Build precarious highways to exciting destinations in Tokyo Highway: Rainbow City!
What Is Tokyo Highway: Rainbow City?
Tokyo Highway: Rainbow City is a dexterity building game for 2 to 4* players, ages 8 and up, and takes about 30–40 minutes to play. It’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, with a pledge level of ¥6,600 (about $45 USD) for a copy of the game. Rainbow City is a stand-alone expansion for Tokyo Highway, but if you already own the base game (whether you have the 2-player version or the 4-player version), there are also optional tiers and add-ons to upgrade your existing set.
*There is a 2-player version of Tokyo Highway as well (also available through the Kickstarter), and if you combine it with the 4-player version, you can play with up to 6 players.
Tokyo Highway: Rainbow City was designed by Naotaka Shimamoto and Yoshiaki Tomioka and published by Itten.
New to Kickstarter? Check out our crowdfunding primer.
Tokyo Highway: Rainbow City Components
Note: I was sent a copy of the Japanese edition (which is already out), so the components in my copy should be fairly close to what the finished copy will look like other than the rule sheet. The Kickstarter version has already unlocked a few additional components, so I’ll list them here but they aren’t pictured.
- Mission board
- Score board (not pictured)
- 4 Column Storage boards (not pictured)
- Tweezers
- Special ruler (not pictured)
- Red Tower
- 3 Buildings
- 5 Development areas
- Airport area
- Rainbow area
- Stadium area
- Harbor area (not pictured)
- Amusement Park area (not pictured)
- 36 Road sticks
- 80 Gray columns
- 8 Yellow columns
- 40 Vehicles (10 each in 4 player colors)
The vehicles are made of rubber and there are 10 unique designs; in the original version, they were all sedans and they were made of wood. The new versions are less prone to slipping off the roads, and the different shapes are a lot of fun (and also have some significance when playing with Missions). The cars really feel like little erasers, so if you’ve got kids who love cute erasers, you may want to keep a close eye on these!
The road sticks are like long popsicle sticks (though a little thicker, longer, and narrower); the new versions have small rubber pads on each end, which also help prevent slipping. (If you get the upgrade kit, you’ll get stickers to put on your old road sticks.) The pads are pretty grippy, which means you can actually shift the columns around when moving a stick if you’re not careful. The columns are small wooden discs—they stack fine but are fairly slick so they can slide around a bit.
The tower is a pointy red pyramid, and the other buildings are tall grey blocks of various shapes. The “areas” are all flat bits of wood—some plain grey ones for the development areas, and some colorful areas that have additional decorations like a rainbow or a stadium with trees. (In my copy, the trees were not actually attached to the plate—they just slot into holes on the board, but I suppose they could be glued in.)
The mission board is just a folded cardstock that has some reminders: one side has the setup grid so you know how many columns and roads to give every player, and also tells you the names of the different vehicles and restrictions on the areas. The other side has the missions so you can see how many points everything is worth when using the mission variant. I particularly like the setup grid—too many games with variable setup based on player count hide this information somewhere inside the rulebook, and I end up having to look for it even when I know the game’s rules really well. This is basically an oversized player aid that you can stand up on the table and it’s pretty easy to read from across the table.
Some of the unpictured components are just extras to make scorekeeping easier: a scoreboard so you don’t have to count on your fingers, and some column boards so you can easily see how many columns you have left (since you score points for those in the missions variant). The most exciting component to me is the special ruler—it’s two road pieces attached on one end so that you can form an angle—ideal for planning out two moves in advance when you have a destination in mind but can’t get there with a single road. Currently, I just hold two roads together but I have to be more careful about not dropping either piece.
Overall, the components are just really cute, something I’ve come to expect from Itten’s games. The fact that most of it is all grey makes the vehicles and the special areas really pop, and it always ends up looking impressive by the end (assuming the game doesn’t end due to a catastrophic collapse).
How to Play Tokyo Highway: Rainbow City
You can download a copy of the rulebook here.
