There was a stretch, about a year ago, when Elliot was seven, and King of Tokyo was a nearly daily affair, smack in between his homework breaks or after his homework and is allowed to run amok. (It’s gone relatively quiet since — the kids’ attention moves on, same as anyone’s.) That daily run is really what this review is about…
So this isn’t a first-impressions review. It’s the opposite: a review written after the honeymoon, once a game has been played into the ground and you know exactly what it is. And what King of Tokyo is, is one of the best loud, silly, everyone-versus-everyone games we’ve ever owned — with one real caveat I’ll get to.
Quick disclosure on the two-player thing, because I wrote a whole post on two-player game and King of Tokyo pointedly wasn’t on it. Elliot and I played it one-on-one constantly, and it’s fine with two — but it’s not where the game shines, and this will be explained below as well as in my previous post. Where it comes alive is with a full table: the twins, my sister-in-law Xin Yi (who’s genuinely closer to my kids than I sometimes am), the whole loud lot of us. This is a more-the-merrier game. It wants a crowd — and, ideally, a villain for everyone to gang up on.
What King of Tokyo actually is
You’re a giant monster — a lizard, a giant robot bunny, a kind of demonic rabbit — smashing your way through Tokyo, trying to be the last one standing or the first to twenty points. On your turn you roll six dice, Yahtzee-style, up to three times, keeping what you like. Claws attack, hearts heal, numbers score points, and lightning bolts earn energy.
Whoever’s standing in Tokyo scores extra points each turn but can’t heal and gets attacked by everyone else — so the whole game is one nervous question: do I stay in Tokyo soaking up the points and the punishment, or flee like a coward and let someone else take the beating? Energy you save up buys power cards, and that’s where it gets interesting.
One house rule we’ve settled on, worth mentioning in case it helps your table too: the base game shows you three power cards to choose from each turn. We tweaked ours to show five, with the option to pay 2 energy to refresh three of them if none appeal.
We made the change because we’re a family that loves buying upgrades — more options on the table means more of that shopping-spree feeling, especially in a one-on-one match where there’s no one else snapping up the good cards before you get a look. It’s not the official rule, and it does speed up how fast an engine like the one below can come together, so try it as written first and only steal our version if you find yourselves wanting more choice too
Richard Garfield’s giant-monster dice brawl
Roll six dice, smash your rivals, grab Tokyo for the points, and buy monster power cards with the energy you hoard. Easy to teach in five minutes, chaotic and loud in the best way, and it scales up to six players — the more the merrier. Just enough decision-making to keep an adult engaged, simple enough that a six-year-old with a little help is right in the thick of it.
Scary confession to make
A small confession: none of us actually fight over Tokyo as fearsome monster avatars in our house. Somewhere along the way we retired the official figures in favour of Pikachu toys standing in as our avatars — Elliot’s a small, tweeny Pikachu, mine’s a properly fat one, waddling into Tokyo like he owns the place. It shouldn’t work thematically at all, but it absolutely does.
Peppa pig and another different look Pikachu sit waiting on the sidelines, when the twins join us for a mega blockbuster game. There is something uniquely ridiculous about a chubby Pikachu smashing skyscrapers, and it somehow makes the game funnier every single time, even after a hundred plays.
The night the kids all turned on me
There was this super epic game that will be forever etched in my memory and I still bring up to the dinner table. Somehow — and I genuinely couldn’t tell you how it snowballed — I ended up building an absurd engine of power cards, the kind of run where everything feeds everything else. I had Alien Metabolism, which knocks a point of energy off every card you buy. I had a card that let me buy power cards straight off the other players. And once those two were working together, cards got cheap, and cheap cards meant more cards.
So I went shopping. I bought an Extra Head, for a fourth die. I bought a Giant Brain, for an extra reroll — and I’m fairly sure I bought that one right off Elliot, prising it out of his little hands, which he did not take well. I had Friend of Children, the one with the turtle on it, quietly handing me a bonus energy cube every single time I earned any, feeding the whole machine.
And then, the crown jewel: Freeze Time, where rolling three 1s hands you an entire extra turn. With seven dice (six + one from my Extra Head) and an extra reroll, I was hitting those 1s far more often than I had any right to, taking turn after turn while the kids watched, aghast.
And that’s the moment King of Tokyo showed me its real magic. Because the whole table — Elliot, the twins, everyone — stopped playing their own games and united around a single shared goal: stop Daddy. Every claw got pointed at me. Alliances formed in real time, entirely at my expense. I was Public Enemy Number One, the archvillain, and three furious little monsters were coming for me. I don’t even remember if I won. What I remember is the roar when they finally knocked me down, the entire family cheering my destruction. That’s the game. That’s what it does that almost nothing else on our shelf does.
Why it needs a crowd (and the two-player catch)
That story is also, neatly, the case for why King of Tokyo wants a full table. The best thing it produces is exactly that dynamic — a shifting, chaotic, everyone-versus-the-leader free-for-all, where the guy in front becomes everyone’s target and the little ones learn the delicious politics of teaming up. You can’t get that with two. With more players, there’s always someone to gang up on, always a villain of the moment, always a reason to cheer or groan.
Which brings me to the honest two-player catch. Elliot and I played it head-to-head for months, and it works — but it’s a lesser game that way, and the reason is structural: whoever grabs Tokyo first, with nobody else to share the incoming fire, tends to snowball. All the attacks come from one direction, all the Tokyo points flow one way, and the game can tip early and stay tipped. It’s still a perfectly good time with two — but if it’s just you and one child, honestly, there are better one-on-one games, and I’ve written up a whole list of them. Save King of Tokyo for when the cousins are over.
Can younger kids play it?
The box says 8+, and I’d say that’s a little cautious. The core loop — roll dice, hit people, grab points — a six-year-old gets immediately, because it’s gloriously uncomplicated and there’s no reading required beyond the power cards, which you can read aloud. My twins managed fine in a full-table game with a bit of help on the cards when they were five years old.
The one genuine snag for younger kids is what makes it exciting for everyone else: you can be knocked out. Player elimination stings even at 8, and a kid who dies early has to sit and watch the rest unfold, which is a rough ask for a little one. In a family game that’s usually survivable — a lap around the table, a snack, they’re fine — but it’s worth knowing going in.
The honest downsides
Two, and I’ve half-covered both. First, the two-player weakness — this is a crowd game pretending, on the box, to be a 2-to-6 game, and it’s really a 4-to-6 game that tolerates two. Second, player elimination: getting knocked out and watching from the sidelines is the price of the tension, and for the youngest or most competitive kids that can end in tears. Neither is a dealbreaker. Both are just the honest truth of what you’re buying — a loud, swingy, luck-forward party brawl, not a careful strategy game. If you want the latter, you want something else. If you want your whole family shrieking around a table, this is close to perfect.
If your household can regularly muster three or more players, yes, without hesitation — it’s one of the best on-ramps to “proper” board games there is, and it produces the kind of night the kids still talk about a year later, long after the game’s gone quiet in the cupboard. If it’s mostly just you and one child, I’d point you at a two-player game first and save this one for gatherings. It’s a party game at heart, and like all the best parties, it’s better crowded.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ (4/5) — a star off only for the two-player weakness and the sting of elimination for little ones. With a full, loud table, it’s a five.
If you liked the sound of this
- Karak Review — our other big, epic family game night.
- Best 2-Player Board Games for Kids — for when King of Tokyo’s the wrong call.
- Helping Your Child Lose Without a Meltdown — useful for the elimination sting.
- Where to Buy Board Games in Singapore — where to find it locally.