Robot Battle Card Game (working title) is a physical card game for two to four players (up to six with expansion decks). Players run a country that is trying to build a massive battle robot (Mecha style robots). The first to establish and hold their robot wins!

Players can attack other players' robots directly or indirectly to hamper that countries progress. The five and six-player add-on decks add more variety and complexity to strategy.

The game takes 15-20 minutes to play and requires a little bit of space for the physical card layout.

History

At the 2017 NZ Game Developers Conference, Stephen attended a half-day game design workshop. The facilitators provided a card deck with circles, triangles, and square shapes. Stephen got the idea to use "layout" to build a robot, and to use the shapes to represent attack/defence/balanced.

The game started out as an elimination game - last player alive wins. Through play testing, the game change quite a lot to its current form, which is a first player to hold the victory condition wins. This makes the game more inclusive.

The shapes were also replaced with specific parts; body, head, arms, and legs. The theme of the game was developed to players representing countries and this informed the flavour of events, and the art style.

While the game allows strategic play so good players can influence the outcome, it also has game mechanics to help players recover from set-backs, and positional mechanics that come in to effect with three or more players - to mitigate "ganging up" type play. This makes the game a good, fun, family experience.

The game is targeted for 8 to 40 year-olds.

Features

The Robot Battle Card Game includes the following features:

132 Awesomely designed, professional quality cards with stunning art for your visual pleasure during play.
Robot parts, events, and abilities inspired by America, Japan, Russia, and China.
Layout-based card play that creates the satisfaction of building-up a massive battle robot
Positional-based card play that creates interesting dynamics when playing with three or more players
A five-and-six player expansion deck, with a further 66 cards.