🤖Micro Bots: Duel🤖 is a tin-box card game that comes to Kickstarter at the end of January! Thanks to Prometheus Game Labs we could try it last weekend!

When I think of tin-box games, something fairly simple comes to my mind. Well, spoiler alert: this game delivers way more than I hoped for! 🙃

In the game you play as 2 dueling mechs. To win, you have to outsmart your opponent, play your cards more strategically and reduce their armor to zero before you explode. 😁

You choose one of 4 mechs, grab your starting deck and you are ready to go! Each mech has a unique ability and cards, but you will be able to upgrade yourself and buy more cards as the game goes on.

Turns are snappy. At the beginning of each round you choose a card to play then reveal at the same time – the one with a lower number on it gets to go first. You place your card in the appropriate row next to your mech card – left for weapon, right for support cards. Each card shows multiple actions, many of them scale according to the total number of cards in a row. So as you have more cards in play, certain effects get stronger. 💪 Many cards have a one-use “held action” that is locked-and-loaded for a later turn when you need it.

The meat of the game is of course the combat ⚔️, which will happen when you use a card with an attack action on it. It starts with adding up attack and defense values, and some bluffing with power tokens and using additional held actions!

Cards and power tokens you have are finite, so one of the most interesting decisions in the game is when you use your Recharge card to recuperate. On one hand you get exhausted power tokens back, however you also take back your cards, which will weaken many abilities until you build up your rows again.

We found real strategic depth in this game that comes from playing cards at the right time, buying cards with good synergies, seeing through the bluffs of your opponent and choosing when to recuperate. 😊

We also just had an ultra-long duel which showed us it is not necessarily just a brawl but more like a well-choreographed methodical dance to the death, as you keep outplaying each other.

❓Do you like dueling games?