On Monday I headed down to Snakes & Lattes to play in their tournament for King of Tokyo. They've apparently acquired the adjacent store and have been working to use that store to expand their space. They held the tournament in the new store which was a pretty sweet space.
I think they had around 24-25 people and played mostly 5 player games. 3 rounds, cut to top 5 for a final table. I hadn't really played before and decide to go with a brawling strategy. Getting points seemed pretty random and smashing faces seemed really awesome so I went for it. It turns out that's not a very good plan at all. I eliminated many people in the 3 tournament games I played, and never died myself, but someone always managed to score enough points to win.
I played most of a game before the tournament in a teaching game for a new player and also played a game during the finals. I've come to the conclusion that trying to kill everyone is not very feasible. The problems with trying to kill people is you can't choose who you attack unless you try to attack everyone at once. But in order to do that you first have to let everyone else attack you AND you can no longer use the healing result on the dice. Maybe it's better in a smaller player game but in a 5 player game it really felt like everyone was just rolling for very random points while doing enough damage to anyone who thought about being aggressive to shut them down.
People seemed to _really_ like the game. People were talking about how it's in their top 5 of greatest games of all time. I'm not a fan. The fact that you often can't make use of any of your rolls makes it feel really hard to control what's going on. Contrasted with Roll Through The Ages, for example, where the faces all do different things but they almost always do _something_ so no matter what you roll you can make some choices and further your board position.
The turnout was really varied, too. There was a 7 year old kid and a large number (for a board game tournament, anyway) of cute young women. Everyone seemed to be having fun despite all the randomness and the fact that there's a lot of attacking going on. (I could have imagined people getting really bitter when I kept re-rolling points in order to try to eliminate them from the game but no one seemed to mind.) I was pretty much playing kingmaker by eliminating a couple people who were trying for points each game. But since I wasn't actually choosing who to attack it doesn't seem as bad, I guess... It helps that the flavour of the game is large monsters brawling each other!
After the tournament I hung out for another hour and a half and taught Tichu to Duncan and a couple other guys from the tournament. It's been a long time since I'd played that game and enjoyed playing it more than King of Tokyo. A good evening in all!
It sounds a lot like the sort of issues I see in most FFA games. Any time there is player elimination and random smashery I find the strategic element of the game is practically nonexistent. The best strategy is always to hide in a corner trying to avoid combat and savagely punish anyone who takes a swing at you. Not much replay value there unless you really enjoy rolling dice and seeing what happens - which some people do, but not me so much.
ReplyDelete