Until now, ROBOTS! Feed Your Evil Overlords! has been limited to prototyping and proof of concept work, but I’m happy to finally be able to show off a little bit of the gameplay.
Setup
Two players, two Overlords, 6 robots
This is the setup for a 2-player game of ROBOTS! – the two Overlords sit opposite one another, the robots are arrayed around the table in the middle, and the players have a set of Charge tokens ready to use (although it should be 3 rather than 6 each as shown here).
Round 1
Each round is divided into two phases, Charging and Serving
Charging
During this phase, players take turns placing their Charge tokens on robots.
After Charging – both players have placed all their Charge tokens, and we’re ready to start the Service phase.
Serving
During the Serving phase, players take turns using their Charge tokens to activate robots to move Diners, Meals, Money, and Scraps around the Dining Room to attempt to satisfy the Demands of the Evil Overlords.
On Yellow’s turn, all tables (T) are empty, so each table gets a Diner token.
Yellow activates a robot in Waiter (W) mode and grabs Meals from the two tables adjacent to the robot.On Blue’s turn, two tables are empty, so they get Diner tokens, while the rest add Meal tokens for each Diner already on the table. Blue takes their turn (not shown).On Yellow’s next turn, they activate a robot in Runner mode. They take a Diner token from the Waiter and move closer to the robot that has the last Yellow Charge token. They place the Diner token on that robot., so they can immediately activate that robot
They activate the robot in Slinger mode, which can place tokens 2 tiles away. They take the second Diner token from the Waiter. They place two tokens 3 tiles away on the Bargain Devil’s “Just Two More Things” Demand card, satisfying the demand, and receive a Bargain Devil token. At the start of Blue’s turn, the pairs of Diner/Meal tokens are replaced with pairs of Money/Scraps tokens. Blue activates a robot using Busser mode and moves the robot between two tables that have Money and Scraps. They use the Busser’s special take action to grab all 4 tokens from the tables.Since Yellow has used all their Charge tokens, Blue acts again, activating the last Robot in Picker mode. This mode allows the robot to take 2 tokens from any tile or robot up to 2 spaces away.
Blue uses the robot to grab two Money tokens from the Busser, then places one of those tokens onto the Influencer’s plate.
With all Charge tokens used up, Round 1 is complete
At the end of Round 1, Yellow has 1 Bargain Devil token, and Blue has no tokens
Round 2
Round 2 – Charging complete. Blue knows they go first, and they choose accordingly.
Yellow, meanwhile, seeing that Blue could score big this round, does their best to run interference.Blue activates the Busser , moving it down and using its Take action to grab another Scrap and Money token from the table beside the Bargain Devil. Blue then places the Money token on the Slinger robot and activates it. Blue takes a Diner token from the nearby Table, moves the Slinger 1 space closer, and then uses its 2-space place action to put one Diner and one Money token on the Plate tile, satisfying the Influencer’s Lifestyle of the Rich and Famous Demand and earning Blue 2 Influencer tokens.
Since the Bargain Devil’s current Demand is Show Me You’re Serious, which requires they satisfy another Overlord’s demand, they also satisfy the Bargain Devil’s Demand and gain 1 Bargain Devil token.
Yellow, unfortunately, hasn’t anticipated just how clever Blue was going to be, and can only set themself up for the next round. At the end of Round 2, there are a significant number of tokens concentrated around the Bargain Devil. Since Yellow acts first in Round 3, this may well work in their favour.
Near the end of Round 2, the Bargain Devil is the centre of attention
There’ll be more to come in the near future, but I’m already seeing some really nifty interactions. I’m very interested to try the game out at 3 and 4 players to see how things differ, as well as trying out the Overlords’ special rules and the various Overlords that are ready for testing to see how well they interact with one another.
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