 People have been talking about this game for a long time. I see it played everywhere. It's got a good theme, like basically the theme of rampage theme. And it shot up the board game geek rankings. I'm pretty sure it's way up there. Let me see exactly where it is. Yep. It has average rating of seven point four five. It's ranked 108. I think I think it's actually higher on the actual straight up list. No, on the straight up list, it's 108 on the family game list. It's 16. Well, that's pretty good. Yeah, like that's every board game fucking ever 16 family games. Like, wow, that's that's a bit. I want to take it aside because this game King of Tokyo and several other games that are like it, that have come out in recent history are all just Yahtzee with a twist. Not saying that's bad. I'm saying almost everyone we've talked to has never played Yahtzee. Right. So let's list the games that you get through your life and not run into Yahtzee. Yahtzee is like one under monopoly and one above Candyland in terms of basic games. Everyone plays with their so here are the games that are just like Yahtzee roll through the ages, not through the ages, but roll through the ages. Skyline was that the one? Yeah, Skyline. All right. Well, what was the game? I played at anime Boston where you colonize the planet. I forget you forget in front here. Yeah. Is that Yahtzee? Yeah, that's Yahtzee. OK. Yeah. There's just tons of frigging games that are all actually just Yahtzee. I guess, you know, zombie dice is sort of Yahtzee ish. Not exactly, but sort of. Yeah, basically, these are the games it is alien frontiers from before where you roll a bunch of dice, usually five, and then you pick which ones you want to keep and re-roll the rest and do that twice. It's basically the same mechanic as draw poker, only you get to draw twice. And it's, I mean, Yahtzee's been around forever. Yahtzee is one of those old as games that super studied ever. At least I assume until recently, everyone I'd ever met had played it. And suddenly, you know, I'm introducing these games to people and I'm like, oh, yeah, it's basically Yahtzee, but with an attack component. And they're like, Yahtzee, what? You mean the guy that talks about games online? And I'm like, what the fuck? What the fuck is wrong? So if you basically what Yahtzee games come down to is, you know, is probability, right? And there's different combinations of the dye results will result in different scores or points or whatever. So you need to know what you need, right? In terms of score, you want more points generally. And, you know, all of them have different odds. High scoring things. And if the game is well designed, have low odds and things that score low are very easy to roll, relatively speaking, in terms of percentages. But you roll all the dice initially and you see what your results are and thus you need to calculate, aha. Knowing that my first roll, now I can see certain scoring possibilities are more or less likely. Something that might be more points might actually be more likely than something that is less points given the dice I have already rolled. Like I've already got three sixes. So rolling two sixes on two dice, right? And with two chances to roll them, that's pretty likely right now, actually, you know, whereas it was incredibly unlikely when I rolled just all the dice to begin with. So any game that has that mechanic of roll dice, pick some and do the poker thing until you have your set and then deploy the set in some fashion onto a board or a score sheet. If you play Yahtzee until you can play it basically perfectly where the winner is basically random based on the look of the dice. You'll be good at all of those games because once you master that, that's the core of the game and all the other stuff is just increasingly obtuse ways of actually maximizing the role after you roll it or understanding what is worth more points in a game like alien frontier is worth noting I played alien frontiers for the first time at anime Boston and yeah, I just played Yahtzee and I won by so much. It was ridiculous. Right. Like if I play Yahtzee against some kid like a middle school or high school kid, at least understand what's going on. Unless they're the really smart kid, you know, I'm just going to win if Scott and I play. We might as well flip a coin me and rim play. Let's just post keep taking the score sheets over and over again. It's probably going to come out to 50% winning after a little bit of trivia in the standard standard officially published rules of Yahtzee. What is the maximum possible score? I think you can only get a certain number of Yahtzees. Yes. Right. Do you know how many? Because I had to look it up. I did not remember. I believe I'm trying to remember. I think that my Yahtzee score sheets that I had when I was a kid official ones said I got a triple Yahtzee. You would get like 500 or something triple Yahtzee. That was a different game. Was it? Yes. Oh, I guess we had triple Yahtzee. Yes. You had three Yahtzees in one game that you would score a triple Yahtzee to get many hundreds. Right. And then right so that you could act you could keep filling those up and basically what would happen is if you managed to get enough Yahtzees you wouldn't X out your Yahtzee hole so you would keep rolling even after everyone else had filled their score sheets and you could keep going and going. So in the standard game there are 13 chips and you can get on chip for every additional Yahtzee you get. So if you get all 13 and you max out the rest of the game your maximum total score is 1575. Okay. That sounds about right. Unless Wikipedia. I remember high. Yeah. I remember good Yahtzee scores would be in like the high eight hundred nine hundreds or low thousands. Yep. You know if you got a Yahtzee that's hundreds. But seriously in general if you want to be good at games and I feel like I'm going to add this to some of our panels for the next time we talk about this stuff. Yahtzee itself is while it's not a good game for people who know better is a great game to learn a lot of the basic skills of gaming. Yeah. You're not going to be good at games unless you can master Yahtzee and Yahtzee is so transparent and easy to master just because it's not trying to hide or conceal anything with theme or anything like that. So if you just play a lot of Yahtzee into you've mastered it then you're going to be really good at all these other games are talking