Giga-Robo!

Giga-Robo! arrives carrying the baggage of a troubled Kickstarter and one very specific promise: huge manga robots smashing one another to pieces. It keeps that promise. There is room to customise, rules depth somewhere between AEGIS and GKR, and the pleasing sense that the next fight may ask for a completely different plan.

The game lives in its deckbuilding and in the combinations of pilots, robots, and abilities. You are not merely assembling a strong set; you are hunting the combos you want to bring into the arena, and that small metagame gets tastier with repeat plays.

At the table, 2vs2 is its natural habitat: players need to know what they are chasing and line up their hits accordingly. 1vs1 did not do much for me, but a three-way free-for-all showed that the game has a clever answer to arena games' usual weak spot: deciding who wins once everyone is punching everyone else. The system is a little clunky. It is not a disaster; it is simply one more gear before the fist lands.

This is not just a robot game; it is a little PvP monster that rewards people who come back with a plan and a willingness to ruin somebody else's. When the group wants to chase combinations and trade steel, Giga-Robo! does its job very well.

Updated session

The later play did not change my reservation about 1vs1, but it did firmly improve my confidence in the free-for-all. Three players showed that the winner system can survive the chaos, and that the game stands up well beyond its excellent 2vs2.