Dana bought this one used from a customer who traded it in still shrink-wrapped, box corners crushed from storage but every component inside untouched, and it’s the only time I’ve genuinely gasped opening a game box at the counter. The production is closer to what I handle appraising a fine-press edition than what I’m used to seeing from a game publisher: laser-etched wooden components, a fabric bag, cards with a card stock heavier than anything else on our shelf. Riot clearly built this to be a showpiece, and I’ll admit that alone would have made me suspicious of the actual game underneath it if it hadn’t turned out to be this good.

The core loop is programming, each player secretly plotting a sequence of moves for their mech using a stack of numbered command cards, then everyone reveals and executes simultaneously, which means your plan is only ever as good as your prediction of what the board will look like three moves from now, after the minions have already reacted to moves you haven’t made yet. It’s the same bones as RoboRally, but tuned tighter and layered with mech-specific upgrade decks that make each of the four available mechs feel meaningfully different to program, not just cosmetically different.

The campaign structure across ten missions is where the real design work shows, since each mission introduces a new mechanical wrinkle, hazards, new minion behaviors, objective types, rather than just scaling difficulty up in a straight line, and by the campaign’s back half you’re juggling systems the tutorial mission never hinted at. My one real complaint is the same one I have with most programming games: the analysis paralysis can stretch a turn out badly if your group has even one player who wants to plan four moves ahead with total certainty, and our first two sessions ran long specifically because of that.

The rulebook deserves its own mention, since it’s the rare game manual with an actual index and a genuinely useful glossary in the back, something I go looking for reflexively now and almost never find. Whoever wrote it understood that a co-op this mechanically dense needs to be a reference document, not just an onboarding document, and it shows every time we’ve had to settle a rules question mid-session without breaking momentum. A five-star game and, unusually, a five-star manual to go with it.