Rumblebots

Rumblebots is a deck-building robot war. Build your bot army, face others in the arena and win the final battle. That’s the plan.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

In Rumblebots, we’ll build up our gang of robots to take on other machines in the arena. Gameplay in Rumblebots is divided into six rounds, each consisting of a build phase and a battle phase.

In the Build phase, we build new bots, break down unwanted ones, harness the power of crystals and upgrade our workshop to create even more powerful machines. We then shuffle our bot deck and are ready to rumble.

During the battle phase, we will face off against other players in a series of clashes. The first clash starts with the current champion.

The champion will reveal the first card from their deck and place the bot in front of the challenger for the Iron Throne.

The challenger then reveals cards from their robot deck until their combined strength exceeds the defence value or they score 4 critical hits. If they win, they become the new champion.

The new champion can place the robots that were used to attack with a chosen colour in their defence. The next player then attacks the current champion, and so on.

If we run out of cards in our deck and have failed to defeat the champion, we will be eliminated from further battles. At the end of the round, the champion gains crystals, which he uses to strengthen their build phase.

If one player has at least 6 more crystals than their opponents, they automatically win the game. If no one has done this, the last 6 rounds will decide the entire tournament.

Robot building

What I like most about this game is that we have literally dozens of ways to build our deck, and virtually any strategy is good. Of course, it also depends on what our opponents are building, but we’ll come back to that.

Each player starts the game with 3 identical robots. We have a brave toaster, a flower-filled bulb and a chicken controlling a robo-chicken (poultry power). As you can see, our robot gang does not sound very exciting.

However, if we expand our workshop, we will be able to recruit stronger Gundams for our gang.

In all of this, the most important thing is for the robots to create synergy among themselves. Because bots belong to different groups, divided by colour. We have biodegradable robots, kitchen appliances, mechs, battle robots, steam irons, and tin bots controlled by different animals.

Each robot group has its own mechanics and keywords that increase its usefulness in battle. Some robots will give us extra crystals, others will give us a bonus if we have a robot of the same colour in our gang, and there are even some that can transform. Most of the machines are two-coloured so that we can take advantage of their interdependence more often.

But I saved the best one for the end. Because we can disassemble our mechs to get the scrap we need to build other machines. This allows us to slim down our deck and hit stronger bots more often. Although it all depends on our strategy. My wife once built a deck with only 2 cards. They were such strong machines that practically no one could beat her.

Straightforward

The rules are well explained in the manual and there are plenty of examples to illustrate the complexities of building bots. Who would have expected it to be so simple?

Playing time and scaling

Another big plus for Rumblebots is the length of the game. With 2 players, we can easily finish the game in 30 minutes. With more players, however, you can expect an hour of gameplay, but that really does go by quickly.

The game can be played with 2 to 4 players and we enjoyed playing in all configurations. Although when we played together we tended to build our decks in such a way as to disrupt each other’s plans.

Quality and components

The artwork on the cards is very much to my taste. Many of the illustrations are based on mechs from the movies, and you can see that in their names, which are very humorous. Optimus Primate.

It is also very good in terms of components. Because we have thick boards with slots for our cubes. The crystals are just great. Because a lot of people asked me if they were included in the box or if I had to buy them separately.

A bit automatic

There was nothing about battling because I decided to save that for the end of my review.

Rumblebots is an auto battler. Something I’ve never seen in a board game before. Because somehow the Challengers phase passed me by. Maybe it’s because it was a Zendaya film and I auto skipped that.

This auto-battling in Rumblebots is that once we build our deck, the battles are random. Because we will always reveal the top card of our deck when we attack someone. We don’t know what robots are going to show up, which is why it’s so important to create those synergies I talked about earlier.

On the one hand, I like this solution because it’s different. Although it could lead to a lot of frustrating situations.

I made a good deck. I put in a Chainsaw Bot (manga reference), which is weak in defence but very strong in attack. As champion, I draw the first card from the deck to put in my defence. Guess what I ended up with?

There have been many such cases, and they can ruin our plans.

Although it’s not like we don’t have some control over that. Some types of Mechs allow us to put other bots on the bottom of our deck and draw something new. That way we can improve our luck. There are also contraptions that are like traps. Sometimes these can save us in a bad situation. Although this was more of a one-off solution.

On the plus side, we can win fights in two ways. Either we defeat the champion by force or by critical hits, where defence doesn’t count. This means that no one can just surround themselves with defensive mechs and hope to win with a wall of Viking shields.

Generally, you have to get used to this automatic combat and accept that this is what we have to deal with.

I also really liked the fact that most of the time the win was actually decided by the last fight in round 6. This meant that even if we lost all the rounds, we still had a chance of winning. This was despite the fact that the winner got crystals to boost their building abilities.

We also had a mechanism that gave extra scraps to players who had fewer crystals than the player with the most after each round. Such a nice consolation prize.

Summary

Rumblebots is one of those pleasant games. But not the kind of pleasant game you play once every six months and then forget about. It’s the kind of game that gave me a lot of fun, even if it sometimes annoyed me with its auto randomness. For me, the best part of the game is building my doomsday machines and finding cool synergies between them. There are a lot of them, and for me that is the strongest part of Rumblebots. By the way, it’s also a good and quick closer for a board game night, as we’ve found out many times.

Final verdict: I’ll be back

Pros

• Building mechs
• Synergies between bots
• Graphics
• Pop culture pun bots
• Chance to win until the end
• Consolation prize

Cons

• Auto battler sometimes more auto than battler

[Game provided by DV Games]