Matthew BaileyGame 2 of the “Bailey House Mini Xmas, not quite a marathon but let’s see how we go, Boardgameranza” is the game we went out to buy when we bought “5er Finden” played by myself, Jack(7) and Toby(4) and that is “King of Monster Island.”
Now “King of Monster Island” is the newest release in the “King of Tokyo” franchise. Now firstly I am not a massive fan of “King of Tokyo” but as this is a cooperative game and I had heard a few things about it I decided to take the plunge and give it a go.
Let’s get off the bat and say that the rule book in this game isn’t great. It’s fun and presented like a “breaking news” announcement of Monsters attacking. The issues come however when trying to use it to learn the game. It talks you through the phases of the game but uses terms that aren’t explained until much later in the rule book. This makes it a massive chore to learn how to play. Now I know how to play both “King of Tokyo” and “King of New York” and it still took me way longer than it should have done to get my head around exactly how this works. If you do end up in this situation the “example turn” section at the back of the book is way better than the actual “how to play” section.
So the board is sectioned into 6 parts with a cool volcano in the middle. The boss you are fighting starts in a section and everyone else is in different sections to start.
On the boss phase, you do any special boss powers to start, roll the boss dice (which involve dropping them in the volcano and then playing them on whichever section they land in (which is a super cool mechanic and work well). The boss then moves to the segment next to it with the most dice at which point you activate the dice (attack players, add minions etc) and the minions at those locations which may do a variety of things such as damage players nearby or build pylons which can end the game if you play too many of them.
On your phase, you then roll your dice (which works the same as King of Tokyo) and are allowed to reroll any dice you want twice (Yahtzee style). You resolve your dice allowing you to do things such as heal, attack, move, gain fame to power your ally, use abilities and gain energy to buy special powers.
This then continues until either the boss is dead or you lose which happens if; any player dies, 3 pylons are on the board or there are no minions to be drawn
So… it’s okay… firstly there is a lot of admin for not a lot of gameplay and the boys got very bored waiting for ages between turns as I activated cubes, minions, allies, boss powers etc. Now we have played way more complicated games than this such as Gloomhaven and Nemesis but the turns in this really dragged.
You add the minions on each turn the most annoying of which is a shield minion. Minions have to be killed before the boss, therefore there were regular turns where even though you had 5 attack this all gets soaked up by the minions artificially extending the game.
All in all, it felt like a lot of busy work. You end up buying powers to try and overcome the constant minions absorbing all of your damage nonsense or stopping to use heal dice. This means the whole game felt like 4 steps forwards and 3 steps back.
We played for about 45 minutes and I could tell the boys were bored so I might have rigged the minions that came out of the bag which allowed us to rush and kill the boss and finish the game.
None of us enjoyed it and I can’t see us ever playing it again.
To give some positives the components are of good quality (although for the price of the game I would have preferred miniatures), it fits in the box really nicely (always a bonus) and it comes across as a quality package (even if it does come in an unusual shaped box that doesn’t fit nicely on the shelf).
We all really wanted to like this but just could not. It is different enough from “King of Tokyo” and actually doesn’t have the main mechanic I am not keen on from that game but alas it seems to add several others things that make it a turn-off. If you are a massive fan of the previous game I can maybe see something here to like but it’s really not for me and with an RRP of £49.99 is one I really cannot quickly recommend.
