the net and in gaming conventions have been praising how easy and quick this game is to pick up and fun for anyone of all ages… who doesn’t like giant Kaiju smashing Tokyo?  Most reviews tend to agree it kinda plays like “Yahtzee with Monsters”, but its a ton of fun, and easy to customize your personal Kaiju with interesting cards like extra heads, flying, burrowing, spiked tail, or a “friend of children”… lol. The object is to either gain victory through points by destroying Tokyo, or killing off the competing Kaiju monsters (other players).

As with almost anything I play these days, I can’t help but modify the game out of the box and try and “Deluxe it up”… King of Tokyo is no exception to my drive to improve the gaming experience. From the attached picture, only the small central game board and two of the three monsters are “originals” out of the box… everything else you see in the picture is some sort of enhancement that I added to the game to spice up KoT…

1. Added an enlarged (cloth and rubber) playmat underneath the small board… this allows the monsters not inside Tokyo to be “picked up by radar” and includes areas to hold the play cards and energy bin… I always prefer a larger game board anyways
2. 3D-enhanced Tokyo City, with towering skyscrapers (stolen from Monopoly City game… just got the towers off E-Bay)
3. I added a wooden organizer tray for the box (not shown) that includes a wooden pull-out tray for the energy tokens (shown)
4. Customized green lightning bolts to replace the green energy cubes (goes better with the theme of the game and whats printed on-board and on-cards)
5. Created a 3D-printed token holder to hold and organize the different types of game tokens (shown next to wooden energy bin)
6. Added the Kaiju monster “Kookie” promo character obtained from Brettspiel Adventskalender 2016 convention in Germany… as this is the 2nd Edition of the game, two monsters from the 1st Edition were removed and replaced with two new monsters… I did get my hands on 1st Edition and “borrowed” the Kraken and Cyber Bunny (not shown), so my copy has all monsters from 1st and 2nd Edition

Comments on the game and/or customizations welcome.

Well, “technically” Cyber Bunny wasn’t replaced by Space Penguin, Cyber Bunny was replaced by Cyber Kitty… Kraken was rather strangely replaced by Space Penguin.

I just got the new Power Up for 2nd Edition, and it has evolution cards for both 2nd Edition Cyber Kitty and Space Penguin as well as the older Cyber Bunny and Kraken (as I have all four of these), so that was pretty cool.

I think my favorite customization of all, is the cloth/rubber game mat that sits under the original game board… I always thought the original board was just too small, and monsters “not inside” Tokyo always just kinda seemed lost… having the bigger game mat allows for a proper “Tokyo Suburbs” which gives more meaning to those monsters not yet inside Tokyo proper.