In Robot Quest Arena players will bring their beloved bots to boldly battle and barrage the other bolt buckets ‘til they bust their bearings off!

Oh, right, backstory. Several aspects of this game first caught my attention: it’s a deck builder, and one of the designers also co-designed Star Realms—a game I enjoyed during my early days in the hobby and one I still consider quite good. It also looked like a nice family game and had the toy factor, which always appeals to my kiddos. So we decided to put it to the test and see if it would hold up, or fall apart under our scrutiny.

Robot Quest Arena is a 2-4 player arena style game for ages 12+ and has a listed playtime of 30-60 minutes.

Gameplay Overview:

At the start of the game, players choose which bot to play, each with a different ability, and receive identical starting decks of ten cards. On your turn, you can play battery cards to move your bot, or spend the batteries to purchase new cards from the shop. The shop consists of 6 cards randomly drawn from the upgrades deck, as well as three stacks of cards always available to players.

Robots who start their turn in the highlighted middle spaces gain a point!

Other cards are played for special abilities or to damage other bots with melee or ranged attacks. Bots can be pushed into obstacles or other bots, causing them to take damage. When you damage another robot, you receive health cubes from their player board equal to the damage dealt. These health cubes will count as points for you at the end of the game. There are also certain tiles on the board that can damage a robot that moves or is pushed onto them. Other tiles have positive benefits, such as allowing you to heal or draw a card.

When a player’s bot loses its last health cube, it is knocked out. The bot is removed from the board until the start of its owner’s next turn, at which point it respawns. Each time a robot respawns, it places one blue cube on its board, in addition to regular red cubes. The blue cube is always the last health point to be removed when a robot takes damage, and there are a limited number of them in the supply (differing depending on player count). When a robot respawns, but there are no blue cubes left in the supply, the game ends. Players count how many cubes they’ve collected, and the player with the most points wins.

The top six cards in the shop are randomly drawn, while the three bottom stacks are fixed.

Game Experience:

Robot Quest Arena is just what it says it is: an arena style battling deck builder with cool-looking robots! As a deck builder, it doesn’t really do anything new: you start with a 10-card deck, draw five cards, play them, buy better cards, draw new cards, and when you can’t, you shuffle your deck.

The arena part of the game is probably the most adventuresome aspect, as it’s kind of fun to go around smashing up the other bots. What I liked best about it is that getting KO’d doesn’t feel awful, because you can spawn right back in with no negative penalties, except that your opponent gained some points. That feels much better than player elimination. This, along with the game end trigger of running out of health cubes, seemed to be one of the most thoughtful aspects of the design.

Shield gear is part of the Kettle Robot pack and can easily be added to the game.

We played this game as a family, and it worked well with kids because of the forgiving mechanisms and the cute toy-like robot figures. So, despite the box saying ages 12+, I think this game is best suited for families, or as an introductory board game, in the tradition of Star Realms, and I think that’s where it will shine best.

In deck builders, a common complaint is market stagnancy—that is, nobody wants to buy cards because none of them are desirable and there’s no good way to cycle through them. I didn’t feel this problem in this game because there aren’t many cards that feel like junk cards, and the pricing range seems to be nicely spread out. So with six cards (plus the three fixed stacks) available, I found there were frequently desirable options available to players.

On the other hand, I also found myself hesitant to purchase too many cards. I’d buy a few I liked, then just keep my deck slim and cycle through those, so I could focus on fighting in the arena (remember, batteries are used both to move your bot and to purchase cards). I wanted a little more incentive to continue adding cards throughout the game. So I felt kind of like I was missing out on the deck-building aspect if I focused on the arena, and like I was missing out on the arena if I focused on deck building.

When your last health counter is removed your bot is KO’d until your next turn.

Additionally, I found it easy to forget about my bot’s ability, or maybe the abilities just didn’t feel that interesting or relevant often enough. There was also a certain amount of messiness to the personal player areas. Player boards are small, and the spaces for your health cubes are smaller than the cubes themselves, with no outlines or indents, so if you knock your board, you might mix them in with your point cubes. I also would have liked a designated place for my deck and discard pile.

Final Thoughts:

Many Deckbuilders of today have transitioned from the Dominion-esque pure deckbuilder model, to incorporate deckbuilding as one facet of the design. Here, it is the mechanism that fuels robots in arena battles. The trick with these hybrid designs is finding balance and making all elements of the game interesting for players to engage with. This game felt, for me, like it almost nailed it, but not quite. It has fun moments, some nice design aspects, but it is just a little too safe and predictable.

I do recommend Robot Quest Arena for families or those who prefer lighter games because it is more forgiving than other arena battlers and is playable within an hour, but ultimately, I didn’t find the game to be as fun as the idea of it sounded.

Final Score: 3 stars – A decent family game with a nice toy factor

Hits:
• No player elimination
• Few “junk” cards
• Clever damage = points design

Misses:
• Doesn’t feel fresh or exciting
• Deckbuilding/ Arena balance seemed a little off
• Player boards weren’t very functional