Game Preview: RoboRama, or Chinese Checkerbots Roll Toward Self-Destruction

The short description of RoboRama from designers Kirps, Pierson and Zuidhof and publisher PLAYTHISONE might bring another RoboR**** game to mind:

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In RoboRama the goal is simple: Race against the other players by constantly picking the right combination of action cards and routes for your robots in order to cross the arena. Or — if that isn't thrilling enough — add the ChaosBot, which can be controlled by everyone. Finish first with your four robots on the opposite side of the arena and you win! Of course this is easier said than done. After all, you are not the only one trying to win, making it pretty crowded in the arena.

Yes, players in both RoboRama and RoboRally move robots across a grid to reach a goal, but aside from that commonality the games have almost nothing in common. So where did the title come from? PLAYTHISONE's Patrick Zuidhof told me that he came up with the name "RoboRama" because the robots made him think of the animated series Futurama and Bender the Robot, "so I glued the words together. After Franz Vohwinkel made the logo, though, I realized that there would be some emotion because of the name."

In general, RoboRama comes across like an engineer's take on Chinese Checkers or Halma with players trying to move their team of robots diagonally from one corner of the board to another, but with your robots sharing movement from a pool of action cards in front of you. The trick, however, is that those action cards don't replenish themselves automatically, but become available for use once again only through your movement on the game board and the use of a special chip card.

More specifically, each player has action cards that show 1-5 gears (with gears equalling movement points) and one chip. A player's robots start on the four squares of the opposite corner, and each turn you must choose one of your available cards and use it. If you choose a gear card, you move one of your robots in a straight line exactly as many spaces as the number of gears on the card — jumping robots of the same color as a single movement, if needed — then you slide the card up into your inactive row.

The space you land on will show 1-5 gears, a question mark, or a chip. When you land on a gear space, if possible you slide that action card from your inactive row to your active row (although you can't do so if you used that card to reach that space). When you land on a question mark, you can slide a gear card of your choice from inactive to active status. When you land on a chip, you can reclaim your inactive chip card — and you use a chip card on your turn (instead of a gear card) to reclaim a gear card that matches the gear space where one of your robots stands.

If you can't use one of your action cards on your turn, you're out of the game and your robots purged from the board. Boom!

The advance game starts with the action cards being flipped to their reverse side, with each card having a special action on it, such as the 1 gear allowing for a single diagonal movement and the 3 gear allowing for an "L" move. During the game, you can use each special action only once, flipping the card over to its blank side in addition to making it inactive when you use it.

For additional complications, you can choose to play with the ChaosBot, which despite the name doesn't move randomly on the board but is instead partially controlled by each player. At the start of the game, each player receives 3-6 ChaosBot cards and on a turn when you don't use the special action on a card, you can choose to play a ChaosBot card in addition to your regular action. The ChaosBot moves, jumps, pushes other robots around, or shoots robots with a laser to make them inactive for one turn.

Whatever the rules, though, your goal remains the same: Get all four of your robots home before anyone else. If everyone else just happens to be knocked out of the game before you get there, well, then you've won just the same...