Day 5 - King of Tokyo/7 Wonders

For the first half of class I played a game called King of Tokyo, a dice game in which each player was a giant monster trying to take control of Tokyo. In order to win the game you needed to either reach 20 victory points or eliminate every other monster. At any given time there was only one monster actually in Tokyo. Any attacks from that monster affected all other monsters but any attacks from other monsters were focuses solely on the one in Tokyo. The main way to achieve victory points is by constantly entering Tokyo or rolling three of specific number (1,2, or 3). The most obvious strategy for this game would be to try as hard as possible not to be the monster in Tokyo as you end up spending your rolls trying to regain life points instead of racking up victory points or energy cubes (in-game currency) unless you have some specific card that is more beneficial if you are in Tokyo. It's also a good idea to try to stay in the middle of the scoreboard until late game or else other players will gang up on you early on. I found the best strategy for me was to spend time getting lots of energy cubes because many of the cards you can buy have abilities that allow you to gain victory points very quickly and there is no limit to how many cards you buy in one turn as long as you can pay for them. Overall I really liked it. I tend to like more complicated games but this one was very simple yet very fun and encourage very competitive playing styles.

For the second half I played 7 Wonders, which is a hand management game with a few twists. I always thought this game was a little too complicated. I'd played it at least twice before and still needed a thorough refresher on all the rules. You have to pay a lot of attention to not only what you are building or need to build your wonder, but you also need to pay attention to the players on either side of you. In each age there are several turns in which you will be handed a deck and you need to choose a card to keep and pass the rest to your neighbor. You want to hold on to things you need, like resources, but you want to try not to give your neighbor something that gives them an advantage. I noticed that Curt was building a hefty military so I tried to either take military cards for myself or sacrifice them face down to build stages of my wonder. Ultimately I realized I should have been keeping the science cards from him. Most militaries aren't much larger than 4 to 6, and the penalties for losing to a neighboring army are small (-1, -3 or -5 depending on the age). But the score for having science cards is determined by the number of science cards squared. It would have made more sense to prevent him from going to 5 science cards (25 points) to 6 science cards (36 points) than to worry about losing 5 points to his army. I'd rather lose 5 points than let him gain 11. I do like playing 7 Wonders and it's a reasonably timed game, it's just difficult to teach to new people.