Bot Builders

Bot Builders Overview

The Premier Educational Arena Robotics League (PEARL) is a new competition founded to help teenagers learn about engineering, by creating robots to play games and navigate obstacle courses.
You represent the leadership of a brand new PEARL team, attempting to win in their first season.

Bot Builders is a game of engine building and dice manipulation for two players. As leaders of new robotics teams, players will draft a variety of students to their team, before capitalizing on their strengths and knowledge to assemble robots from various components. When it's time to compete, they will choose robot and pilot pairs to roll and manipulate dice to meet increasingly complex goals.

How is it played?

Recruit

Each player chooses one of two randomly-chosen Captain cards - students with particularly strong abilities and building skills.

Then, they draw five student cards from the deck. They choose one to keep, and then pass the remaining stack to the left for the next player. This is repeated until each player is passed one final card, which is discarded.

Players should think about team composition during this phase - making sure that they have a good mix of build capabilities (mechanical, software, research) and piloting skill, as well as special abilities. 

Build

Players take turns activating students to use their building skills.

Each robot card can be played in two different ways - either as a chassis starting a new robot, or as a subsystem on an existing robot. This way, players can mix and match robot parts to form new combinations.

Compete

For each round of competition, a new set of goals will be in play. Early goals will start off simple, but at the end goals can become much more challenging - and worth many more points!

After choosing a robot and a student, players will roll any dice that the robot has capability for, before using the robot's and student's abilities to manipulate those dice to meet the goal they chose.

Players can pilot as many robots as they have students, so this allows them to build a wide variety of robots that complement each other!

After three rounds of building and piloting, the player who has earned the most victory points is the winner!

Solo Play

In addition to the main game, this campaign also offers a solo automaton expansion!

In solo play, players have extra decisions to make - the automaton will take cards that they might want to build! In addition, each time the player pilots, the automaton gets its chance to do the same. However, players have the ability to counter the automaton's robot cards, reducing their scoring capabilities. With a sliding robot system, each pilot attempt provides a new challenge to deal with - will you sacrifice one of your own die to prevent a big score, or can you manipulate their robots into doing the work for you?

What's in the box?

The main Bot Builders experience is the core box, which consists of:

• 16 student cards
• 30 robot cards
• 6 goal cards
• 2 player aids
• 18 dice
• 28 punchboard tokens for tracking pilot ability and exhaustion
• 1 rule booklet
• 1 dry-erase board and two markers, for score tracking

The solo box contains:

• 18 Solo cards
• 1 rule pamphlet

Please note that the solo box can not be played standalone, and requires the core box to play!

What inspired this game?

When I was in high school, I had the opportunity to join a real life robotics team. This chance helped push me into my day job career as a software engineer, but more importantly I saw how influential such programs can be on students, teaching them valuable skills in STEM but also in marketing, presentation, and leadership. 

Once I graduated college, I started volunteering with the same team that I had been on. Since then I've taught dozens of students about programming, and seen how they grow and thrive as individuals. 

I wanted to make this game to highlight the people involved in such a team, as well as the robots themselves. For that reason, the students in the game are just as critical as the robots - each one has their own style and abilities.

While the robots are arguably the stars of the game, I wanted them to feel distinct and wholesome. I got tired of robots being mainly used as excuses for combat. That's why the robots in Bot Builders aren't fighting or damaging each other, but instead showing creativity in design and problem solving by doing sports style tasks.

Shipping Info

Shipping will be collected after the crowd sale ends, as part of the pledge manager. This is to ensure that the shipping costs are up to date with the latest state of the world.

Meet the Creator

Matt Soucy (he/him) is a software engineer by day, game designer by night, programming instructor while volunteering. He has been working with his gaming friends to study game design as a medium for storytelling and expressing creativity, and loves finding games that capture someone's niche or unique lived experiences.