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Of course, one of the best bits about these games is the monsters that you get. The boss monsters in particular are pretty special here, especially the biggest one, Lavalord. Of the player monsters, I do love Megamoth and Pagurah (huge cyborg moth and massive crab thing), while H.A.D.E.S is different enough to make playing it fun. That said, I’ll probably start rotating in Tokyo favourites like Gigasaur and Cyber Kitty before long. Whilst previous entries in the beginner board game series pit monsters against one another for control of territory to terrorise, King of Monster Island has the kaiju working together to defeat an even bigger and badder monster threatening to destroy the entire planet. Imagine Suicide Squad, but with robots, crab abominations and giant aliens. Meehan, Lolies and Wheels play the Dark Edition of King of Tokyo.
King of Tokyo has always been a series where size matters. Whether it’s the original King of Tokyo or its spin-off title King of New York, bigger is always going to be better in a board game themed around Kaiju fighting one another in various major cities. King of Monster Island is easily the largest iteration the series has seen yet. Each player takes the role of a Monster: see the choices above. Interestingly, the Monsters have no special powers: it’s the Ally you choose that has the special powers!! (This kinda reminded us of Minecraft : Heroes of the Village from a few weeks ago when the pets had the special abilities, not the villagers … is this a new trend?) Although King of Monster Island can play 1-5 players, I can’t imagine playing this with 4 or 5 players. The game seemed to be great solo, and flowed pretty well at 2, and slightly less better at 3. The problem was that there’s not a lot of to do when it’s not your turn! At 4 and 5 players: the downtime between turns is much more pronounced and not fun. Granted, players can talk and offer a little bit of advice (since it’s a co-op), but generally each player is very focused on the dice and ignoring everything else. I am not sure why, but it took me three times to play this game to get the rules right. The first time I played solo, I thought that all Minions did their thing on the Boss’s turn: Nope! Just the Minion IN THE ZONE with the Boss! It even says that at the start of step 4 (see below).These red dice activate the “bad news” parts of the game: they summon minions, give the Boss fame, and build crystals. In the end, you’ll notice I ended up playing with the rulebook up on the table (see above) taking up tons of space! I liked King of Monster Island and my friends liked it. We’d probably give it a 7/10 overall. The production is pretty great, the gameplay is pretty fun, and it flows fairly well. It works best at 1-3 players.
As good as the King of Monster Island rulebook was, it failed The Chair Test. Caveat Emptor! UnboxingMinions can also help build pylons, but mostly they do damage to players, or shield other minions from damage. As you can probably appreciate from this rundown, there’s a fair amount of upkeep and admin to keep the game flowing – and that slows down the action. At its core: King of Monster Island is a dice game with a Yahtzee re-roll mechanic. You roll once, keep what you want, then re-roll again keeping what you want, then one final re-roll. Just like King of Tokyo. Or Yahtzee. Or many other games with dice. It’s what the dice do that is interesting! There are lot of punch outs: minions (left), crystals (upper right) , and Support tiles (lower right).
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