Stress Botics

We sat down with three players again, because a regular was absent and because the traumatic brain injury from our first attempt was still fresh. So we gave Stress Botics another chance: hours spent on rules and FAQs, setup done on Saturday, and Sunday set aside, because beneath the confusion it looked like an honest, intriguing economic game. And yes, at its deeply black core, there really is a game I want to like.

At heart, it is produce and deliver. Three cargo spaceships travel in orbit near the planet where our psychotic robots and their mother, Alpha Bot, have settled. There are three distinct Lagrange points where we try to fulfil each spaceship's cargo manifest in order to score points. So far, so good: a clear objective, a promising economic premise, no complaints.

The core system is hand management, action selection, and action programming. We arrange a sequence of commands for our robots, from one to four depending on their components, and then those commands resolve in order, RoboRally-style. The robots go to the planet, dig up resources, upgrade themselves, build cathedrals, and generally do all the usual nonsense. The hand management is, for me, the best part: it demands real thought and has substance. A shame that the game then decides to pile a mountain of sub-rules onto it, with the tabletop logic of a shoe.

After four or five hours of strain and mild irritation, with every plan falling apart because of some stupid sub-rule, we called it finished and moved on to the vastly more constructive Flip 7 to decompress. I do not know whether the odd design choices were added to make the game different or because someone lost the path to basic tabletop coherence, but the result is excessively busy and overengineered. I recommend it only to deeply hardcore board-game obsessives, and only in its base-game form. Odyssey? Honestly, I do not know who wants to play that.