Solarisphere

I played King of Tokyo for the first time this year and I absolutely loved it! Everything about the theme, the mechanics and the illustration just screamed fun. And if being king of Tokyo wasn’t enough, along comes King of New York!

I didn’t think that anything about KoT could be made better and that’s why I was so surprised when I first played KoNY.
The replacement of the three number faces (1,2 & 3) from the die, that had to do with Victory Points, with only one face (Star) and the introduction of two completely new ones has a tremendous effect on the complexity of the game. Destroy buildings? Why, thank you! Get attacked by the army? Well that seems fair. Become a monstrous Superstar? Can’t say no to some hard earned fame! Although the basic mechanics are still the same, all of these additions give you way more choices on how you proceed in the game and a round doesn’t feel as plain as in KoT.

To make things even better, in KoNY the map is updated as it now contains 5 boroughs of the city instead of just the city as it was in KoT. That means that all monsters are on the map at all times. It feels as though you are always in the thick of it and never really safe. In this case the borough of Manhattan acts as “Tokyo” and unlike Tokyo, Manhattan is divided into three parts. Each part has a better reward than the last one and you advance through them the longer you stay in Manhattan. That makes staying there much more tempting than staying in Tokyo was, thus spicing up the game a lot.
And of course there is also new Power Up cards for you to browse through with some of them creating completely new strategies for you to follow and adding great versatility to an already rich game.

The quality of the game of course is, as in KoT, top notch. The comic illustrations totally match it’s crazy theme and they are absolutely beautiful to see. The components are the same as in KoT, with thick cardboard huge monster models (in order to tower over the puny buildings of NYC) and their respective tracking boards,thick cardboard round tokens and building tiles, black dice with green engraved symbols, green plastic cubes for the energy and of course a deck of new and colorful Power Up cards.

Overall King of New York is an amazing, fun and fast game! Richard Garfield took a great game and made it into an even better one. The changes made the theme skyrocket and the gameplay much more interesting. If you already like KoT then I guarantee you will love this one. If you’re looking for a filler dice game to hit your table, then look no further!