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What if I were to tell you the most fun you’ll have with your friends today were to involve piles of grey ice-pole sticks, a tweezer, some yellow cylinders and ridiculously fickle little cars? You’d probably think I’m mad right? Well, welcome to the nail-biting, sweat-inducing fun that is Tokyo Highway.
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!
