Robo Rally Dice Game Review

Back in 1994, a guy named Richard Garfield — who you may remember from another one of his inventions, Magic: the Gathering — essentially invented the subgenre of programmed movement games with RoboRally.

Over the years, this chaotic game of robots racing through a hazardous factory has become a cult hit, inspiring love and hate in equal measure, and enjoying a number of different editions and expansions. Now, 32 full years after the original, it finally has a spin-off with some fresh mechanics: Robo Rally Dice. Interestingly, Garfield's name isn't on the box. Instead the design credit goes to Kane Klenko, who's made a bit of a name for himself as a fan of real-time play and dice rolling including his most popular game, FUSE; concepts which he’s now brought to Robo Rally.

Most editions of the original game are fairly stripped back production-wise, and this new take on the old classic is no different. There are some punch sheets of cardboard tokens that feather annoyingly as you push them out, some thin player boards, and some thicker, double-sided, modular map boards which begin to curve slightly almost as soon as the box is opened.

The player pieces are rather more endearing. They’re wooden blocks with a pointy arrow face to indicate facing, printed with cartoon artwork of the different robot characters you can play. They’re functionally identical but each has their own name and goofy charm.

The art is definitely the best thing about the Robo Rally Dice production, successfully blending a blocky, retro-futurist style with comic-book touches that evoke the game’s setting and crazy theme. You can see more of this art style on the cards, which are fine, although there are a paltry 20 of them in the box.

In programmed movement games like this, the idea is that everyone pre-selects a set of actions which they unveil at the same time and then implement on the modular board that you’ve set up before play. In most cases, and the Robo Rally games are no exception, the entertainment value is in trying your hardest to figure out a turn in advance within limited parameters, only to watch your plans fall apart when they come into contact with everyone else trying to do exactly the same.

The original game gave players nine cards from a random selection and got them to plan out five moves. The cards were things like move forward, turn left or right, about-turn and suchlike. Robo Rally Dice jettisons the cards for, you guessed it, dice, with the custom symbols matching similar movement patterns to the old cards. However, you don’t just roll the dice and abide by the results. You don’t even roll them, put a few back, and re-roll the remainder Yahtzee-style. Oh no. You can keep on rolling as long as you like, as fast as you like, picking out dice one by one and adding them to your mat.

Obviously there's a catch, otherwise the game would go on forever. The first player to be satisfied with their selection of five dice picks up the black dice and starts rolling, calling out each time they roll a six. After three sixes, anyone who's still not finished has to stop and face a turn with an incomplete set of moves.

The in-game effects of this are interesting, and worth discussing at length since they’re the primary way Robo Rally Dice differs from the original game. First up, the dice make it easier to do what you want. It’s possible, for example, in the original game that you might desperately need to move forward and have no cards to do it. Here, you’ll almost always be able to make progress in the race. Rather, it’s the time pressure that leads you to accept compromises or even make mistakes in planning your turn.

As it turns out, the time pressure is as much of a weird psychological trick as it is anything else. Everyone wants to put down all of their dice, so whoever finishes first is unlikely to be that much further ahead of everyone else. So by the time they’ve grabbed the black dice and started rolling and even got one six, let alone three, most of the other players have probably finished. But, not always. Sometimes those sixes tumble out in quick succession. Sometimes players lose dice through damage, so they can end their turn plan much faster than their competitors. Sometimes, someone is left short when the third six is rolled and the fact that it’s rare doesn’t stop everyone feeling the terror that it might be them when it happens.

So you have this weird amalgamation of mechanisms which, in isolation, feel like a terrible idea but somehow, in concert, they work. The dice selection phase feels like a crushing timebox when, really, it isn’t, and the pressure leads to you planning suboptimal moves. That, in turn, substitutes for the lack of cards that stymied you in the original, without the heartless frustration that engenders. You’ll get the desired effect that the player’s robots speed through the factory at a satisfactory pace, but from time to time, they screw up. That’s when the game gets both more and less interesting.

After each die is resolved, there’s an ordered checklist of things to go through. If you’re not bumping into anyone else’s robots, or on any board icons, you can ignore this and play rumbles on. However, when those effects apply, you have to be quite careful about how you implement them and in what order, which slows things down in what’s supposed to be a fast-paced, madcap game. The results, however, are often enjoyably anarchic, especially when bots push each other into unexpected squares, which can then derail all the following movement dice, leading to a growing chain o