After finishing a game of King of Tokyo recently, a friend pointed out that nothing about the game is actually described on the box. I was surprised to discover she was right. (Update: I was wrong about this. See the update at the bottom of the post for details.) Sure, there’s the usual basic stats: the required number of players, the minimum age, and the estimated game time. But otherwise it’s pretty much just illustrations of big monsters attacking a coastal city. There aren’t even pictures of the game components–you’d never know it’s a dice game by looking at the box. It’s just pretty pictures, the game’s name, and the designer: Richard Garfield.

The back of the box for King of Tokyo: the game that needs no description. Image from Board Game Geek.

For many people, “Richard Garfield” is all you need to know.

Europe has its fair share of rockstar game designers, but in the United States, Richard Garfield really towers above the competition. Best known for creating Magic: The Gathering, and with it the ridiculously lucrative trading card game genre, Garfield is actually quite prolific with a wide ranging portfolio. Over the years he has released many games in a variety of styles, from the zany robot programming game RoboRally to the recently revamped, hidden information thriller Android: Netrunner. He has even delved into party games: growing up, I spent countless hours playing the little known What Were You Thinking. And King of Tokyo is his venture into the world of light weight dice games.

King of Tokyo takes the classic dice game trope of roll, re-roll, re-roll, score, and adds a few extra layers. What results is a game that is extremely accessible and surprisingly deep. Mechanisms in the game ensure that there are many strategies that can lead to victory, but players are never overwhelmed with options. Similarly, the game has lots of interaction, but prevents players from getting picked on.

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Pandemic has proven to be so popular, it gets a spiffy new cover a mere 5 years after its first release! Image from the Board Game Geek.

Matt Leacock’s coop masterpiece Pandemic made its debut in 2008 and has quickly become a modern classic, even finding a place on the shelves of huge toy stores like Toys’R'Us. But how did Pandemic achieve this level of success so quickly?

I believe it’s because Pandemic dove head first into the only lightly tested waters of the coop board game space. While it wasn’t the first, it was clearly the best, designed in every way to emphasize its coop nature from the theme to the clever mechanisms that power it.

And lets face it: lots of people like working together more than they like working against each other. While the cut-throat classics such as Risk and Monopoly are still well loved in certain circles, more forgiving and collaborative games, games like Settlers of Catan where you at least partially work with other players, have become more and more popular. Pandemic, as an all out cooperative game, is the natural destination when you begin traveling in this direction. Coop might make many hard core game fans roll their eyes, but for casual gamers and families especially, coop is a huge plus.

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