Tokyo Highway is a tense board game about building roads

If you could design your own highway system, it would be nothing like what you get Tokyo highway.

This table game, loosely based on Japan’s de facto privatized highways, asks players to build their own roads from sticks and cones. For a modern board game, Tokyo highway looks beautifully minimalist, even bordering on simple, but the gameplay is surprisingly tense.

Instead of valuing efficiency, the game awards you points for crossing an opponent’s highways. The result is a beautiful, maze of perilous roads that all try to intersect. And beware: this game is limited to components and if you knock over an opponent’s roads, you will have to rebuild it And repay them with your own equivalent building materials. There is even tweezers for particularly tricky constructions.

We played Tokyo highway in the last episode of Overboard, our monthly table show. With trembling hands and hopeful hearts, our four-player mega-city came to life.

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