Wouter & Ymke 
A storm is gathering over Tokyo, but apparently that’s no reason to stop building restaurants, karaoke boxes, stores and arcades. In Lightning City: Tokyo, we’re developing our own little part of the city, filling buildings with different businesses as the clouds above them become increasingly unpleasant.
An unfinished building and a lightning strike aren’t exactly the best combination. A roof protects everything underneath it, but also means you can’t build there anymore. So perhaps there’s room for one more restaurant before you close the building. Maybe another arcade as well. The weather might cooperate.
👥 1-12 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designer: Jannik Auth
🎨 Artwork: Oliver Freudenreich & Sandra Freudenreich
🏢 Publisher: Nürnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Everyone gets a sheet showing nine street numbers divided between three Tokyo districts. These are the locations where you construct your buildings. Streets 6, 7 and 8 already have foundations, while the others start empty. Rooms are drawn directly onto the sheet using four different symbols: restaurants, karaoke boxes, stores and arcades.
At the start of each construction phase, all six dice are rolled. The larger colour die removes one matching die for that round, after which everyone chooses two of the four remaining dice. Add their values together to find the street where you build, while their colours determine the two rooms you draw there. Everyone uses the same roll independently, so several players can choose the same pair.
The white die is wild and can represent any of the four businesses or a roof. Rooms must be drawn into the lowest available spaces, and adding a roof finishes that building. If none of the dice combinations suits you, you can ignore them and instead add one room of your choice or one roof to any legal building.
Four scoring cards determine what you’re trying to create across the city. There are 16 in total, four for each business type, with the level 1 cards recommended for your first game. Everyone also gets a mission card asking them to have more of a particular business in one district than the players sitting next to them.
After construction comes the storm phase, except in the first round. Two room dice determine which street is affected. The first time a number appears, you colour in its cloud. If that street is rolled again, lightning strikes. A roof protects the building; without one, the rooms are destroyed and no longer score, though you may move one destroyed room to another legal location.
Lightning also moves the game towards its end. A new strike crosses off two spaces on the round tracker, while rolling a street that has already been struck crosses off one. Once the tracker is full, you score the four shared scoring cards, your mission and your roofed buildings. The sheets also have a night side, which changes how destroyed rooms can be rescued and doubles your lowest scoring-card score at the end.
Artwork & Components
Lightning City: Tokyo is colourful for a game about buildings being struck by lightning. Pink, blue, turquoise, red and dark burgundy appear across the cards, dice and sheets, with Japanese wave patterns in the backgrounds. The box is much darker, showing the Tokyo skyline underneath a stormy sky.
Most of what you see during play is your own sheet. It starts almost empty and gradually fills with hand-drawn businesses, roofs, dark clouds and lightning bolts. The symbols are simple enough to copy, though some of ours became increasingly questionable as the game went on. Apparently architectural drawing isn’t one of our hidden talents.
The four room dice are translucent and brightly coloured, joined by a white wild die and the larger colour die. An earlier version of the game apparently used twelve dice before development brought that number down to six. Looking at the size of the box, twelve would have been rather crowded.
Then there are the pencils. Lightning City: Tokyo supports up to twelve players and includes two pencils. I guess that keeps the contents and price down, but it did make us laugh when we opened the box. Two players are completely prepared. Everyone else had better bring a pencil or get used to passing them around.
Our Experience
We’ve played enough roll-and-writes that the basic idea didn’t require much adjustment, though we did keep checking the scoring cards during our first game. Once several different symbols started appearing in the buildings, remembering exactly what counted for each card wasn’t always immediate.
Much of our time was spent trying to make one placement do several jobs. A pair of dice could give us something useful for one scoring card, improve another building and help with our mission. Other rolls left us staring at four dice in the hope that we’d somehow overlooked a much better combination. We hadn’t.
We weren’t particularly good at listening to the clouds. There were buildings we roofed quickly because we didn’t want to risk what was underneath, and others we kept extending because the available rooms were too useful to turn down. “Please don’t roll that number” became a common sentence at our table. Sometimes we got away with it. Sometimes the lightning bolt followed immediately.
Ignoring the dice and placing a single room or roof was an option we didn’t use much early on. Giving up two rooms for one felt expensive. With several useful rooms sitting underneath a dark cloud, the calculation looked rather different. We also had buildings where we knew perfectly well that a roof was the sensible choice and built somewhere else anyway. When that went wrong, rescuing one room was useful. The others were gone, along with whatever we had planned for them.
Even with more people at the table, we mostly concentrated on our own sheets. Missions had us checking our neighbours, especially when a single store or restaurant could decide those points. Beyond that, we each got on with our own city. Since everyone chooses from the same roll, adding more players didn’t add much waiting. The lightning rolls usually got more attention around the table than the final scores.
Our Thoughts
The randomness bothered us most when lightning did two things at once. A strike could take several useful rooms out of our city and cross two spaces off the round tracker, leaving fewer turns to replace what we’d lost. Street 8 could be a disaster for one player and almost irrelevant to the person sitting next to them. Everyone gets the same storm roll, but definitely not the same storm.
We knew which buildings we’d left exposed, so some disasters were entirely self-inflicted. There were also strikes that landed at exactly the wrong time and did more damage than we could realistically repair. That’s quite a lot of influence for a single roll, especially when several scoring cards depended on the rooms that disappeared.
The scoring cards gave us different things to chase from one game to another. After several plays, though, we weren’t finding many new ways to approach those choices. We’d already become familiar with judging which pair of dice helped several scoring conditions and when a building was worth protecting. The night side changes the rescue rule and end scoring, rather than turning it into a substantially different puzzle.
That’s probably the point where Lightning City: Tokyo divides our usual gaming groups. With experienced roll-and-write players, we’d rather pick something that gives us more to work out after repeated plays. It worked better for us around the family table. The rules didn’t take long to explain, and nobody had to wait while somebody else worked through their turn. A lightning strike ruining someone’s ambitious building also tended to get everyone involved for a moment, even if the rest of the game was mostly spent looking at our own sheets.
We’ve had games where the storm was irritating and others where our own greed deserved most of the blame. I wouldn’t want every roll-and-write to start crossing out parts of my carefully constructed score, but here I enjoyed having that possibility hanging over the sheet. Lightning City: Tokyo isn’t one we’d pick when we’re looking for a demanding puzzle. For a lighter game with family, I can see it coming back to the table.
Next time a dark cloud appears above one of my better buildings, I’m definitely putting a roof on it.
Probably.
📝 We received a copy of Lightning City: Tokyo from Nürnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag.
