Roll for Vibe Check

One con of working in the board game industry for your day job: MANY games on the shelf that never get played.

One pro of the job: when you forget you have a RVC to write, you pull one off of the 2 player pile to play with your spouse.

So let’s crack on with our review of King of Tokyo Duel, by Iello. The back of the box tells you to “Get Ready for the Ultimate Fight,” and although the game was fun, it felt more clunky than ultimate. 

In KoTD, players choose their monster, and on your turn, you roll dice to deal damage, heal, gain energy to buy power ups/abilities, and move either the Fame or Destruction marker to your side of the board in an ongoing tug-of-war. Each monster has a unique ability to manipulate the dice or even the board, so there are plenty of options to pick a monster that fits your style. That means you should be starting the game ready to go for one of the three victory options:

• Get the Fame marker to your end of the board

• Get the Destruction marker to your end of the board

• Damage your opponent till they reach 0 hit points

KoTD does an incredible job of creating monsters that all feel unique, clearly scaled from easy to hard difficulty, and none of them felt like The Right Answer. That and pretty rad art made picking the monsters fun from the start. Also, love me some IP distinct word play.

First playthrough took us about an hour, including reading the rulebook a few times to understand the diagrams of dice combos for monster powers. The wording is a little clunky, but after a few rounds, we got what was going on and things moved smoothly.

The biggest difficulty is to manage what to focus on. My spouse immediately started whaling on me, and in hindsight, trying to get someone to 0 hit points felt like the easiest and quickest win. I focused on the Fame and Destruction tracks, which then forced my spouse to move their focus from a good ol’ donnybrook to pulling the tracker back toward their end of the board. So there’s definitely a feeling that this could turn into a longer game where there’s a lot of undoing what happened on your opponent’s turn.

So there are lots of back and forths in the game, which definitely get more fun in the midgame once you have a few powers to make some combos. The hook mechanic is Buzz tokens, which you play on the board to outright change the Fame and Destruction paths to give you bonuses, or hinder your opponent. I feel like this is a game that’s better the more you play; once you’re out of the learning curve you’ll be quicker to get to the fun power combos and interactions between you and your opponent. KoTD is a definite “will play again,” even if the vibes weren’t packing a lot of Big Kaiju feeling.