- Designer: Michele Piccolini
- Publisher: dv games
- Players: 2-4
- Age: 12+
- Time: 60 minutes
- Played with review copy provided by publisher
There is no trace of humans anymore. Only plants, animals, and sentient machines continue to roam the Earth. They constantly seek energy and technological advances. The Bots were created for one unique purpose: FIGHTING!
Rumblebots is a deck management card game inspired by Auto Battler video games. Assemble your group of fighting robots (Bots) and launch them into the arena. The last one left standing will be the winner!
Rumblebots is divided into six rounds, each consisting of two phases: Build and Battle. In the Build Phase, you assemble new Bots, adding them to your deck. Choose synergistic Bots, recycle obsolete units, level up to build ever more powerful machines, or push your luck with an aggressive, yet risky plan made by an army of simple automatons. In the Battle Phase, one team attacks and one team defends in a series of clashes. Bot decks fight each other in an almost “automatic” way. Whoever becomes Champion is challenged by the following team. The last Champion in the game wins the battle and gets powerful crystals to improve their Workshop and level up their Bots.The last team of Bots standing during the Showdown wins!
To set up, place the Laboratory board on the table, and shuffle the 1, 2, 3, and 4 star decks and place them on the appointed spaces. Make a display of the top four 1 star cards. Place the Transformation deck nearby. Some crystals are placed on the first five round spaces on the board. One player is given the Champion token.
Players take their own workshop board and place a marker on the 1-star space of the Tier Track as well as the 0 space of the Scrap track (this is the currency in this game). Each player also gets a starting deck made up of three 0-star bots (Bulby, Mechchicken, Wrench Toast). Bot cards have at attack value at the top (red sunburst) as well as a defense value (on their butt in a blue shield). The cost for the bot card is in the bottom right as well as its scrap value. Bots may have a special ability, this is found beneath the name. Finally in the upper left, you will see the one or two factions that the bot belongs to.
The game is played over six rounds – each with a Build phase followed by a Battle phase. Each phase is started by the player holding the Champion token and then play goes around the table in the direction shown on the current round space on the main board.
In the build phase, the player receives scraps equal to the round number. Also, if you have at least 2 crystals less than the player with the most, you get one extra consolation scrap. Place your current deck of cards face up under your board and then you take actions:
- Build a bot (max 2x) – you can build a bot of the same tier or lower than where your tier marker current lies. Bots can come from the Laboratory display or from your hand. Pay the cost for the bot (in yellow in the bottom right) and place it above your workshop (to show it was built this turn). If it came from the market, replace the card there. Alternatively, if you buy a Contraption card, they do not have attack or defend values; they have an action that is in play as long as the card is upright (it is rotated when used).
- Upgrade your workshop (max 1x) – spend 3 scraps to increase your Tier marker by one space If you are the first player to reach a specific Tier, reveal four bots from the corresponding deck into the display
- Recycle a bot (infinite) – trash a bot into the Recycling Area gaining the number of scraps seen in green in the bottom right. You can’t recycle a bot you have built this turn nor can you recycle your only bot.
- Energize a Crystal (max 3x) – move a crystal from your purple storage area to the orange Reactor. For each, either gain a Scrap or Scan (draw the top 2 cards from a deck you can build from and keep them in your hand. For the rest of this turn, you can build these bots by paying their costs. Any unbuilt bots in your hand are returned to the bottom of their deck at the end of your Build phase).
At the end of the build phase, you move any newly built bots from above your board to below. Discard any bot cards you have in your hand from energizing crystals and then reset your scraps to 0. You do not carry Scraps from round to round, you always start over. When all players have had a chance to take their build phase, the game then moves into the battle phase.
In the battle phase, all players participate. The player holding the Champion token is the first Champion. Each player shuffles their Bot cards to form their deck (leave your Contraption cards out of your deck). The Champion flips up the top card of their deck and places it with the defensive number facing the opponents.
