King of Tokyo

After a very long day at working worrying about organizational shifts which included an exceptionally large departure of talent from my team, digging around in capacity numbers that hadn't caught up to reality yet, and a variety of SOC 2 related issues, I was pleased that it was a board gaming day in the cafeteria.  There were more than enough people for Descent, and it looked very similar to Ravenloft which I'd played the last time, so I joined in a game of King of Tokyo with Jon, John, Mike, and Dan.  Three games.

I've never played it before, although I watched them play it on Table Top.  Wil Wheaton made it look like enough fun that we bought a copy for Logan for his birthday.  I'm not sure if he and Ming have played it yet.  If they haven't.  They should.  Our first game was incredibly fast, one of the two monsters in the middle killing nearly everyone outside Tokyo.  I'd been swapped into Tokyo just prior to that event, so I ended up with a quick win.  The second game dragged considerably longer and was a win by points on Jonathan's part.  And the third game took up 2/3 of our gaming time and was a barely eeked out win by Jon in a monster-to-monster grudge match between him and Mike.  Mike was within a point of winning when Jon pushed his own points over the edge.

One of my favorite cards in the game was one which let me reroll one die of any other player.  While the extra heads and large brains allowed players to have brute force dice rolling fun, the reroll die allowed me to just be sort of a dick and disrupt point accumulation and specialty card accumulation.  I used it to good effect a few times derailing 3 point plays and the accumulation of three hearts which allows a player to grab a card off their monster-specific set.

Mike said with five people, the games are generally incredibly fast because of the damage flying back and forth.  It would definitely be a good family game or quick game with casual gamers.