Godzilla: Tokyo Clash First Impressions

Godzilla: Tokyo Clash sees Kaiju destroy Tokyo.

Will you be King of the Monsters?

You play as the Earth’s most fearsome Kaiju — Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah, and Megalon — battling for dominance as the most terrifying monster in Japan.

Godzilla: Tokyo Clash Game Play

A city is laid out made up of various tiles with buildings and vehicles all over it. Everyone also has a big monster mini which starts in a different corner of the board.

There are also 2 event cards added to the board. In our game, one added UFOs that attack the nearest player and the other allowed the player last in turn order to move trains at the start of a round.

Players get a player board to track energy and each character has their own unique deck of cards.

On a players turn, they either play a card from their hand, discard a card for their action, or pass.

Cards allow you to move and attack and cost energy. If you throw a building or vehicle and destroy it, or throw a Kaiju into a building to destroy it, you can gain energy from that.

Attacking

When attacking you pick a target and deal the damage shown on the card minus any defence on cards played by the defender. For each damage, the attacker draws that many cards from the defender’s deck, they keep one face down in their score pile as a trophy and the defender discards the rest.

If you attack the holder of the start player token, you take it.

Some cards are enhancements that stay in play for a passive ability or are discarded for an extra ability.

The discard ability differs from character to character. I used Megalon so I could throw a Vehicle or Kaiju with momentum meaning I could take another action.

When all players pass the round ends and there is some tidy up where players can discard cards and then draw back up to 5. Then you trigger any event cards.

When small buildings are destroyed they’re added to a track starting at the end and going backwards.. Each round, an oxygen destroyer moves forward and when it passes the buildings on the track, the game ends.

Players count the points in their score pile and the holder of the first player marker gets 2 points, most points wins.

Theme

Can’t go wrong with big beefy monsties bashing each other around a city. The city is destructible so that adds to the theme. All the Kaiju have their own deck and abilities which is cool too.

Setup

Two people that had already played the game did it while I was on my phone. There is a lot of little bits including board tiles and especially buildings, trains etc

Components & Artwork

Obviously, it looks great but I’m not sure what is and isn’t printed. The minis and the buildings are not for sure. Not sure about UFOs, Satellite Dishes, Trains etc

The cards have that distressed look that fits the theme but I keep thinking I messed the cards up when I forgot that pattern si there!

The art is cool.

Ease of Teaching

This is both straightforward and tricky at the same time. Everything is very easy, but there is a lot of it. You have cheat sheets to remind you what happens when you throw a thing into another thing.

Godzilla: Tokyo Clash Summary

There are plenty of arena combat games, I could almost do a top 10. I recently looked at Carthage but I’ve also done how to plays for Starcadia Quest: Showdown and Adrenaline as well as a video from Essen for Funkoverse. There are more.

It has deterministic combat which I know a lot of people will like. You know how much damage you will do, you just don’t know how much will be blocked.

it is random scoring though. Once I dealt 4 damage, drew 4 cards and they were all 0 points. Someone hit me for 2, drew 2 cards from my deck and discarded a 3 pointer into my discard pile. that means the card they took was 3 or more. So there is luck there.

But if you like the sound of this game and you like the theme I’m sure you’ll enjoy smashing things up.

Jesta ThaRogue