Tokyo Highway (English and Nordic Version)

RRP: £38.99
Now £30.99(SAVE 20%)
RRP £38.99
Expected Restock Date 30/04/2024
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Tokyo Highway is a clever game of cat and mouse by itten, wrapped up in a wonderful dexterity package. Have you heard of the infamous ‘Spaghetti Junction’ near Birmingham? It might look like a tangled mess of roads on top of roads, but it’s a structural work of genius. That’s the aim in Tokyo Highway – can you replicate your own intertwining highways? Each player has their…
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Awards

Rating

  • Artwork
  • Complexity
  • Replayability
  • Player Interaction
  • Component Quality

You Might Like

  • A great gateway game
  • Easy to teach
  • Light on rules

Might Not Like

  • Small car components
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Description

Tokyo Highway is a clever game of cat and mouse by itten, wrapped up in a wonderful dexterity package. Have you heard of the infamous ‘Spaghetti Junction’ near Birmingham? It might look like a tangled mess of roads on top of roads, but it’s a structural work of genius. That’s the aim in Tokyo Highway – can you replicate your own intertwining highways?

Each player has their own supply of highways (which remind you of lollypop sticks). You’ve also got a series of chunky cylinders, which you can stack to make columns. Last of all, you each have your own collection of ten wooden cars, in your colour. You’re competing to build your own rival, continuous roads and to be the first to place out all your vehicles. This is like network and route-building like you’ve never seen before!

The game starts with players building a car on their own ‘on-ramp’. One end of your highway starts on the tabletop and the other end raised, the tip supported by a cylinder. You balance your car along this incline. The player’s starting cylinders have to be at least one highway apart from each other. There’s also a series of abstract, blocky wooden ‘skyscrapers’. You place these at random in the middle of the table to act as obstacles.

The first player extends their highway by placing another highway from their supply. It balances on the cylinder from their previous road. This highway has to either incline by a height of one additional cylinder, or one fewer cylinder. You can build over or under other players’ highways. In fact, you’re encouraged to do so! Is your highway is the first to travel over/under another highway? You get to place one of your cars on your newly placed road. The trick is to try and sneak over your opponents networks… without giving them an easy ride in the process!

You have some flexibility up your sleeve in the form of yellow cylinders. You can place these to create columns at identical heights to predecessors. You can also fork highways out of yellow cylinders, offering further options. And of course, if things get really delicate, you can use the game’s tweezers to place your cars…

Player Count: 2-4 Players
Time: 30-50 minutes
Age: 8+

That Sounds Great! But What Are We Doing?

You and your pals will be replicating the work of  Tokyo’s famous metropolitan expressways (go on, google it), tasked with the objective of getting ten cars onto your roads. How do I get these micro-machines on board you ask? Simply by building stretches of highway crossing over a road that has no roads above it or crossing under a road that has no roads under it. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Oh, how simple it all sounded…

There are a few rubs in Tokyo Highway that really make it stand out as a dexterity game. The fact you can only score by going above or below the other player’s roads means inevitably you end up in this brain-baffling cat and mouse dynamic. Desperately trying to work out how to efficiently score cars by going over your friends’ roads without them being able to gain any for themselves. You can never stay on the same level with your roads, you must always go higher or lower using your grey cylinder pillars or yellow junctions.

Roads? We’re Going To Need Lots Of Roads!

You’ll start on the table and go higher and higher until you realise you’ve left so many gaps for your pesky pals, that they’ll swoop underneath your roads and you’ll be watching them gleefully adding their chosen coloured cars onto their highways as if they were the best engineers in the world, however, there is hope despite this.

One of the stand-out mechanics of this game has everything to do with highway placement, particularly when it comes to how they are placed onto the pillars. You must have your road connected to the pillar without it sticking out. You must also not have your road cross over the top of other players’ pillars and make sure no roads touch each other. This leads to the rest of the group getting up close and personal as you desperately try to squeeze in that one bit of road in a cluster of poorly thought out highways and as you just manage to put it on without toppling the entirety of the highways you  hear a voice quietly announce “that road is sticking out…”

Getting the road off will take some serious work and just as you think you’ve managed it, the sound of lollipop sticks and cars crash to the table. You’ve Godzilla stomped their highway, Pieces and pillars abound. Not only do you have to fix it like a naughty child who just had a tantrum, but you also have to give that player the equivalent pieces dropped from your pile of sticks, pillars and junctions!  Now you’re left with barely any materials and your mate is flush with so many that they can just about build anything.

The higher the player count, the more madness you get. Large blocks like skyscrapers are placed around the table once you’ve placed your base road giving you even more obstacles to take into account as you try to find the next opening that’ll score you cars.

Junctions let you head off in two directions, giving you far more flexibility but also more opportunities to be used for scoring. It’s a game that starts off with everyone fairly amicable and happy, building their little roads in their own little world but it doesn’t take long for you to be caught up in the action as you watch your friends find an opening you missed or the weird satisfaction of another player pulling off the most mind-boggling manoeuvre that once everyone has agreed it is up to code, a small round of muted applause will break through the room.

Bits And Pieces

The components are well crafted and incredibly durable. My only criticism is the roads can end up becoming a sea of grey and it may have been helpful to have different coloured roads to differentiate players as opposed to the cars but it’s never really affected the game. Your junctions and pillars are wonderfully sturdy and the addition of a few skyscraper shapes really helps to mix up the action.

The wonderful thing about Tokyo Highway is that it fits into that category of games that is ‘Easy to teach, hard to master’.  It’s incredibly accessible and even those with hand-coordination issues are helped along with the helpful addition of tweezers to steady your construction.

The Round Up

So get together with some of your friends, put on your high-vis jackets and get going on one of the most enjoyable and memorable dexterity games out there. Tokyo Highway is the game that you’ll get more mileage out of than the entirety of the Tokyo metropolitan highway has to offer…Did you google it? I mean look at it, that’s loads!

Zatu Score

Rating

  • Artwork
  • Complexity
  • Replayability
  • Player Interaction
  • Component Quality

You might like

  • A great gateway game
  • Easy to teach
  • Light on rules

Might not like

  • Small car components