A dark day that I never thought would come to pass finally has: I own a product of the Funko company. It's not one of their garbage cube-headed figures, though, it's Godzilla Tokyo Clash a board game about monsters throwing trains at each other. It even has some excellent-looking miniatures, proving that some talented sculptors do apparently work there!
The game sees two-to-four players each picking a kaiju from a selection of Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Mothra, and unexpectedly, the one movie wonder Megalon, and having them wage turn-based combat against each other and humanity. You take turns playing cards from your hand to perform attacks against the other monsters, or discarding them to move around the city and attack buildings and vehicles. Attacking buildings and vehicles gives you the energy you need to attack the other kaiju, so you've got to perform a balancing act between the two.
Because kaiju are generally near-indestructible (and because being eliminated from a board game is boring and dumb), you can't actually kill each other. Instead, every special move card has a points value in the bottom-right corner, and dealing damage means you take a number of cards from the top of your victim's deck and taking the most valuable one as a trophy. There's a round tracker with the oxygen destroyer moving in one direction, and the smaller buildings going the other way as they're destroyed by the players, with the game ending when the two cross over each other. I guess the in-universe explanation is that the more bildings get destroyed, the greater urgency humanity feels with regard to deploying the ocygen destroyer? (Let's be kind and ignore the fact that Ghidorah can travel through space and doesn't need to breathe oxygen, okay?)
The board is made up of a bunch of tiles representing the city (a different amount based on the amount of players), and even comes with a bunch of little plastic buildings of various types to populate it. Along with the excellent kaiju minis, it comes together to be a really great-looking game. I've seen some photos online from other people who own the game and have replaced the slightly generic-looking buildings with more detailed ones from other games, and the cardboard tokens representing the human vehicles with minis, and they looked amazing, too! That's something I may have to look into myself at some point.
Luckily, it's also a fun game to actually play, and the four kaiju all play differently, each emphasising different tactics. Though it's not the kind of game I can see myself playing every week, I do see it being a game that gets brought out semi-frequently for a long time. Especially if the rumours about planned expansions adding more kaiju turn out to be true.
