GOTM: May ‘22

My most-played game in May was undoubtedly State of Decay 2, which I can’t resist starting over on a new map and with a new team of survivors every time I finish a campaign. That I’m still doing this after a bug in a recent update resulting in me losing all of my legacy boons and survivors speaks volumes about how much I love this game. I’m not gonna call it my Game of the Month two months in a row though, because one thing I’ve enjoyed even more than State of Decay 2 is playing Richard Garfield’s King of Tokyo with my five-year old daughter.

I purchased the King of Tokyo Monster Box on a whim months ago after a YouTube algorithm pointed me at a 2013 video of Wil ‘Wesley Crusher’ Wheaton, Greg ‘BioWare’ Zeschuk, and a couple of other guys playing the base game. It looked a lot less intimidating than many of the board games I have in my collection, but I never expected to be regularly playing it with my daughter after she convinced me to take it down off the shelf and break the seal.

We stuck with the base game for our first few runs, in part because my daughter has trouble reading and keeping track of all the extra cards that come into play with the included Power Up and Halloween expansions. She recognizes many of the Power and Costume cards by their art at this point though, so I mostly just help her with the monster-specific, no-art Evolution cards. We’ve been playing and enjoying the game together so often that I even purchased all four of the monster expansions, adding King King, Cthulhu, Cybertooth, and Anubis. Each of these introduce new gameplay mechanics that I have to keep track of for both of us, but Cthulu has quickly joined Boogie Woogie atop my daughter’s list of favorites.

If we were still just playing the base game, the collector in me would probably be spending far too much time and money acquiring some of the country-specific promo monsters that publisher IELLO has released in recent years. None of these monsters introduce new mechanics to the game or even come with Evolution cards though, so I don’t particularly want them at any price, much less at what ebay sellers are trying to charge. 

How long I continue playing King of Tokyo really isn’t up to me. I’m hopeful that my daughter won’t get bored with it anytime soon, and that it’ll serve as something of a gateway for her to get into other tabletop games that we can enjoy together in the future.