Robo Rally Transformers Edition Review

boardgamequest.com:

I remember my family renting a VCR and a VHS of some episodes of the Transformers cartoon show in the 1980’s for a sleepover birthday party when I was 10. That show, and the toys, were some of my favorites when I was in that awkward phase of growing up but still really liking toys, especially big stompy robots (and not much has changed if I’m being honest). Transformers and Robotech led me to Battletech to help make the gaming connection.

Robo Rally, originally released in 1994, is a programming racing game where the robots get to bump and shoot at each other because rubbing is racing. Today’s review will look at a new Transformers themed version published by Renegade Games.

There’s too much to cover so the following is only a high-level overview four phases of each round of play:

The first is the Upgrade Phase (All players do this at the same time) where each player may do each of the following actions once in any order:

Next comes the Planning Phase: Each player draws cards until they have nine planning cards in their hand. Then they place a card face down in each of the five registers on their player board. These will be the actions taken during the next phase and you can pick your robot form to either be a robot or their vehicle alt form.

Then it’s time for the Activation Phase or where the magic chaos racing happens

Lastly, the End of Round phase is a clean up phase

These four phases continue until the first robot reaches the final checkpoint and wins. I’ll explain a bit more about damage and some other details in the next section.

For the kids of the 80’, Optimus Prime and Megatron are the two most iconic Transformers in this box. The others; Drag Strip (first appearance in 1986), Arcee (movie), Blurr (movie), and Flamewar (2005) were not familiar to me despite having watched most episodes of the original show and movie but I’m guessing by their inclusion that these probably resonate with later fans.

At a high level, this reminds me of Quirky Circuits meets