King of Tokyo: Origins is a dice-chucking game that pits monster against monster in the age-old battle for Japan’s biggest city. The winner will either be the first person who reaches 20 points, or be the last monster standing.

Set Up

All players take a cut-out of a monster and sets it in the plastic stand. They then take the accompanying monster’s score tracker, setting the wheel in the upper left (Points) to zero and the wheel in the lower right (Health) to 10. 

[caption id="attachment_295759" align="aligncenter" width="500"] King of Tokyo: Origins[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_295760" align="aligncenter" width="498"] Mechamster and Cosmic Joe[/caption]

Set the board on the table in reach of all players—or don’t. The board only has a circle for the attacking monster to stand in. That’s all. Simply placing your monster in the middle of the table will have the same effect.

Shuffle the deck of cards. Throughout the game, you’ll be able to purchase these to gain either a temporary or permanent bonus. Place three cards face-up and the remaining cards to the side.

[caption id="attachment_295762" align="aligncenter" width="500"] A sampling of cards[/caption]

Randomly choose a starting player and…

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Return to the beleaguered city of Tokyo—now with the addition of Tokyo Bay—as our monsters slug it out once again for domination and to claim victory. 

If you’re new to King of Tokyo, I went over the setup and gameplay in my recent review of King of Tokyo: Origins. (Known from here as KoT: O) That game comes with four monsters, each lacking in special abilities and rendering them disappointingly interchangeable. King of Tokyo: Monster Box (KoT: MB), a fully stand-alone game, solves that problem in a big way. 

Let’s start with some of the basics, though. 

[caption id="attachment_295770" align="aligncenter" width="500"] King of Tokyo Monster Box box[/caption]

KoT:MB comes with its own big deck of monster cards. 

[caption id="attachment_295771" align="aligncenter" width="500"] A sampling of the many Monster cards in the box[/caption]

From my games, these can be mixed in with the KoT:O cards if you want even more options.

KoT:MB also comes with two sets of dice, one in black & green and one in orange & black. The orange set was initially included in the King of Tokyo Halloween expansion. There is no difference between these sets of dice. If…

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Senjutsu is a skirmish game for 1-4 players, set in feudal Japan during the civil war that followed the fall of the Ashikaga Shogunate. Each player takes on the role of a samurai protecting their Daimyo, but the narrative doesn’t make its presence known. This is Street Fighter in three dimensions. Another name for that might be Tekken. Players battle it out, trying to be the last man—hey, that’s what’s in the box—standing.

Mechanically, Senjutsu is a card game with heavily customizable decks. At the beginning of each session, both players construct a deck that corresponds to their chosen character. The flexibility of the system is tremendous. Each character has a set of special cards only they can use, on top of a large stack of general cards that can be used by anybody. This portion of the game reminds me of Sakura Arms, a dueling game in which players select characters and choose cards from within their supply. Though Sakura Arms is a bit tidier about how it implements its version of this system, Senjutsu offers a similar promise: the more you play, the better you know the characters and their cards, and the more emotionally satisfying the deck-building portion of setup becomes.

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The city of Recife was quiet. The streets near the prison were empty. Everyone had fled inside. Even the sun sought the cover of the horizon.

Jararaca cleaned the blood off his facão, running the blade across his kerchief. The volantes had put up a good fight, but they were no match for this band of cangaceiros. The dry, harsh deserts of northeastern Brazil do not create soft men. To survive here at all, let alone as an outlaw, you had to be tough.

Tainá put her hand on his shoulder. “Jararaca, we need to go. They’ll be sending more men.”

“Grab what you can from the corpses. We’ll head out into the mountains. They won’t be able to follow us there.”

A História

Cangaceiros has a remarkable capacity for suggesting narrative. The setting, northeastern Brazil during the Cangaço movement at the turn of the 20th century, combines with comic book illustrator Emiliano Mammucari’s superlative art to give the whole enterprise an impeccable sense of character. That box cover is divine. The character cards are full of personality, each feeling like a distinct individual. Even the volantes, who fought against the cangaceiros on behalf of the wealthy land-owners in the region, look cool. It makes sense that my imagination…

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Before diving into the two new expansions for Mindbug, the cocaine-addled card dueler I first reviewed back in 2021, I pulled the base game off the shelf for a refresher. It had taken me a while to warm up to this strange, spasmodic design. Mindbug is so streamlined, so reactive, so fundamentally swingy, that my first several games felt like they didn’t involve any decisions at all.

That definitely wasn’t the case, as I came to see with experience. Mindbug is full of interesting decisions. Except for when it isn’t. It’s complicated.

My feelings about the base game haven’t changed, though they have muted. My admiration has diminished. Returning, I found myself a bit bored, which was never a feeling I had when it first came out, even when I hadn’t found my way in yet. Sounds like a perfect time to inject some novelty.

Don’t Mindbug If I Do

Any given Mindbug deck, be it the base game or any of the three expansions, is full of creature cards. Each creature is obscenely powerful in one way or another. Some are strong. Some are disruptive. Some are both. Nearly every card, by design,…

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If you have a chance to review any of my previous content, you’ll see a lot of glowing words attached to the reviews of games designed or co-designed by Simone Luciani.

