Description

Rocket Fist! Form Galaxy Sword! Omicron Torpedo, fire! Giant robots battle in the style of your favorite Japanese cartoons.

Duel Bots is a card game that lets you design your own deck, load up a giant robot with high-tech components and devastating weapons, then duel head-to-head or in a multi-player death-match.

Duel packs contain two pre-constructed decks. The decks in Galaxy Sword are designed for new players to learn the game. Once you're familiar with the rules the cards can be used alone or with other duel packs to design your own custom deck.

-- Game play summary --

Design your own deck of 32 cards or use a pre-constructed deck from the duel pack. There are three type of cards: components (such as weapons or other gear), resources (which focus on hand management) and damage cards. Damage cards go in a separate pile and you draw them when your robot takes damage. When your damage pile is empty, you lose.

Each turn you may put one component into play from your hand into one of 7 available slots. This sets the pace of the game. Components get more powerful as the game goes on: Tier I components can be played right away but aren't very powerful. You must have 3 components on the table to play a more powerful Tier II component. When 6 of the 7 slots are filled you can play your signature component. Each deck has exactly one signature component, and once they start hitting the table the game will end soon. This follows with the giant robot theme, where mega-weapons tend to decide the battle after some back and forth with smaller attacks.

Damage cards first go into available component slots; you can't play a new component into a damaged slot. You may also put damage on a component on the table, which keeps you from using that component until the damage is removed. Some cards let you move damage to the discard pile where it will eventually cycle back into your hand, so that's just a temporary fix. If instead you pay the cost listed on the damage card you can remove it from the game. There are 5 different kinds of damage with 5 different costs, so choosing compatible damage cards is an important part of deck design. You also choose how many damage cards to use (8 to 12) but the total is always 32 cards, so choosing more "hit points" reduces your available number of components and resource cards.

The game has elements that limit the luck factor present in all card games. Certain resources let you choose cards from your discard pile, others from your draw pile. The small deck size ensures you will see your whole draw pile several times each game. (The discard pile shuffles to form a new draw pile when it's exhausted.) Luck plays a factor in which components come out first and in occasionally finding yourself without a component to play which can put you a turn behind.