It’s Probably Best to Turn Around and buy the Board Game Instead
We have an unofficial board game hierarchy in our house. There are three shelves of board games, and the top shelf is for the most-played, while the least played sit on the bottom shelf. That’s not necessarily by design – it’s just turned out that way.
King of Tokyo sits on that top shelf. That’s by virtue of being accessible, speedy to set up, and everyone having their favourite kaiju. The Yahtzee-esque rules are easy to grasp, and – on occasion – you get to gang up on Dad. That ‘top shelf’ presence made us excited to play King of Tokyo on the Xbox.
Rampage: The Board Game
Oh boy, did that feeling evaporate quickly. King of Tokyo may be a top-shelf board game in our house, but this is a bottom-shelf port. When your game gets the whole family discussing how it could possibly be worse, you know you’re in a tough spot.
We decided that this King of Tokyo port had two things going for it. The first is that it’s possible to play co-op. You could argue that’s an expectation, that it would be a dismal conversion if you couldn’t play it together like the board game, but we’re grasping at straws here. The second is that it’s not broken. This is a functioning, playable version of Richard Garfield’s classic, and when you press buttons, the correct things happen.
But oof, the rest of King of Tokyo is a sad state of affairs. Remember that this is a £24.99 game as we list off our grumpy condemnations.
Surely There’s Online Multiplayer…
We’ll start with the different ways you can play King of Tokyo. There is no online multiplayer: it is impossible to play with randos, and the only way to play with friends is couch co-op. That’s plain crazy, and something we would consider a baseline expectation for a £25 board game conversion. Dovetail and Nomad Games have been launching their board game ports of Catan, Talisman etc with multiplayer as standard, so why not here, Microids?
You’re stuck with Solo and Couch Co-op play. To sweeten things, Breakfirst Games have included CPU challengers, but there are asterisks here, too. You can’t choose which monsters you fight – they are always random – and there are no CPU difficulty or behaviour settings. That last addition would have been welcome as the CPU all have consistent behaviours, like abandoning the centre of Tokyo at the merest whiff of danger, and it would have been nice to switch that up.
Something I love about the board game is how colourful and characterful it is, with Cyber-Kitty, Kraken and riffs on the traditional ‘Rampage’ trio: The King, Gigazaur and Meka-Dragon. It’s not hard to squint and imagine the glorious, technicolour world they share: something between comic books and an Illumination movie.
We Were Expecting Glorious Mech-nicolour
What you get with King of Tokyo is one of the drabbest possible interpretations of the source material. Only the characters have any real colour, and the backdrops are all washed-out greys. I think I can see what the big pitch is: there’s a Japanese silkscreen effect on a lot of the backdrops, which is in-line with the ‘Tokyo’ setting. But this is just not it. I look at the Powers cards and see the vision of the original artists – not a grey, black or brown in sight – and switch back to the game, only to sigh. Even the audio is on board with the whole ‘drab’ thing, and half-heartedly tosses in some ambient sounds.
But at least it works, I suppose. For the uninitiated, it’s easy enough to pick up. You roll six dice, and those dice have symbols on them. A claw is an Attack, and that does damage to whichever monster is in the centre of Tokyo. Roll a Heart and you heal yourself; Lightning Bolts generate an energy currency to buy Powers cards; and get three-of-a-kind of a 1, 2 or 3 and you get that many Victory Points. You get to roll three times, Yahtzee style, ‘holding’ dice on each roll if you like them. After three rolls, your dice are locked and you receive their benefits.
What makes King of Tokyo unique is how it pivots from defence to attack, from cooperative play to competitive. If you attack the monster in the centre of Tokyo, they might abandon that position and force you in there instead. Now YOU are the focus of everyone’s attacks, so you better have enough health to survive.
There is a reward if you stay stubbornly in the middle, however. If you survive until your next turn, you get 3 Victory Points and cause to be very smug indeed. Reach 20 Victory Points and you are the winner.
Functional, Without the ‘Fun’
All of this, on a very basic level, works. Choosing and rejecting dice is simple and clear. You don’t have to deal with the fiddly green energy cubes that are in the board game, which is a bonus. And the Powers cards, bought with those energy cubes, are all tracked and trigger when they should. I’d often forget that I had the opportunity to use a Power in the board game; here, there’s a pop-up that pokes you and does the reminding.
BUT BUT BUT. While King of Tokyo works, it also does the bare minimum. For example, games can be ponderous unless you opt for x2 or x3 speed. But this only speeds up certain parts of the game: there are text intros for each character that, inexplicably, can’t be skipped or removed in the options, and they play slowly regardless. CPU characters may choose their dice quickly, but their animated attacks stay slow (and, again, can’t be sped up in the Options menu). You need to press two unnecessary buttons before you get to roll your dice. Basically, everything is slow when it plainly didn’t need to be.
Looking at your Powers Cards or those of your enemies is a laborious and nested process. It takes too many clicks to reach them when they could have been socketed onto the main HUD. You can’t look at cards in an enemy’s turn, either. King of Tokyo gives you little glimpses of the cards that opponents are using, but not long enough to read them or understand what’s happening.
King of Tokyo also doesn’t give you all the information you need. A Power Card might interrupt and ask if you want to negate incoming damage, but there’s no way of knowing what the incoming damage is – not unless you were paying attention to the dice-roll that came before (which, at x3 speed, isn’t necessarily feasible) .
As Anemic as a Board Game Port gets
It’s entirely possible to finish a game of King of Tokyo and wonder what to do next, but the package is so slimline that the answer is often ‘stop playing’. The Options menu only has audio settings – nothing else. There are no game modes, challenges or puzzles to solve. There is no completionist log for the Powers Cards, or telemetry so you can see which cards you tend to use, or which character you play most.
For £24.99 you don’t even get any of King of Tokyo’s expansion packs. The board game has been around for a while, so has Power Up!, which allows you to evolve your creatures; Halloween that gives you costumes; Duel which is focused on two-player; and so much more. But this is the very basic, core game, presumably with the option to purchase DLC in the future. None of that DLC is present now, however. I’ve never wanted paid-for DLC on launch more than I have with King of Tokyo.
It is hard to imagine a more half-hearted conversion of King of Tokyo. The best we can say is that it functions without falling over, and you can play with friends – as long as they’re sitting next to you on the sofa. The rest is the barest of minimums, which is somewhat insulting for the significant sum of £24.99. For a fiver more you can buy the board game and have the satisfying, click-clacky feeling of the giant dice in your hands.
Important Links
King of Tokyo Continues Japan’s Gaming Takeover – https://www.thexboxhub.com/king-of-tokyo-continues-japans-gaming-takeover/
The Legendary King of Tokyo is Smashing its Way onto PC & Consoles in 2026 – https://www.thexboxhub.com/the-legendary-king-of-tokyo-is-smashing-its-way-onto-pc-consoles-in-2026/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/king-of-tokyo/9NM9K9W1ZCJW/0010
