Bored? Game! – King of New York

Right now giant monsters are, and I offer no apologies for this term, ‘big’. With a remake of Godzilla, as well as movies like Pacific Rim making Kaijus more mainstream, I had a lot of hope for the board game, King of New York. Coming to us from Richard Garfield, designer of King of Tokyo and Magic: The Gathering, the game sees you controlling one of six giant monsters in their conquest of New York City. However, despite the game’s unique-ish pretext and a pleasant variety in monster design, King of New York offers little in strategic gameplay. For a game about destroying hospitals and military tanks, King of New York is very much a ‘baby’s first’ table-top game.

With your assigned monster, the goal is to either gather up enough ‘victory points’ to secure a win, or to simply be the last beast standing. Players use six six-sided dice to determine their actions each turn, which can be altered by purchasing cards from a deck. The game board is divided into different New York boroughs. Essentially, there is ‘everywhere else’, and Manhattan island: whoever occupies the island gains victory points and energy cubes each turn, but they are not allowed to recover their health if attacked. They can leave the island if they want, though the next player will have to take their place once the turn is over.

For a game about destroying hospitals and military tanks, King of New York is very much a ‘baby’s first’ table-top game.

A big disappointment from the get-go is that there is no difference between the monsters you play as besides their visual designs. Ranging from a giant automaton, to a cowboy dinosaur, to a chainsaw wielding praying mantis, the monsters are wonderfully designed, but none offer any unique stats or advantages. This is a downright shame, since a lot of fans might want to use the game to settle a ‘who would win in a fight’ debate.

The mechanics of the dice are easy to grasp and surprisingly smooth. You can destroy buildings or enemies, attack other monsters, recover health, gather ‘energy cubes’ or stars, or run the risk of being attacked by the military. As the game develops there are always many choices to make, especially since the game allows you to re-roll any unsatisfactory dice up to two times. It’s a push your luck element that makes good use of the core mechanic from Yahtzee. You can accomplish a lot in one turn, with the rules remaining simple enough for even inexperienced players to take full advantage of each roll. Combat is very straightforward: players in Manhattan who want to launch an attack can target players everywhere else on the board, and vice versa. Each player has only ten health points, and though they can be recovered, it adds a need for players to stay aware in their hunt for victory points.

A big problem with King of New York is the cards. They can be purchased with energy cubes, which players gather by rolling ‘lighting’ symbols on the dice. In two out of three games, the cards provide mild advantages, or only slightly tip the scales for individual players. The issue is that certain cards can give a single player a huge advantage. They will suddenly be able to score a great number of victory points, or deal ludicrous amounts of damage to others. As I said before, the monsters all start with the same abilities, and so if someone draws one of these monster-ex-machina cards there is little that the other players can do to defend themselves. Granted, these players would usually become the target of their rivals, but when players can only target either Manhattan or ‘everywhere else’, this becomes impossible.

As a whole, King of New York really is a light, introductory table-top game. The game’s colourful designs are hard to dislike, even if one would struggle to find a cowboy-dinosaur intimidating, and the dice system is easy to grasp. It is by no means a terrible game, but it is not without its flaws. Some of the cards provide game breaking advantages, and a lot of the game’s potential just wasn’t realised in terms of monster variety. King of Tokyo, of which this game is essentially a retheme, did eventually release specialised ‘evolution’ cards for each monster, so perhaps this will be added in a future expansion, but it’s a shame not to see it there right out of the box. This is a good choice for those who are less used to table-top games, or even people who just want a quick experience or a ‘filler’ game. If you want a more complex game, with more potential for a unique play through each time, I would look elsewhere.