The next player in turn order is the first Challenger, and he flips over cards from their deck, one at a time, resolving any actions on the cards as they are revealed. Subsequent cards are stacked on top of each other, with the total attack value being calculated as well as the total number of critical hits. The Challenger wins if the total attack value is greater than the total defense value OR if the number of critical hits is four more than the number of barriers on the Champion’s gang. As soon as the Challenger wins, he stops flipping over cards, and the old Champion now discards all of their defensive bots into their personal discard pile. The Challenger loses if he runs out of cards in his deck without beating the Champion – they surrender and are out of the rest of the round.
The new Champion takes the Champion token and chooses a Faction of bots to form their defense gang. Cards of a single faction from their attack are stacked and then turned to point their defensive numbers at the opponents. The rest of the attacking bots are discarded. The next player clockwise now becomes the next challenger. This process continues until only one player is left with cards; that player is the winner of the Battle. They take the 2 crystals from the round space on the main board and places them in their Storage area. In a 3p or 4p game, the final Challenger gets one crystal for surviving as long as they did. Now, all players move their energized Crystals from their orange Reactors to their blue Cryo-Cells. The current champion is rewarded by being able to then move all their crystals in the Cryo-Cells to their Storage area (where they can be energized again).
The game can end immediately if a player ever has 6 crystals more than any other opponent. Otherwise, the game will end after the sixth rounds. The first five rounds are played by the rules above, but there are special rules for the final Showdown on the sixth round:
- You can build 3 bots this round (instead of 2)
- You can upgrade your workshop as many times as possible
- You can energize as many crystals as you like (instead of 3). You can also energize any crystals in your Cryo-cell
The battle phase happens like usual, and the player who holds the Champion token at the end of the final battle is the overall winner!
My thoughts on the game
The obvious comparison here is to Challengers – one of my favorite games from a few years ago. The premise is similar; construct a deck as you work through the game, pausing at each step to duel with what you’ve got. While they are similar on their surface, there are also a number of important differences that make each game distinct from each other.
First, and foremost – you don’t duel against a single player. Instead, you take turns in a circle challenging the current top of the heap. In one way this gives you a bit of guidance as you’re often going up against the same RHO in the fight phase, but it also means there’s a lot more time sitting around watching other people battle. Yeah, sure, an autobattle doesn’t take very long – but it is downtime.
Second – you don’t just draw cards at random and decide if you want to keep them. Here, you get to buy them from a market, and if you have crystals, you get to possibly draw a personal stash of cards so you’re not stuck with the miserable cards in the market that no one wants to buy. This does bring into question whether there is a rich-getting-richer element here – because the winner of each round’s battle ends up with more crystals than everyone else.
For me, the goal when buying cards is to get cards that generally match alignment so that whatever I use to attack… if/when I win, I can keep all those cards and turn their butts to the opponents as defense. You can only play as many cards as you need to defeat the previous Champion, so you don’t have as much control of your defense as you’d like. At least this keeps the fighting a bit unpredictable; though honestly just about every aspect of the game is unpredictable.
Early on, the decks are super small – you only start with three bots and you only get 1 Scrap in the first turn; so even if you want to buy something, you’ll end up scrapping one or two of your starter bots. You do get more money with each successive round, but the overall size of the decks stays slim. You should be fairly choosy with your purchases if you can, but remember that you lose all your unspent Scraps at the end of the round, so sometimes you just have to make the best of what is in the market.
The bots and Contraptions are all cleverly named, and I do appreciate a good pun – so hats off for that. There are a few cards which seem exceedingly strong, but the ability to defeat any card with 4 critical hits helps keep them in check. In fact, I have seen a pretty decent deck that added a bunch of critical hit cards and it allowed them to take down even the largest bots.
So, to continue this inevitable comparison of Rumblebots and Challengers… In Challengers you add cards from random draws and make the best of things. But all you do is add cards and then duel. In Rumblebots, you get to actively select cards from a market but there is a bit more rules overhead and crystal fiddliness to deal with as well as a bit more downtime in the battling phase as you watch other people rumble until it’s your turn to jump into the fight.
In Runblebots, the first five rounds are merely tools to building your deck for the final round. As you will get pity crystals if you’re too far behind in that race, so just focus on getting cards that work together well so that you can win the final round of random flipping. As always, YMMV, and you’ll just have to try it out to see what works for you.
Until your next appointment,
The Gaming Doctor
