Review: Kaiju Crush

• February 3, 2018
• James Skemp
• review

The following is a review of Kaiju Crush, received as part of the Amazon Vine program.

Rock, Paper, Scissors, Destroy

While Kaiju Crush isn’t a very deep game, we’ve enjoyed every play of it.

The idea is simple: each player selects a kaiju/monster and tries to destroy as many tiles in the city as they can, keeping in mind what types of tiles they are, and which objectives for bonus points is active.

However, you have to be strategic as there are only a certain number of ways your kaiju can move, depending upon the number of players. Each player gets one of the unique movement cards, with one additional being set out as a shared movement. Once you move your personal movement card you switch it with the shared card, meaning that you can potentially block other players from moving in a way they need to take a tile but also restricting how you can move. While not as complex as Onitama, this still adds a really nice challenge.

In addition to just taking tiles over by stomping them, you can also fight other player’s by landing in the same tile they are. Alternatively, you can choose to fight them if you’re in an adjacent tile for the chance to get end-of-game bonus points.

In either case combat involves drawing five random tile cards (or six with one of the kaiju) and then using those to play a game of rock paper scissors plus, since there’s on additional level of rock paper scissors one layer in. This is the trickiest aspect of the game, as while it allows anyone to play since it’s relatively simple, there’s still a deal of luck on which cards you end up drawing.

Which brings up our suggestions for the game.

First, while each player gets a card that shows them what beats what, it might be nice if the actual cards you play noted what they beat. This is the hardest part of first playing, and there’s plenty of room to put that on the cards.

The other minor issue is that one person noted that the gray color (for Mecha Kaizer), blended in with the other tiles, and would have liked to have seen another color used that’s a bit brighter.

The other minor issue is with the player tile cards. These aren’t as thick as the city tiles, and are of a size that makes them more prone to bending.

Unlike King of Tokyo/New York, one of the nice things about this game is that every player is in until the end. Young and old could get into Kaiju Crush given how simple the base rules are.

For these reasons, we give Kaiju Crush four of five stars. It definitely won’t get pulled out every time we play a game, and won’t meet the need when we want to play something complex, but it will definitely replace King of Tokyo in most cases, and be great for game lunch and when we need something quick. Recommended.

• review
• board game