Today we’re going to take a look at a mini expansion for King of Tokyo/King of New York. Iello have been putting out these character packs for KOT for a few years now and when they first started doing it I was exceptionally dubious.
The monsters in KOT are more or less identical and even with the Power Up expansion, unless you really push hard to get evolutions you’re not going to be vastly different from the other players at the table. So I initially planned to skip these expansions, after all I already had KOT, KONY, both power up expansions and the halloween expansion so I didn’t need anything else. However, I picked up Cthulhu last year pretty cheap in a sale and gave him a whirl and was actually surprised.
The monster expansions come with components and power up cards for both King of Tokyo and King of New York. And, as well as the monster itself, the packages each come with a mini expansion which can be added to either base game, regardless of whether you are using the monster it came with. For Cthulhu that meant cultists and with King Kong comes tall buildings.
For Tokyo you get the Tokyo Tower and New York the Empire State Building (what else?!). Players in Tokyo can claim the bottom layer of the building by rolling four 1’s (four Skulls in New York). Holding the bottom section of the tower gives you a permanent +1 heal even in Tokyo every turn. Taking the next sections gives you an additional +1 heal and +1 energy and claiming the third and final section wins you the game.
I think it’s great adding another method to victory and being able to heal just a little in Tokyo gives you a reason to stay in there and go for the tower. That said, we played 3 games of this so far and no one managed to claim any pieces of the tower at all in any of the games!
As for King Kong he seems like a pretty cool monster. I played him in the last game and managed to get the Beauty power up into play. This card gives you Beauty who gives King Kong an extra dice. The problem is every time he takes a hit the player who hit him steals Beauty. This obviously prevents King Kong from having an extra dice, but it also narks him off. When King Kong loses Beauty he can no longer reroll hits and instead of his normal target, King Kong only hits the monster holding Beauty. Fortunately if another monster hits you they take Beauty so it adds this minigame of hot potato where no one wants to be the last one holding Beauty.
So then, do I recommend the monster packs? Yes and no. If you don’t own Power Up or Halloween, get those first, not only do they give you a new monster but they also add a lot of other content to the game for not much more than the monster packs. But if you already own everything then these mini expansions just give you some more variety that you can use from game to game to change things up and so far the monsters have been pretty fun.