Robot Quest Arena ash players battling their cute bots.
Who will come out on top?
Robot Quest Arena is a deckbuilding arena battle game with awesome pre-painted robot miniatures!
Robot Quest Arena Game Overview
Quick Rules Summary
Players have a bot with a unique ability and use deck-building to move around an arena, buy new cards and deal damage to opponent’s bots.
There are tiles around the arena that have abilities such as dealing/healing damage etc.
When damaging a bot, you take their red health cubes as points, when you eliminate a bot you take their final blue health cube too. The bot respawns on their next turn at full health with one blue cube and the rest as red cubes from the supply.
How do you win?
When a bot needs to repawn but there are no blue cubes left in the supply the game ends.
The player that has claimed the most cubes by dealing damage, eliminating bots and some other in-game scoring methods is the winner.
Main Mechanisms
Deck building, the whole game is run with deck building.
USP
The USP is the toy-looking bot figures you play the game with. I mean, to be honest, the whole production quality and cute artwork could be included in that.
Theme
You’re fighting for generic fame and glory. I don’t think it says anywhere why you are doing this and what the purpose is of these battles but that’s OK.
Setup
There is the standard deck-building setup for these games like shuffling and laying out cards.
You then just need to set up the map and add cubes to the bots and you’re good to go.
Components & Artwork
First up, the bots are great and a huge appeal to me for this game. The cubes are nice and shiny and the tiles in the area are thick and chunky, although you can’t see them when a bot is on one!
The art is very cute and fun and right up my street.
Ease of Teaching
It’s a very simple game to teach someone especially if they already get the whole deck-building thing which most people do.
The hardest thing is the range in these games and they simplified it to range 1 is the 8 tiles around the attacker etc So that takes a lot of stress out of the teach.
Similar Games
Any quick deck-building game, even Hero Realms which is from the same publisher. I would include Trains as a quick deck-building game that affects a board as you play cards.
For arena combat, Adrenaline works well and is the best example of this kind of game that I’ve found.
Robot Quest Arena Review
Positives
The game looks great on the table and is very cute.
It plays lightning quick as most deck-building games of this type do.
The bots all have different abilities and the arenas have different variations. Add in the random reveal of available weapons each game and it changes it up somewhat.
Negatives
The bots are missing orientation, they have a face but the way the point doesn’t matter. I’d like to see 90-degree rotations as part of the movement to feel like you have more control. I’d actually much prefer this a bit more like Mechs vs Minions where programming can go wrong, it would make for a more fun and hectic game.
You can bully the weakest player, there is no penalty for picking on someone.
There are no tournament rules or reason to play multiple games so it’s all very low stakes as the games are a one-off.
For such a light game, it’s quite expensive. It’s about £100 for the first batch, another £100 for the second which expands the player count and sounds fun. I’m expecting, based on the publisher’s other games, to have some sort of co-op/campaign element brought in. That might get me on board, but by the time the buy-in will be £300+ and I’m not sure I could go for that.
Summary
A fun game held back by easy, safe design.
Jesta ThaRogue