about because it teaches you sort of opportunity cost about it teaches you odds it teaches you when you're falling behind you've got to go for things that are less and less likely to catch up. Yep. The Hail Mary. Yeah. It's the game. It also teaches you dice rolling and Jigaboo Jonesing. Yep. Because you're all in that cup. I learned how to cheat as a kid by swirling the dice at the end or putting him in having two dice that I swirl while one's banging around in the middle and then immediately flipping the cup over I could consistently give myself three of a kind or really good odds and getting along straight. We had I had basically like I didn't have the whole game I had like remnants of the game because I think it was my great uncles and it was mad old and decrepit but it was basically from the pieces left over I could tell it was had these orange dice and a cup and sort of a blue tray similar to a Yahtzee tray. Yep. And it but all the dice had letters on them spelling. Yeah. I don't remember what the name of the game was. Yeah. Let me see if I can find it on the board game. Geek. So yeah, King of Tokyo is at its core Yahtzee but instead of deploying your dice to points you deploy your dice to sort of one of three areas you can either build up energy to buy superpowers you can attack other players directly to kick them out of the game or you can acquire victory points. And the way the game ends is if you get 20 victory points you win everyone else loses game over if you are the last man standing before anyone has gotten 20 victory points you win game over. So it adds that element it's not a great game it's eminently solvable the odds once you figure them out and once you know the strategy there's not a lot going on there. It ends up having chip taking game elements with the attacking but the way it gets around that is very elegant. It's a very sort of I can see why this is a Richard Garfield game. So what the way it works is you roll your dice and if you get the clause which lets you attack if you're in Tokyo you do damage to everyone who's not in Tokyo. If you're not in Tokyo you only do damage to the person who's in Tokyo. When you take damage and you're in Tokyo you have the option to stay the fuck there anyway or to concede Tokyo to whoever hit you. If you stay in Tokyo all the way until your next turn you get two victory points for remaining in Tokyo. So the game has this sort of sunk cost fallacy do I hold out or oh I've taken too much damage I've got a bail how much am I willing to risk on the next person's role do I go for fucking other people or victory points on my own and it adds just enough to her it's a good game to play as the light warm up game before your real game because it takes 20 minutes to play this game okay and it takes five minutes to teach this game. I found the word Yahtzee it's spilling spell also known as Scribbidge which is now I guess known as word Yahtzee but yeah this is the exact one that I had sit here with these orange dice and the cup. I've never seen that in my life. Yeah there's apparently fuck tons of versions of it called spilling spell Scribbidge and word Yahtzee so there you go. So I don't know what do you think of King of Tokyo because you played it with me. Well King of Tokyo I think has some really elegant elements to it right. The fact that the chip taking is based on are you in or out as opposed to I'm attacking this play right it's basically you're forced into Tokyo right if you don't want to be and then it's like you know you basically you either leave as soon as someone rolls a claw on purpose because you're going to die or you hold out to the bitter fucking if you're going to if you're going to stay in there you got to stay in there until it's your turn unless something freakish happens right like maybe you know somebody rolls like four claws and it's like okay I didn't think it would roll for claws right I thought I could make it around with my 10 health but I guess not so I'm going to pull out now right but even then if you get down in your health from like a four claw roll when you're in Tokyo and you're out of Tokyo the person you just went in you know if they give it becomes to you know whoever's in Tokyo if they roll and do some damage that might kill you off so think of this they're not safe but you need to roll hearts if you're in Tokyo it's like King of the Hill you're getting points for being in the king of the hill place but instead of basically now every other player is doing damage only to you while if you're in Tokyo you're doing damage to everyone else so when you're in Tokyo you're effectively getting an analog to victory points by doing damage because you're taking everyone else down equally but if anyone attacks you they're all attacking just you and knocking you out of the game yep I think the strategy having only played it a few times is to stay the fuck out of Tokyo I agree because the first game I played I stayed the fuck out of Tokyo and I ended up winning and the second game I was trying to stay in a few times to get points and I just died now I wouldn't go for damage either I'd let other players do that of course then it's Briggsmanship game but I would go for energy to buy the superpowers and also victory points just get is basically take victory points opportunistically so you're try to be like second place in victory points that way if someone blitzes toward the end you can either beat them on the blitz or kill them but you're not so far behind you can ever catch up like if you roll two threes go for that third three get all those victory points but otherwise go all energy buy as many superpowers as you can and just be the invincible asshole who wins the game kind of on his own at the end when everyone else is kind of weak I think that is the basic way to win and staying out of Tokyo means you can roll heart so if you do take damage you can you'll be good right but basically it's a light game quick to play quick to teach could be reboxed into basically a tiny bag yeah and anyone can learn and play this game right so it's it's sort of like you can get people who are less gamery to play a game that does have some good strategies in it right that they normally might be a verse to playing the theme is excellent awesome theme are just great the pieces are super high quality right there's a there's a monster for every personal taste like I like all the monsters except King Kong because he's