Chicago Skirmish Wargames

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.