To me, Luciani is gaming royalty. Grand Austria Hotel, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Marco Polo II: In the Service of the Khan, and Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar are some of the best games I have ever played. Luciani’s “T” game release with Daniele Tascini, Tiletum, was my pick for the best game of 2022.

With all of that in mind, there was never a doubt that I would play Anunnaki: Dawn of the Gods (2023, Cranio Creations), a co-design with Danilo Sabia. Sabia and Luciani also designed Rats of Wistar, which will soon make its way to gamers in the US.

I’m not going to lie to you: Anunnaki didn’t hit it out of the park, to use a baseball reference. It’s not that the game is bad—in fact, it is occasionally interesting, particularly with its action selection mechanism—but it is very likely that my standards for Luciani games have gotten too high. Grand Austria Hotel is the best Euro-style game I have ever played; as a film buff, when you love a film director and that director puts out middling fare, you…

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When people talk about cooperative gaming, Castle Panic almost always enters the conversation. When Castle Panic took the stage in 2009, cooperative gaming wasn’t anything new. Reiner Knizia’s Lord of the Rings was arguably the front-runner, having introduced a whole new era of board gamers to the concept 9 years earlier. But, even that wasn’t the first one. Board games which task the players with working together to reach some common goal have been around as early as the first decade of the 1900s.

Regardless, it didn’t take Castle Panic long to solidify itself as a shining example of what cooperative gaming could, and should, be.

As the name implies, Castle Panic is a castle defense game that places the players squarely in the middle of a monstrous invasion. Sheltered within their fortifications in the middle of the board, the players must work together to eliminate the hordes of oncoming monsters before they are able to tear down everything the players have built. With a little bit of hand management, a healthy dose of teamwork, and a whole lot of prayer, they just might succeed.

In this two-part series, we’ll be taking a look at the Castle Panic: Big Box Second Edition (2E). In the first part, I will be discussing the base game, how it plays, and what…

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Disaster Strikes

Space – the last frontier. All is quiet, all is calm. The placid stars twinkle at you as you cruise the friendly void.

And suddenly, explosions rock the ship. Blaster-wielding intruders teleport aboard. Enemy fighters swoop in from every direction. Irrational fear grips your comrades. What? Why? How? It doesn't matter!

Because worst of all, the Captain falls over dead (Incinerated, decapitated, perforated, poisoned . . . it’s really up to your imagination).

[caption id="attachment_292174" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Intruders in the Computer Core! Should the Chief Engineer leave her station to deal with the threat? Can the Tactical Officer leave the Bridge for a turn to handle this? What about the Science Officer? What’s he doing that’s so important?[/caption]

Pulling it all together

In the aftermath of this cataclysmic and apocalyptic prelude, only your motley crew remains. There’s only one way out of this pickle. Head into Engineering, repair the Jump Core and then get out of the neighbourhood! Alas, disaster has taken delight in leaving you with a most unlikely band of survivors. How will the Janitor, the Diplomat and The Scholar come together to fend off intruders, shoot down attacking ships and fix the Jump Core? Which of these challenges will you tackle first? Can any of them…

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Guilty Gear is widely considered one of the great 2D fighting franchises in video game history. Though the series has never achieved the cultural prominence of Street Fighter or Tekken, it has long been lauded for its technically exacting gameplay and visual flair. Earlier this year, Level 99 Games announced that they were adapting Guilty Gear: Strive, the most recent title, into a two-person card game.

It’s a sensible marriage. Much as Guilty Gear has been a long-running cult success, Level 99’s Exceed Fighting System has been a niche favorite, beloved by a certain type of board game enthusiast, for most of the last decade. The system has adapted video games before, with entries for Shovel Knight and Dead Cells, but never with this level of ambition. A stonking 20 characters will be included in the final version of Guilty Gear: Strive.

That won’t be available for a while yet, but I spent some time with the demo deck, which includes Sol Badguy (incredible name) and Ky Kiske. The choice of these two characters for the demo should provide longtime Guilty Gear fans with assurance that they’re in good hands. Sol and Ky are the only two characters to have appeared in every installment of the series.

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Twisted Metal.

The long-time PlayStation video game car combat series is maybe my favorite all-time PS experience. Although I have enjoyed playing through all of the games—Twisted Metal 2 took up so much of my time that I should have gone blind staring at the screen for so long—Twisted Metal: Black is the undisputed best of those games.

But all of the Twisted Metal titles feature the same things: taking on the “character” of a driver whose car is used to murder every other combatant off the map, using weapons that were picked up in the field of play as well as special abilities that could be triggered a few times in each match. The lore was insane with Twisted Metal; save for one or two characters in each game that were ostensibly “good” (former cops, a priest, etc.), everything about the games really was twisted, right down to the game series’ signature character, Sweet Tooth, a demonic-looking clown that drove an ice cream truck that happened to have a missile launcher.

Sweet, indeed.

Thunder Road: Vendetta (2023, Restoration Games) is a take on the 1980s board game Thunder Road, which may have been one of the inspirations for the original Twisted Metal video games. (Because video game adaptations are hot, yes, there is a Twisted Metal TV…

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