sdg wrote:
I've not played Forbidden Island but I watched the tabletop episode with Forbidden Desert on it and it looks cool. It's on my wishlist and it seems to be great value for money as well. I've played King of Tokyo and enjoyed it, do you know if King of New York is the same?
Caveat: I've not played KoT, and only played KoNY once. But I read a few reviews before choosing the latter.
KoNY has some extra game mechanics over and above KoT, and these add strategic depth:
1) Smashing buildings now creates military units, who can attack monsters in the same map place as they are based on a new symbol on the dice.
2) The map now has half a dozen places and you can move around to find more buildings to trash or avoid the military.
3) There's a new "Fame" dice symbol; if you roll three of those, you become the "superstar", and from then on every one you roll gives you a free victory point until someone else rolls three "fame" symbols.
4) The longer you stay in Manhattan (the equivalent to Tokyo), the more points you earn each turn, so it rewards careful hoarding of healing cards so you can try and maximise your stay in the hot seat.
My understanding is that KoT is vulnerable to slightly cheesy tactics where you just keep rolling for maximum victory points, and KoNY doesn't have this -- choosing what to re-roll is really hard most of the time.
This does change the character of the game a little bit, from a 30 minute knockabout fun to something a bit more thoughtful (although still pretty lightweight mechnically.) That's more to my tastes though.