Episode 268: Raising Robots

Raising Robots is a 1-6 player game designed by Brett Sobol and Seth Van Orden, art by Viktoriya Fajardo and Howard McWilliam and published by Nauvoo Games.

In Raising Robots players are famous inventors seeking to assemble the greatest collection of robots over the course of 8 rounds by simultaneously selecting two actions and then performing said actions. Each player will be given an individual player board and two inventor cards where they will select one to keep. These inventor cards have different abilities that could be persistent throughout the game, provide additional benefits at the start of the game or increase end game scoring. They are all different and unique. Every player will be given the same deck of energy cards and the same action cards. There is a central board where the rounds will be tracked and the actions denoted. First you will draw two energy cards from the top of your deck and then place energy cubes on cards that show an energy icon. Energy cubes will increase that action's power and also allow other players to perform that action so you need to be careful what action card you assign to which energy card. After energy cubes are placed you are going to assign one action to each energy card face down and then everyone reveals simultaneously. These actions are: UPGRADE which allows you to move upgrade tokens to robot cards, report cards or inventors which make their abilities more valuable, ASSEMBLE allows you to build robots onto your board, DESIGN, FABRICATE AND RECYCLE are different actions associated with different rows of your factory. Choosing these actions will allow you to gain resources, robots, energy and points and then also allows you to run your robots that are in that row. All of these actions require that you use ENERGY to power them up and resources. This energy can come from your energy cards, energy cubes, upgrades or batteries that you spend from your supply. Once all action cards have been revealed everyone will simultaneously run their factories executing the actions of the cards they picked and then also any other actions that have energy cubes on them. Once everyone is finished you move to the end of the round where bonuses are given from inventor cards, energy cards are put into a discard pile and action cards are put back into your hand. Then the next round commences. This continues for 8 rounds, at the end of the game you score points for robots that you have on your board, inventor cards, left over resources and your end game report cards. Let’s head back to the studio to hear which peg was the most successful inventor.