Are you ready to rumble, robots? Get into the arena and be prepared to move, push, attack, and do whatever it takes to keep your robot alive in order to secure victory! Can you and your robot handle the heat? It’s time to find out!

What Is It?

Deck Building + Combat – Players start with the same set of 10 cards, but can buy new cards throughout the game with energy (including cards that give them more energy). Function cards give players various effects (drawing cards, gaining points, et cetera) and attack cards let players deal damage to opponents with melee or ranged attacks

Grid Movement – Players will move around the board in order to get close enough to opponents to attack. With ranged attacks, players will also need line of sight in order to be successful

Push / Pull – Players are able to move other robots around the board as well by pushing into them (which may also damage them), or possibly pulling them with some cards

King of the Hill – Players can earn bonus points if they start their turn on any of the 9 center tiles

Who Is It For?

  • 2 to 4 Players – It works okay at 2 (variant) and 3, but I think it’s definitely best with a full 4
  • Ages 10 & Up / Light-Weight Gamers – Pretty light deck building game – more about attacking as often as you can than buying a ton of cards – combat is fairly straightforward; good for a wide audience
  • Fans of deck building and combat
  • Players who don’t mind take-that, and some luck from card availability

Variants

2 Players – Play with 2 robots each, but still 1 deck. Play each card for either of your robots – I like that you don’t have to take alternating turns with the robots, and can just do whatever is best for you at the time, and I like only having to manage one deck. Overall, I think it works well.

Teams – Alternating turns with teammates. If your teammate takes damage on your turn, you also lose that many victory points. Combine teammate points at the end for total team scores – I like the added balancing of making you lose points if you damage your own teammate so that you can’t just do cheap shots on your own team to try and score points. It works fine, but I think free-for-all with 4 is still better

PROS

  • Aesthetics – Fun / cartoony art and bright colors
  • Components – The robots are so adorable and chonky! Nice player boards and cubes/gems; big game board
  • Rules are well-written and clear
  • Insert stores everything nicely, with room for more
  • Robots have fun, unique abilities, all of which are useful
  • Some variability in board set up and tiles that have various abilities
  • Very approachable – good for a wide skill / age range
  • Smooth gameplay / quick turns
  • No player elimination – robots come back when KO’d until health cubes run out, which just ends the game
  • Fun theme which works well with the gameplay

CONS

  • Components – The cards are a bit thin
  • Wish there were player aids for the board tiles
  • As with many deck builders, luck of the market plays a role; if someone grabs a cool card early they can have a slight advantage
  • I don’t feel like there’s a ton of opportunity to cull cards, so it never feels like a great strategy to focus on buying the cheaper cards (I prefer when buying is encouraged more)

Final Thoughts

This is a super cute, fairly light deck builder. It’s fun, tactile, and you can really feel the battling robots theme while you’re playing, which I adore. I think a lot of robot theme games I’ve seen/played in the past are programming games, so I really like that this takes a different route that feels much more welcoming to me. I think it works best at 4 for sure, but can be okay with less players on occasion. Overall, worth a try if you like the theme and mechanisms!

Additional Information:
My Final Rating – 6.5/10

Designers – Robert Dougherty, CJ Moynihan, Paul Waite
Publishers – Perfect Day Games, Wise Wizard Games
MSRP – $79.99
Website

*I was provided a copy of this game to do this review*

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