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While I consider RoboRally to be as close as you can get to The Perfect Game, I still find it incomplete without the features of the Armed and Dangerous expansion: New boards with new hazards to kill your robot, and new Option Cards for your robot to kill other robots with!
Components
These are of the same high quality as you find in the core game. Nice and sturdy boards, with good cards thrown in as well. I could however agree that the one-colour-only tokens feel a bid cheap.
Gameplay
This section could as well have been thrown in with components above, as that is what Armed and Dangerous is all about.
You get 6 new boards, and most of them are a real challenge to play. Laser Maze and Circuit Trap doesn't add any new board elements to make the life of your robot miserable, but they are still nightmarishly difficult to navigate.
Speaking of navigating, the Flood Zone board adds water. Water slows down your robot, which makes this board a bit boring. Stay clear of the drain though...
Chasm, on the other hand, add teleporters. These little darlings adds 2 squares to any Move card and allows you robot to ignore any hazards or robot in its path. Which is good, considering all the gaping holes on the Chasm board!
Coliseum and Gear Box have one thing in common: If you end up in the centre, you might be stuck there for a long time! The first adds floors. Getting down these is easy, getting up is not. The second is filled with gears, making sure your robot is never facing the direction you want. Finally, it has the new randomizers thrown in. If your robot ends up on one of those, your next programmed card is replaced with a randomly drawn card!
The meat of Armed and Dangerous are however the 26 brand new Option Cards. I can't say I noticed this before I owned Armed and Dangerous, but the options in the core game are a bit straightforward. Adding a lot of fun, but not in as drastic a way as one could hope. There's a lot of drastic surprises added from the ones in Armed and Dangerous though.
Robots can now deploy mines, fire homing missiles, fly with jet-packs, or blast everything to pieces with The Big One! There's some really insane stuff that gets mixed into to the game with the new cards, and they all add more fun to an already incredible game.
Quite a few of these options are more powerful than the ones in the RoboRally core game. To balance this, the really powerful ones can only be used a limited amount of times.
Further Comments
Armed and Dangerous doesn't change anything about RoboRally, it just adds more to it. Most of the added stuff consists of pure amazing, distilled into cardboard form.
However, there are some minor inconveniences. For instance, some of the new Option Cards are so complicated that their rules couldn't fit on the card. It's a bit sad when the fast and furious action slows down because you suddenly need to refer to the rulebook. I can understand why they did this, because the cards are really fun! But it still is a bit sad...
And as I've already mentioned, Flood Zone isn't the funniest board to play. You could perhaps argue that Coliseum is slow to navigate too, rather than challenging.
Still, this is probably as good as an expansion as you will ever find. I consider it to be almost essential for RoboRally.
Score: 9
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Ian McCarthy
United States
Milwaukee
Wisconsin
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Re: Adding to Perection!
Many of the options are fun, but some are overly convoluted. I love explosive weapons and the Big Gun!
The boards are pretty much ho-hum for me, though, Colosseum and Flood Zone definitely being the worst of the bunch. The later expansions Radioactive and especially Grand Prix added the best boards. And there are many excellent homemade boards available online.
http://tartarus.org/gareth/roborally/boards/all
Thanks for the review, might want to fix the "perection" typo in the subject, though. I thought for a moment that you were quite excited about this expansion.
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Well, I am exited about this expansion, though not that exited
Thanks for the heads up!
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Posted Mon Jul 18, 2011 8:13 pm