The Goal
There are two ways to play: the basic game, and then with the missions. In the basic game, it is a race to place all of your vehicles. With the missions, you will score points for placing vehicles and also fulfilling the various missions, and the goal is to have the highest score.
Setup
Give each player a set of cars, columns, and roads (based on the player count). Each player will build an on-ramp by placing a road with one end raised by a column piece, and then place their sedan on that road. The columns should form a regular polygon in the center of the table with the sides equal to one road-length.
Players will take turns placing the various city objects—starting with the development areas and then the other pieces—around the table. Buildings must be placed on development areas, and all areas must be at least a column width away from anything else.
Gameplay
On your turn, you must build a column, and then extend your own road onto that column. Your column must increase or decrease in height by one piece from your previous column. Your road cannot touch any other roads or columns, and cannot cross directly over any columns. You may not ever close a loop by reconnecting to a column.
If you cross over or under another player’s road and you are the first to do so, you get to place a vehicle on your road. (If you cross multiple roads that haven’t been crossed, you place multiple vehicles.)
Each player has some yellow junction columns: when you use one of these, you may break the rule about increasing or decreasing the column height by 1—the new column topped with a junction can be any height (as long as it’s at least 2—the junction piece cannot be used on its own without grey columns). Also, the junctions are the only place where your road can branch; each junction column can have a total of 3 roads touching it instead of just 2.
You can create an exit off-ramp from a single-height column to the table; if so, you place a vehicle on it (in addition to any vehicles placed by crossing other players’ roads). However, this ends the road, so if you haven’t placed any junctions already then you will be done building for the game.
If you knock down items belonging to other players during your turn, you must pay them 1 column from your supply (regardless of how many things were knocked down). Everyone helps to put things back as well as they can.
You are allowed to place both columns and off-ramps on the grey development areas; you can place off-ramps (but not columns) on the airport and stadium; you may not place anything onto the rainbow area, but you can (and should!) place a road through the rainbow. (The harbor and amusement park areas were added as stretch goals so I’m guessing they function like the airport and stadium but haven’t seen the rules to know for sure.)
Game End
If you place your last vehicle, you win! Other players can continue playing for second and third place; when only one person has vehicles left, the game is over.
Alternatively: if you run out of construction materials, you just pass on your turn—there’s a chance you may get a turn in the future if somebody gives you a column because they knocked something over and you will be back in the game. However, if you don’t get any materials back before your next turn, you are eliminated.
Mission Rules
The mission variant plays the same way for the most part, but you have additional opportunities to score.
There are two new rules: First, if you place a vehicle when crossing another player’s road, if the same vehicle type is on the road you crossed, you steal a column piece from that player. Second, if you run out of columns during the game and can’t play, you forfeit one road (discard it) during your turn. If you gain any columns before your next turn, you may take your turn as usual, but, otherwise, you just keep losing roads each time you have to pass.
The game ends when everyone has placed all of their roads, and at least one player has played all of their cards. You finish the current round and then score as follows:
- 1 point per car placed
- 1 point per development area with at least 1 of your columns on it
- 1 point per building you surrounded (cross over your own road to close the loop)
- 1 point for every 5 columns remaining in your supply
- 2 points if you have a “jam”—three connected roads with cars on them
- Double score for your buildings if you also surrounded the tower
- 2 points if you have the highest column without a junction piece
- 2 points if you placed a car on a road going through the rainbow
- 2 points if you exited to the airport
- 2 points if you exited to the stadium
The highest score wins, with ties going to the player with the most vehicles placed.
Why You Should Play Tokyo Highway: Rainbow City
Tokyo Highway first appeared in 2016—and it was difficult to get in the US at first—but the original game was only for 2 players, with a 4-player version appearing a couple of years later. I bought a copy several years ago and have enjoyed it, so I was really excited to hear that there was something new in the works.
