Gaming Friday

It’s been a while, but I made it to Friday Game Night again. It was still low-key as the host has a way to go before his broken leg is healed.

First game was the debut of King of Tokyo for all of us. It’s a simple king-of-the-hill boardgame with a giant Japanese monsters theme, designed by the guy who created Magic. It plays quickly and it’s a breeze to learn. You win by defeating all the other players or by collecting twenty victory points. Tokyo itself is the aforementioned hill; you get extra VPs for taking it from someone else (more if you hold it), and while you’re there you can damage everyone else, but everyone else is also attacking you and you can’t heal normally. The core mechanic is a dice roll to generate points for attacking, healing, buying event cards, and earning extra VPs. Significant strategy comes from deciding which dice to reroll, as VP dice are worthless in less than triplets and an attack could force you into Tokyo when you don’t want to be there.

Both games were decided on damage. In the first game I was too aggressive about holding Tokyo and ended up so beat up that I was easy to finish off even after I left. The second game was played more thoughtfully all around. I won that one.

The last game of the night was “Grimoire Shuffle,” one of the six small games in the Level 99 Games Minigame Library. Teams of two players race back and forth across a maze. The first team to make four individual traversals wins. Each turn, each player does some combination of moving himself, moving other players, and rearranging the maze according to the movement card he got. The clever part is that cards aren’t individually drawn. Instead, team leaders get three and distribute them by choice: one to their teammate, one to the next leader, and one to the discard. And the two that aren’t discarded are not only played, they come back and comprise part of the next turn’s distribution.

It was a close game, but me and Shaterri squeaked out a win. More than once, someone traversed the map in two moves or less. Both teams benefited from clearing a straight path of obstructions. None of us were sure whether this was a fundamental flaw in the game or simply how this session played out.