Mechs vs. Minions

I need to talk about the insert before I talk about anything else, because it’s genuinely the best one I’ve ever unboxed. Everything has a slot, the sleeved scenario dossiers are organized so you’re never hunting for the right envelope, and I’ve caught myself just admiring the packing logic instead of actually setting up to play. Other publishers should be taking notes. I’ve rebuilt three inserts myself out of foam core over the years because the stock ones weren’t cutting it, and this one means I’ll never have to pick up one of those expensive wooden organizers or make one myself again.

The game underneath the box is a co-op action-programming crawler, you and your team each program a sequence of moves for your mech, then watch the chaos unfold as those programs execute simultaneously and inevitably go sideways. It takes what I already liked about RoboRally, the chaos, the programming, shortens it down to a reasonable hour or so of play time, and makes it cooperative instead of competitive, which suits my group better since we’ve got at least one player who hates head-to-head conflict.

Reading the dialogue out loud became a running bit for us, and it’s fun and genuinely funnier than it needed to be for a game riding on a video game license, my group started doing voices for the champions by the third scenario, which is usually a good sign a game’s tone is working.

Where it loses steam is exactly where you’d expect: the campaign system made my group determined to finish it, but once we did, nobody asked to bring it back out. My group finished the full run in about seventeen hours across a few sessions, and it’s the type of game I could see going back on a shelf after you’ve run through all the scenarios and not getting touched again for a long time. I don’t regret owning it, the ratio of fun-per-hour while it lasted was excellent, I just don’t reach for it anymore the way I do with games built for indefinite replay.

Four stars. Great while it lasts, and I mean that as a real compliment, not a knock.