Leveled

I love two player games. I do not love duel-ifications. Adapting a multiplayer game to a head-to-head format rarely goes smoothly. Something always breaks – the incentives are wonky, it’s too zero sum, no more dynamic swings based on multiple coordinated turns, something somewhere always gets lost in translation. King of Tokyo: Duel bucks that trend by going in a very different direction: incredible, aggressive mediocrity.

On the surface it looks familiar. You still Yahtzee roll, you still buy power cards, you still try to either beat opponents to death or win in a more boring manner. Both of those are rendered significantly less exciting by the complete removal of Tokyo itself. You know, the hill? The hill everyone’s fighting to be King of? That critical element is excised, replaced with a pair of point tracks that keep getting slowly tugged back and forth. 

While I respect the willingness to alter a design to the point where its namesake is all but gone, what we’re left with lacks any of the tension or emotional highs of the original. Everyone who’s played KoT has experienced that moment where they’re on low health outside of Tokyo, accidentally roll a claw, and are forced to eat the next punch from the peanut gallery as the current hill-haver cedes it to them whether they want it or not. It’s a major source of the game’s comedy and table-talk, and its absence is strongly felt. Gone are the emotional highs of King of Tokyo, and all we have to show for it is dry tug-o-war. 

I realize it’s bad criticism to rag on a game for what it isn’t, but what’s on offer here is just a patchwork of KoT ideas with additional rules grafted on. Rolling for points works the same, only you tug the ropes instead of simply scoring. The card offer now does the popular cha cha sliiiiide to the right, with the oldest card on offer being discounted by 1. Passing on a purchase gets you an energy now, presumably to avoid the awkward sessions of the original where energy just wasn’t rolled and cards never got picked up. That drip feed does add up, but rarely to the point where a pass is an interesting option VS a purchase. You either have an appealing card in the offer or you don’t. All of these changes are minor, and some qualify as quality of life, but their impact isn’t especially notable.

Where KoT:D does significantly differ are its two new mechanisms: buzz tokens and asymmetric monsters. The former are grafted onto most of the cards, giving you a little chit to slap onto one of the tracks that triggers every time the tug of war passes it. These take more admin than their meager benefits warrant, with the rare exception of situations where you pull the rope back and forth in rapid succession. Granted that’s indicative of a stalled out game state where not a lot is happening, but hey, at least it’s made mildly more interesting for the tokens’ inclusion. The most impactful ones shorten or lengthen the tracks, but again, this just leads to more fussing with the game’s least exciting element.

It’s the monsters themselves where I feel the most let down. Asymmetric monsters have been something King of Tokyo and its spinoffs have never quite figured out. The Power Up expansion is infamous for slowing the game down dramatically, and while King of Tokyo: Dark Edition added a very enjoyable track of draftable powers, that didn’t give each monster an identity of their own. Duel does exactly that – each monster has a unique power that procs on the new “!” side of the dice – and they are wildly imbalanced. Rarely do I gripe about perceived balance, especially in a dice game, but when your player count maxes out at 2 there’s no ability for other players to gang up on a perceived leader and mitigate the swing. There are a whole 6 monsters on offer here, which to be fair is the typical amount found in a KoT core game, but given how few that is I’m amazed that these are as miscalibrated as they are.

To give you an example of the lower end of the power curve: The King gets tokens that let him slow down his opponent’s track pulling a bit. Given that the line is often tugged in 1-space increments, this often ends up meaning his “real” power is having 15 health. By contrast, Meka Dragon gets multiplicative damage sides. As in, 3 exclamation points and 3 damage sides is 9 damage. This doesn’t require cards, trickery, nothing, they just get that. One of our plays ended in a whole 3 turns! Games with Meka Dragon are constantly threatening to end in explosion to the point where we banned the character at our table because hard committing to damage completely outpaces everything the other characters can do. Cosmic Encounter didn’t translate its wonky powers to 2p well in its duelification, and it seems KoT’s couldn’t get there either.

The more I played King of Tokyo: Duel the more I questioned who it was for. Were diehard fans clamoring for a low player count alternative? Was this a game Richard Garfield felt brought something new to the table? Did iello just need another KoT product? I don’t know, I can’t know, but what I do know is it doesn’t fill any of those functions as well as it could. The potential of a highly asymmetric Tokyo-stompin’ time is great, and I’m certain something like this could be excellent, but the game we got misses the mark by some margin in every regard. No game about kaiju smashing a city should have sessions that end in a collective sigh.

4/10