The delightful Jordan Draper sent me this in the mail earlier this week: Tokyo Metro. It was such a delight to unbox that I wanted to share some photos with you before I even get a chance to play it.
It’s not a big box, weighing in at 164mm x 101mm x 84mm. But fittingly, it has a Japanese aesthetic to the design and efficiently packs a lot into a tiny package.
The first thing you notice in the box is the presence of something you normally never see in a board game. It’s a beautiful cloth game board.
I pull it out and spread it over the table with the same sense of delight as I discovered the cloth maps famous from the Ultima games of the 80s and 90s. The cloth is crisp and white and smells nice. I presume this is accurate to the Tokyo Metro in real life, but I’ve never been in real life.
Underneath the cloth map and scoring track are an assortment of goodies. You’re struck by two things: the sheer number of components packed into this box, and the size of components which are dainty and evocative.
The attention to detail in each and every component is worthy of the designer who Kickstarted a game made entirely out of metal (Metal), and has conceptualised an entire series of games made out of different materials (Material Series, “a set of games that showcase various materials and utilize their best qualities”).
The train markers and their matching income markers are brightly and uniquely coloured. I can tell the difference between them all, although I’d want to run them past my colour-blind friend to double check how colour-blind friendly they are.
The individual player pieces are made with a sense of care. These aren’t standard meeple, but little meeple on the run. Each of the player pieces comes not only with it’s own colour, but own paint and finish. The little pyramids are what I’m most curious about: each seems to be constructed from a very different material. The natural colour seems to be made from soapstone or something quite similar.
The little white tokens are also very pleasing to the eye.
The highlight of the game has to be the add-on metal money. Having stacks of white and black rectangles (¥1000 and ¥5000) is immensely satisfying, and it is a delight to heft the ¥500 and ¥100 yen coins.
My only gripe about the components is a necessary evil. The rulebook is necessarily the size of the box. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the graphic design–if it were twice the size. But in a condensed format, the pictured components are perhaps 3x3mm large on the page. The rules themselves are not obtuse, but me and my terrible eyes struggled to make sense of the diagram of components. This is a problem that would disappear on a second playthrough, but as I set up a demo game, I struggled to know if I set up the board correctly.
Thankfully, it’s not an insurmountable problem.We have the internet, and there are playthrough videos that help make sense of the plethora of pieces.
I’m looking forward to pulling this out at my local game group soon, and I’ll let you know how it goes!
But if you’re sold on the basis of the components alone, Tokyo Metro and the other Tokyo Series games are currently being Kickstarted here.