ROBOTS: The Card Game (Transformers the Deck-Buildling Game)
Transformers
Deck-Building Game
by Matt Hyra & Dan Blanchett
Published by Renegade Games Studio
Renegade games and their team of designers and developers have done some things in the last year that have really impressed me, starting with Matt Hyra and Dan Blanchett’s Vampire: The Masquerade - Rivals (2021), a game released to minimal fanfare last summer. An ECG based loosely around capturing the feel of Richard Garfield’s Vampire: The Eternal Struggle (1994), Rivals is a game I picked up right before summer vacation because of my ongoing fascination with the non-collectable aspects of customizable card games.
My plan was to press-gang my sister, who learned Magic: The Gathering as a kid, into playing Rivals with me and Kathleen while on vacation, as Rivals is a game that arguably was designed for more than two players. Inevitably, that didn’t pan out, but even at two players, Rivals still showed that it’s not your typical dueling card game. And I haven’t given up on this three player dream yet, damnit.
Anyway, in the wake of Rivals, Renegade released the first of four IP-based deck builders, Power Rangers: Deck-Building Game (2021). Shortly thereafter came Transformers Deck-Building Game (2021) and GI JOE Deck-Building Game (2021). I believe the My Little Pony deck builder is coming out sometime in 2022.
Based on my normal tastes and cynical outlook, that paragraph doesn’t really spark much excitement in me. That being said, Renegade has a good track record in my book–publishing one of my favorite games, Covert–and Rivals showed that Matt Hyra and Dan Blanchett are interested in solid card games that defy your normal expectations and tropes. If you missed Episode 36 of our podcast, Be Prepared, we discuss how much we enjoyed Renegade’s GI JOE Deck-Building Game, designed by TC Petty III. Both Hyra and Blanchett worked on its development team. Not to overstate things, but it’s one of my favorite new games I’ve played in the last year or so.
After the excellent surprise of GI JOE, I went back and read up on Power Rangers and Transformers. Of the three IP deck builders currently available, I have no strong thematic connection to any of them, but if I had to pick one I personally care about the least, it would probably be Transformers. I remember playing with GI JOEs as a kid, and I remember watching Power Rangers a little on TV growing up (that Tommy/Green/White Ranger drama!), but I don’t really remember much about Transformers. That being said, Renegade’s Power Rangers looks the most familiar in regard to its mechanics. Transformers Deck-Building Game, however, is a little different. So I turned my attention in that direction, and I gave it a shot.
Not being a big Transformers fan, I took a picture of the two character avatars I’d heard of.
In Transformers, you will select an Autobot as your character, giving you some unique abilities, a standee, and one BIG card as your avatar. You’ll also get ten basic cards to start (all players have the same starting deck). Like many deck builders, Transformers has two main currencies you gain through cardplay, plus a third you gain as a resource that functions a little differently. One of the two base currencies is ‘movement,’ which will allow you to move your Transformer standee around a grid of cards. The game calls this market grid THE MATRIX.
Transformers’ Matrix, doubling as both the board and facedown card market.
Hold on, what? A grid of cards? Moving, did you say? Yes, Transformers’ most immediate tweak is that the typical deck building market is all facedown (a la Legendary Encounters: X-Files) and laid out in a grid to form a board of sorts. One movement point can be spent to move your standee one space to an orthogonally adjacent card, or spent to flip a card in your space face up. After movement, the other in-game resource you find on cards is called Power, and it’s a bit all-purpose. Power is used to both fight enemy cards as well as buy upgraded cards for your deck. Movement and power are accrued during your turn, but do not carry over. Per normal deck builder expectations, these are gained and lost all on a per-turn basis, so no savin’ up your power, kiddos.
You are able to save up the third resource: ENERGON. Energon is tracked with Terraforming Mars-esque cubes, and it is spent to activate card abilities during different points of gameplay. Some cards will have abilities printed at the bottom that can be activated with energon, like “Draw and play a card” or “+2 Power.”
A game of Transformers is spent moving around the matrix, flipping cards, and seeing what you find. Some cards are going to be things you can buy to grow your deck. Technologies, Maneuvers, Allies, and other Autobots (friendly units) can all be bought using power to expand your powers and abilities. Periodically, you’ll flip Decepticons (enemy units) and have to fight them. Other cards like sites will give you actions available while your standee is on that card.
If you flip an enemy card while your standee is on it, or if you move onto an already-revealed enemy card, you will draw the top card of the Encounter deck–a small multi-use deck that drives enemy responses or attacks–and resolve the top half, or ambush ability. Ambushes can range from losing your Energon to preventing you from attacking this round. In general, they are not terrible effects, but function more as a stalling tactic and resource bleed. I found the normal ambush abilities to be more of an inconvenience than a real threat.
An example of the game’s Encounter Cards. The top half are for normal encounters, while the bottom are for Boss encounters only.
In addition to normal Decepticons, three Boss Decepticons are seeded evenly through the deck, and they are tiered in difficulty. Beyond having much higher HP values to aim for, the bosses also have more damaging abilities. Finally, when attacking them, you must flip an Encounter card and resolve the confront ability on the card (that is the bottom half), which simulates them fighting back during your attack. These abilities often deal direct damage or dramatically raise the HP of the Boss temporarily, making them harder to defeat this round.
