King of Tokyo Headhunter Mod: Can Gambling Save This Game?

This is adapted from the script of Episode 98, “ˆLight and Get Away, It’s the Fall Small Games Preview.”

Let’s talk about King of Tokyo: Headhunter Edition, which is something I made up because I’m already pretty firm that King of Tokyo should not be played sober. I never enjoyed the after-dinner family time-wasting sessions. It didn’t look like anybody else did, either. But as a nightcap, with a bit of hooch to get your bloodlust up and make the dice sound like war drums? That’s when the game appears.

I’ve always wondered if you could juice King of Tokyo up, make it meaner, cut it right down to the sensation of the kill. Plus add modest stakes. So I tried it out on some pals at the tail end of happy hour at the Hilton Gardens Inn.

Oh no, it’s MegaBoring from Planet Who Gives a Shit

For the handful of people who don’t play boardgames but who arrived at this post anyway: King of Tokyo is an easy-to-learn dice-chucking kaiju battle designed by Richard Garflied, the same guy who designed Magic: The Gathering. It is a riot…if you’re seven or you’re an adult who wears Crocs. It’s a “king of the hill” battle with you and up to five enemy monsters duking it out in Tokyo.

In the off-the-shelf version, you can eliminate other monsters by reducing their health to zero, but also win by stacking victory points. For the Headhunter Edition, I made a few drastic modifications:

• Taking every card focused on victory points out of the upgrade deck, leaving only attack and recovery stuff

• Stipulating a $5 ante for each monster. If you die, whatever cash that’s under the base of your monster goes to the monster who landed the blow. And so on until there’s a bunch of dead monsters and one monster roaring, holding everybody’s gas money.

• Final mod: If you finish a turn with three of any numeral showing on the dice, you add that many dollars to your monster’s ante, making you a more profitable target.

So how did it go? It sucked. Mechanically, the big downside was that monsters, rather than being goaded into an insane slaughter, built up an immense field of upgrade cards that made killing them almost impossible. I envisioned quick-fatality matches, direct lines to modest but still exciting piles of blood money, emptying pockets and building grudges.

Didn’t happen. There we were in the lobby of the Hilton Gardens after, I don’t know, 45 minutes, with the dinner crowd coming in and all the monsters politely parked on their original antes. We broke camp after a beer and took our money back.

I think the best outcome would have been if maybe a kid had wandered over and wanted to play. “Sure,” you tell it, “go tell your Mom you need some money for snacks.” Ideally this would lead to some kind of scene where you fleece the rugrat for $20 and it melts down because you keep killing its monster and taking its money and the parents get furious and you get banned from the property. That would at least make a memorable final King of Tokyo session. I bet I could juice a few hundred local clicks off the trespass warnings alone.

Me and the boys talked briefly about ways to improve it — such as getting rid of all the defensive cards, too — but I think the biggest improvement is to just give this box away to somebody with kids. I’m not capable anymore of the amount of drinking I’d have to do to care about this game again.