Robot Quest Arena

Robot Quest Arena is a kind of robot wrestling free-for-all powered by (make-believe) batteries. You get knocked down, you get up again… until the power runs out.

Each player has their own robot with a specific power and a starter deck of 8 Battery cards, a Jump Jets card and a Hammer card. On your turn you deal yourself five cards and play them: jump jets move your robot up to two spaces on the board, the hammer lets you hit another robot – as long as you’re close enough – and the batteries give you energy, that can be spent in two ways.

One way is movement: one energy equals one move on the board. Two energy lets you push another robot, doing them damage in the process. But Robot Quest Arena’s engagement is really found in the cards energy can be used to buy to improve your starter-deck: anything from more powerful batteries (three energy, or even five) to ranged weapons (crossbow!) to grappling hooks that pull robots into range, reprogram abilities that let you dump your low-powered starting cards, and so on. When you buy a card, it goes into your discard pile with any previously played cards. But when your deck runs out, your discard pile is shuffled into a draw deck again, so your newly-acquired power-ups come around soon enough.

The board itself has a bit of geography to explain. If you start a turn anywhere in the middle nine tiles, you instantly get a point from the supply – but try not to end up on the ‘thumb tacks’ tile! Other tiles – if you begin a turn on them – reward you with health, extra power, dumping a card you don’t want, and a draw-a-card/discard-a-card ability. Other tiles represent pillars (which block line of sight for ranged attacks) and, in the corners, the locations your robot can respawn after its health hits zero.

Whenever a robot takes damage – from a weapon, or by being shoved – the player inflicting the damage takes that robots health points and keeps them as victory points. The last health point (blue, instead of red) is worth two points, and when a robot loses its final health it’s temporarily removed from the board: on the next turn it respawns (and health points go back up to maximum) and takes a normal turn.

As soon as a robot needs to respawn but there are no blue cubes left with which to do so, the game instantly ends. The player with the most points wins!

Extra robots can be purchased separately to push the player count up to 5/6/7.