Although Tokyo Highway is a dexterity game—you definitely need some manual dexterity to stack the columns and place roads without knocking things over—it is unlike most dexterity building games I’ve played in that the “knocking things down” is not the focus of the games. Most games of this genre involve stacking or building in ever more precarious ways until everything comes crashing down, and the object is often to make sure that somebody else causes the final collapse. Here, collapses are more like a side effect of building in tight quarters: it can happen, and you may pay a penalty for it, but everyone actually hopes that most of the structure survives so the game can continue. It’s really more of an area control game, masquerading as a dexterity game.
The primary objective is to place all of your vehicles. To do so, you’ll have to cross over or under other players’ roads—the more crosses at once, the better. That means everyone is incentivized to crowd in on each other and usually results in a huge tangle. Can you possibly fit a road through this gap at the required angle so it’s not touching any other roads? How will you fit this column underneath the existing roads? And if you succeed you’ll still need to figure out how to get the cars actually into place. (Sometimes the tweezers help! But not always.)
The requirements about changing the height of your columns every turn keep things wonky—most of the roads are not parallel to the table, which means that shifting slightly in one direction or another might give you just enough space to skim past. This is a game of millimeters: sometimes even the difference between placing the ends of your roads head-to-head vs. stacking the ends can be enough to get you past a tight spot. And the junctions are crucial—not only for letting you skip the height requirement but also so you can branch off in different directions, maybe build an off-ramp or two while continuing a path around the rest of the city.
The new components and rules in Rainbow City really up the ante by giving you different ways to score. While you’re still trying to get all your cars out, now you have some initial directions about where to build. Before, there could be a bit of a game of chicken—building into a shared space first gives other players an opportunity to score by crossing your road, but it’s gotta be done eventually. Now, it might be worth racing to a development area so you can build a column on it for points before it gets too crowded, or get your loop around the buildings before the path becomes inaccessible.
Another new wrinkle is the ability to steal columns from other players if you use the right vehicles. There’s a new risk to placing vehicles because somebody else might come along later and place the same one. You find yourself checking to see which vehicles everyone has left—should I use my food truck here because everyone else has placed theirs already? Or should I save my food truck to steal a column, but then somebody may steal by matching my bus?
Columns seem plentiful at first, but as you near the end of the game, you’ll see what a precious resource they are. If you’re constantly building up and maintaining an elevated highway, it may be easier because you don’t need to weave below other roads, but you’ll run yourself out of columns. Between that and losing a couple due to penalties or steals, you can quickly find yourself losing turns because you don’t have enough. I’ve seen players have a perfect path plotted out for their last few turns, only to discover that they’re short a column or two to finish it out.
While driving a car through the rainbow is only worth 2 points—the same as making it to the airport or having the tallest column—it can be a difficult task. Not only do you need to be positioned to get a road through it, but to place a car on the road you either need to cross somebody else’s road at the same time or it needs to be an exit. The first time I played Rainbow City with my daughter, we both tried really hard to finish the task, and it resulted in a major collapse that ended the game prematurely. But, come on: it’s called Rainbow City! You gotta try it, right?
The sticky pads on the roads (new in this version) definitely take some getting used to, and they change up the feel of the game. As I said before, Tokyo Highway is more interested in the building than the collapse, and this (plus the rubber cars) is evidence of that. In the old version, it was really easy for the wooden roads to just slip off the columns, particularly if they were angled steeply due to a junction, and the wooden cars were hard to place if the road was just a little wonky. Now, the main danger is that sometimes when you’re adjusting the position of a road, it may just pull the whole column with it—and that can cause a chain reaction, pulling the next road. If you’re accustomed to the old-style components, you’ll need a bit of practice to get the hang of it.
Tokyo Highway is a lot of fun and I’m glad for this excuse to break it out again. Rainbow City has been a blast to explore, and I look forward to building many more convoluted, completely inefficient routes this year!
For more information or to make a pledge, visit the Tokyo Highway: Rainbow City Kickstarter page!
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Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.
