Giga-Robo demo at Valorcon
Valorcon is a small but hopefully growing game convention in Chicago that covers tabletop and digital games. In this its second year, Valorcon was held on two of the upper floors of the loop Marshall Field's/Macy's. Here is one section of gaming, the busier section of the convention on Saturday afternoon.
One game I tried out is Giga-Robo. Cardboard Dynamo, a small Chicago game company, recently ran a kickstarter for Giga-Robo and were showing off their prototype. In the game, each player has a giant robot represented by mini, a control board and deck of cards. The players then take turns moving their robots and playing cards, which are mostly attacks or defensive responses.
I played a small, fast robot with an aggressive close combat focused pilot and fought against a much larger robot with an engineer as a pilot.
My main tactic was to run for cover between quick strikes while building up the power to pull off stronger attacks. The other robot mostly focused on slamming me through buildings, leaving behind the markers you see on the board.
The game is fun to play, but like most games with a deck of unique cards it takes some time to read and understand what options are available. I suppose this will reduce significantly with repeated plays. I believe there are six or seven options available for pilot and robot, so many combinations are possible.
The kickstarter for Giga-Robo ended in August, so it is still several months until the game will be available.
Eilif says:
Thanks for the review Tim. I remember hearing about this somewhere, but didn’t know much about it.
Looks like it has a Gundam’ish vibe. Is it matched in the gameplay?
jlopatin says:
I think it is very Gundam in a good way. Hopefully Alex and Rhodrick will join us for a game night soon, and perhaps they can demo it for everyone.
timlillig says:
A game with the Giga Robo guys would be great. It is strongly related to Gundam, but slamming each other into buildings made me think more of Godzilla or Power Rangers.
jetjagaa says:
Howdy guys! This is Alex from Giga-Robo. We’re going to be demoing at Impossible Industries Fall Game Day on November 12th. I’d also be more than happy to join for a game night. Not sure what the schedule usually is, but please let me know.
We’re in the middle of a big website redesign, but if anyone wants to dig into the game further, check out our Kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2115086518/giga-robo/description . It has a lot of information, gameplay videos and more.
There’s also a 2-4 player demo on Tabletopia (you need Firefox to run it though): https://beta.tabletopia.com/playground/giga-robo-mjxrrt/play-now
And there are some other gameplay videos available online, specifically from Ash and Owen from Guerilla Miniature Games and Gaming with The Cooler, playing the game for the first time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFREGfxK34w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5Y9763WDi0