Kriegbot

It would be too easy to dismiss some board games as rip-offs or dumbed-down versions of bigger, more involved games. Descent and Doom could be called Dungeons & Dragons Lite, and Dominion could be called Magic: The Gathering Jr. It would be just as easy to dismiss Kriegbot as BattleTech For Dummies, but that would be enormously unfair. Despite its low-budget presentation, Kriegbot makes for a lot of light-wargaming, robot-building fun.

The game is straight-forward. Players are issued a robot chassis that determines your movement, initiative, and build configuration. You then are assigned teams and are given a team deck of weapons, equipment, and skins with which to trick out your battle bot. After you're finished building, your robots march out on the battlefield to play. Objectives can vary from scenario to scenario, from alien attacks to AIs vs. Humans, all of the objectives look pretty entertaining. In our first two games, we played a team deathmatch followed by Kill the Human, where each team has a single human piloted robot, and the objective is to slay the opposing team's meatbag, I mean human.

The best part about the game is making combos with a robot’s equipment and weapons, of which there are many. Another benefit is that the robot chassis that is issued to you, while being very distinct from the others, can't really hinder you from making the kind of robot that you're in the mood for. You can make a rocket sniper bot, or a rocket melee bot, or a rocket bot that fires lots of missiles. There are many possibilities, and the game is infinitely expandable to provide more building options. Moreover, the game can be played on any hex board, and using any kind of appropriately sized miniatures, rather than the ones included. This makes for a great use of minis from other games or your own home build figs.

I mentioned that people might call this game an oversimplified version of Battletech, but that's fine because sometimes a simple version of game that I like is a very good thing. Where Battletech requires a lot of time to get a new player into the game, Kriegbot takes about 15 minutes. Where you could spend hours going through all of the materials available to BattleTech players to build their mechs, it takes a fraction of that time to build a robot in Kriegbot. BattleTech, Magic, and D&D can't be replaced, but you can get a lot of the fun thanks to games like Kriegbot that are very accessible, easy to learn, and quite enjoyable to play.

I had high expectations from this game, and I'm pleased to say that they were soundly met. If you can get a copy, I highly recommend that you do. 9/10