For the solo game, your goal is to survive without either the main deck running out or taking five damage, and manage to defeat all three Boss Decepticons. Yay victory.
Okay, I’ve played Transformers Deck-Building Game a bunch in a short time period, and I’ve won every game, which is weird for a solo game. Typically, solo games tend to skew to the higher difficulty side of things to prevent a game from losing its stakes.
In this game, I find the basic gameplay loop very satisfying for how simple it is. For a solo game, it has exactly what I want in regard to choices and low overhead. That being said, because I’ve never lost, there are very low stakes at play here, and this is due to my main issue in the game: The systems in the design are robust and interesting enough to provide satisfying gameplay, but the variety and nuance of the design is lacking, which prevents any real strategy from emerging, or even really being necessary. Reveal cards, buy Autobots, fight Decepticons. Rinse. Repeat. The encounter deck ambush effects are bland and underpowered, while the confront abilities are bland and swingy.
Optimus spilling the tea.
Let’s look at an example. Sometimes when attacking a boss, you’ll flip an encounter card that requires you to destroy a card of a specific type (a maneuver, for example), thus losing its power, which will probably prevent you from defeating the boss. Eh, okay, I should’ve planned better or brought better cards, so now the Decepticon isn’t removed from the matrix. Here’s the wonky bit, though: if you fail to defeat a boss… nothing else happens. There are no negative repercussions like damage or lost cards, instead your turn ends immediately. Figured you’d take damage, too, right? You do–but only if the encounter card says so. To continue the example, let’s say you are instructed by the Encounter card to destroy a card of a specific type but can’t because you don’t have one. In that case, you take damage instead. But because this doesn’t happen with any regularity... again, I say ehh. One damage is nothing really. You can take five damage before losing, and one of the basic starting cards heals damage each time it’s played. I’ve never gone above two damage at any given time, and this is mostly due to the fact that deck building will never grow your deck as large or as quickly as in other games. You will get that basic card fairly regularly, and mixing unbuyable cards like Decepticons into the market means it is self-limiting in its purchasing options. Issues like this seem to be functioning at cross-purposes, knocking the game balance a little out of whack.
Even from this basic example, you see the stakes are just too low, and while I like solo games being straightforward and with low overhead, it is possible to have overhead that is too low. Cards in the matrix don’t interact much with other cards in the matrix, with the exception of schemes–essentially ongoing effects. But schemes are again, randomly seeded, and are fairly easy to remove. There are a handful of cooperative schemes that, by the nature of the card text, are impossible to remove when playing solo, oddly enough. The rulebook says this is intentional in order to create a higher difficulty, but really it feels arbitrary rather than forcing you to strategically adapt. If in a card game, a card randomly came out that said your hand size is now four instead of five, and it gave you no way to address it, it wouldn’t demand better strategy, it would demand better card draw, which when you are top-decking, is impossible to “do better.” Yes, you can cull your deck in Transformers very effectively, but because the market is also seeded randomly (and contains things to buy and things to fight), there will be plenty of times where you have no option to buy better cards because there aren’t any better cards available. There’s that wonky balance thing again. Would you find it satisfying if in a solitaire-like card game, an effect resolved that prevented you from playing cards of a certain suit? No, it would feel weird and meaninglessly punitive.
I think this would all bother me less if the game had more interesting choices built in elsewhere, but unfortunately it doesn’t. There are no scenarios, objectives, or “other things” to focus on. By the end of my fifth or sixth game, that satisfying game loop grew stale because it’s all you do. Something as basic as “I’ve drawn a card that says ‘OBJECTIVE,’ I must take it to a site card to progress the scenario,” would make this game way more interesting. Now you have a reason to explore and dig through the deck beyond just looking for bosses–but be careful, there are bosses in there, too. But nothing like that exists in the current design. Where are the side quests? Hell, where are the quests? Currently, your choices are limited to should I turn left and randomly flip a card or turn right and randomly flip a card? You have options about purchasing cards, transforming your Autobot (I didn’t even talk about this, but it isn’t quite as exciting as I expected), and who to fight, but it all feels a bit zero sum after a game or two. What I mean by that is that as a solo player, you are left feeling like there really is no difference as to whether I turn left or right, and if so, Transformers leaves you with only an illusion of choice, or worse, that your choice means nothing at all.
That being said, I want to reiterate that the loop here is good. I know Renegade has expansions planned, but whether they will address any of my issues is yet to be seen. Transformers has a solo mode in the box, but it’s not designed strictly as a solo game. It’s playable both cooperatively and competitively, neither of which I played for the sake of this write up. The already-announced expansion introduces playable Decepticons, something I don’t particularly care about. That being said, if Renegade announces a small box solo/cooperative expansion that introduces objectives or scenarios to the game, I would gladly buy-in. Hey, remember those GI JOE missions? Yeah, something like that. Beef up the gameplay here, and I think this could be a winner.
Transformers
Deck-Building Game
by Matt Hyra & Dan Blanchett
This game has a great gameplay loop that is knee-capped by some undercooked cardplay. It’s hard not to play through a few games and feel like there are modules missing from the box. It pains me to currently give this a pass considering that I played it a whole bunch and quite enjoyed it, but for the life of me I can’t find a reason to go back to it, which is not good. It’s missing that spice that makes you come back for more.
Add more choices and content to this good system, and you’ve got a winner here. As is, I can’t recommend it.