lame I think the Kraken and the evil bunny are cracking Kraken it's a crack it's a titan have you never been mellow of course I think I pay at first when I saw the cover of the box you know because usually in rampage I always pick Lizzie so I was thinking I'd either be the Godzilla or I'd be the the cyberbunny because I mean cyber right yeah but then when I open the box I saw oh there's a Kraken that's basically just as good as the dinosaur he's got a good face Godzilla right and then I saw the Mecha Dragon I'm like well fuck I mean that's you know that's slightly edges the other ones out but all of them are great except for the friggin King Kong and now I would compare this actually to skyline the game that wasn't it like part of the Kickstarter for ground floor yeah it's much better than ground floor well ground floor is a shit game we talked about that but skyline was kind of fun but it's basically just a shorter Yahtzee skyline is to Yahtzee what Yooker is to Whist so between skyline and King of Tokyo I think King of Tokyo is a better game I also agree because skyline didn't have as many of the interactive elements only interactive elementsmanship the only brings a ship it had was like the one piece left you know that that extra piece you leave over in the storage or whatever it's called the leftover bits that someone else can grab all of right yeah that was it yeah that's it whereas this one it's like you're directly Yahtzee and you need to react to people right if someone you know if you see it's like you know if it's depending on who's in Tokyo you might re-roll a claw you know not to hurt them right because they're gonna lose anyway you're better off getting some points or something yep right let them stay in there and get killed by someone else so you know is vicious it adds a little bit more sort of randomness but it's it's the Yahtzee randomness that's heavily mitigated by odds you know exactly the risk you're taking by going for x over y over z and the odds of six-sided dice are trivial to calculate in your head you don't even need to calculate them you just need to have the rough feel of them I mean I played Yahtzee from my childhood probably over a thousand times because we was like it's like the family game like every family would play it I'd go over to friends houses and they would all play it like everyone played Yahtzee we played in school and like elementary school I had a book of Yahtzee score sheets and they were empty so I had a second book of Yahtzee score sheets so that's how many it's a man ya one Yahtzee score she can play Yahtzee like fucking six times on both sides we had a Yahtzee box from the fifties like late fifties maybe early sixties well we had we had a trip we are all full of like my parents playing it when they were kids yep yep I think that was the triple Yahtzee we had was my parents one and then I think I had another one where I got the second set of score we don't know yahtzee travel Yahtzee when I learned about triple Yahtzee as a kid I was like well it's obviously better than regular Yahtzee so I made my own sheet and then I went to Kinko's and paid to have it duplicated hmm I was very proud of that that same Kinko's refused to let me Xerox pages out of my dungeons and dragon cyclopedia because that would be copyright infringement that was in the early days when copy machines and Kinko's were not exactly common and no one really knew like people were afraid of Kinko's for copyright stuff and Kinko's really weird about that but yeah this is a this is a kind of game that if you go to conventions or are commonly introducing games to other people like hey would you like to play a game or hey you've come over to my party let's play a light game while waiting for more people to show up this is your game just buy it it's also a great game if you want to introduce games like this to your kids a kid who is too young for Yahtzee even though I think six-year-olds can play Yahtzee just fine if you can count and you can if you can play poker you play Yahtzee right now my grandpa taught me poker and I was like no one might not be interested in Yahtzee will play this because you're a monster you're fucking up other monsters with your claw yep it's also got some after references to old robot movies and old monster movies and it's just very well done for what it is and it's not that expensive a lot of times games that are of this caliber cost way more than this for no good reason yeah what I think it really is just that you know there are these certain games that like the warm-up game right and you think of it as like a spotted or something along those lines right but those games I think are almost too light right they don't really you know get you sitting at a table to play a board game they don't really get you doing any sort of strategies or anything right and they get because they're so light they get too much play I think those are better for the stand-up you know we really don't have time for a game let's play spot it right I think this is really a real warm-up game right you still get the people sitting at the table you know playing the game properly and then you can switch to a real game once they're sitting there like that as it's much harder to switch into a Puerto Rico from a spotted than it is to switch from a king of Tokyo to a Puerto Rico yep and it's so quick to teach that you can get the people who normally wouldn't play a game to just oh I'll play it you'll be done with the whole game in 20 minutes plus five minutes of teaching tops yeah and nerds like the themes you can nurse to play is even if they're not board game people yep yeah so but seriously if you want to be good at games you haven't played Yahtzee play Yahtzee you don't even need to play with other people just play it by yourself I played solo Yahtzees I played many a solo Yahtzee this has been Geek Nights with rim and scott special thanks to DJ pretzel for the opening music can't leave for web design and brand okay for the logos be sure to visit our website at front row crew dot com for show notes discussion news and more remember Geek Nights is not one but four different shows sci-tech Mondays gaming Tuesdays anime comic Wednesdays and indiscriminate Thursdays Geek Nights is distributed under a creative comments attribution 3.0 license Geek Nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience but unlike those other late shows it's actually recorded at night