Raising Robots - Friends Review: Go Go Gadget Pals!
Transcript
Hey everybody, Z Garcia here and today I'm taking a look at the second expansion to raising robots. This one right here called Friends. There already was one expansion called Pets and that one gave you well pet robots. Uh very adorable pet robots and more inventors and they each did of course their own thing. This one's going to give you those things as well. more inventors, more robots. Uh but this one also has this module which gives you some objectives like a some races you are taking part of and if you achieve those things early then you are going to get some interesting rewards. I'll show you all of that in one moment here. Now the theme of this one, the first one was pets and this one is sort of a celebration of different cultures around the world. You'll see a couple of the cards uh that will highlight what I'm talking about here. Obviously, I'm not going to be showing you how to play the game Raising Robots. There's quite a bit going on in that game. But if you do know that game and you're curious about the expansion here, let's cut down to the table. Let me show you what's going on in it, and we'll come on back, tell you what I think of it. So, this expansion for Raising Robots breaks down into three basic components. You're going to have more inventors, uh, these inventors right here. I'll give you a look at them in one second. more robots, of which I have a couple laid out right here. And then competitions and friendships, which is this right here with these cards next to that. The cards you can mix and match however you want to. It's very easy to just take the new inventors, take the new robots, shuffle
them in, and not play with the competitions and friendships if you don't want to. Uh or any combination thereof. You can basically do it however you want to. So, the new um uh inventors here, you've got these right here with some new ideas, some new components that I'm not showing you to allow you to take uh you know, advantage of their special abilities. And just like the rest of the components and the rest of the idea for the expansion, these are going to celebrate people from all over the world. Uh and so that's the idea there. So you've got those. You've also then got the new robots. They are going to be, you know, from sort of different cultures or based on different cultures.
And they're going to show you a few new concepts. So you're going to have some of them are going to have this symbol right here, which means they're built into any row you want to any of these three lines. They're going to have sometimes this symbol right here, which is going to be endgame scoring for that. if that happens to be in this case if it happens to be turned on which I did already. Uh then you are going to get that at the end of the game. And then there are also some that are going to have a couple of new symbols such as this one right here. This new symbol is going to allow you to search for a specific robot and the reason for that being of course the deck of robots is getting larger. It might be harder for you to come across the thing you are hoping to find. So now when you activate this, you're going to call out a row and call out a value or range of values and start flipping until you get that thing and then take that into your hand. So I'll give you an example. Let's say I really want to get another design robot.
And I'm just going to grab a chunk of the deck here. And I want that robot to be triggered at three energy, just like this one. But I'm okay with it being a little less. And I'm okay with it being a little more. So I'm going to say uh I'm going to say between one and four energy. And I want it to be purple. And I would start flipping and discarding from the deck here until I get that. Well, it happens to be that right there. Actually, this one's purple. And it triggers at one. Let's say I hadn't included one. Let's say I said no, I want it to be I want it to be three or four only. Okay, then this doesn't count. We keep going until I get one. This this one is purple, but it triggers at five. We keep going. No, sometimes you'll get also while you're doing this, one of the ones that has this symbol right here and that will count as every color. Okay, so you you're also Here we go. This was purple. It triggers at four. This is the kind of robot I was looking for. That gets added to my hand.
The rest of these get discarded. Now, if I do not hit at all because the deck has been burnt through, then instead I keep the last revealed card and then we will shuffle up the deck and and you know, set up a new deck. You don't shuffle up and keep looking. Once you hit the bottom of the deck, you are done looking. So, that's what that rule is all about. There's also sometimes, or I guess I should explain, if you're playing with the uh the friends and the pets expansion, they explain in the rule book that you're going to have to watch out for infinite loops and not allow that to happen. And here they give you a whole example of things that could happen because some of the cards in this set allow you to trigger a row and some of the cards in the pads here allow you to trigger a neighbor. So you cannot use this guy to trigger this row and then when you hit him, activate this guy again. That would create an infinite loop where you could continually do that forever. So can't re-trigger this character. Uh so that's another power that you'll see in here. Some cards that say you can trigger a specific line and you press pause on that and then trigger that whole line then come back to where you were and continue after that. It can get complicated. uh which is one of the things to sort of be aware of with this expansion is that it can get a little heady sometimes. So there you go. Those are the inventors and some of the new ideas with the new robots. And then the
other part of this is this kind of module, right? This this right here where you are going to set out these four tokens. You're going to shuffle up these cards right here and select randomly one of each to put out and the rest you can just remove from the game. This is going to tell you what the triggering condition is that you're looking for. And then down here are some rewards. Everybody gets four of these tokens. And whenever you achieve one of these things, so for example, the engineering expo here says if I have nine of any one of these things, when I achieve that, I am allowed to pay one of these costs at the top. Uh let's say I give up the seven energy. Assuming I had that much, I would give up the seven energy. And then I can do one of these two benefits. I can either take the seven victory points or the two victory points, draw three friends, and keep one. And I'll show you these in just one second. Uh, with that done, I'm going to put my token on there. If anybody else achieves any one of these during the same round, they can also put their token on there. But at the end of the whole round, we are going to flip this over if there are any tokens on it.
Putting these back on here. and anybody else who does it in the future pays a little less but gets a weaker reward and so they could do it too though everybody can do each one of these once. All right. And so that's what that's all about. Um with these up here being different again possibly based on uh the random card that gets dealt out. Now if you do go for the friends reward, you are going to like I said draw three or two and keep one. You want to make sure at the beginning of the game when you're setting this up that if you uh that the characters that you are playing with that the the actual characters you guys picked to be are removed from this deck. So for example, if I want to be Confucious and that was the character I am playing, then this card cannot be in this deck. I want to remove that. I'm going to look at these three. I'm going to select one of these and that's going to be my friend with me discarding the other two.
You're going to set that next to your character and you now have something you can benefit from. So, it's kind of like a a minor version of the regular inventor that you're going to benefit from and in some ways feels like having a whole other inventor. These are going to be very powerful. They're going to do all sorts of things. And the rule book of course will explain what it is they do or at least give you clarifications of the ones you might not understand or you know need a little clarification on. So uh Steven here for example says when gained you may benefit from Steven's energy cards after finishing the current phase. So normally this inventor has their own energy cards. You are going to now be able to use that and Confucious because that's the character I am playing. So, that's how that's going to work out. So, there you go. Hopefully, that gives you an idea of what's going on in the expansion, the things you can choose to add in and how they're going to interact. Let's go ahead and go back up top. Raising Robots is always one of those games I worry is going to be misleading to people that just see this cover and go, "Oh my gosh, that's adorable, cute little robots." Or if they see the cards and then jump into it and don't realize what a thinky, heady, and complicated game this is. This game has a lot in it. It's a It's an involved game. There's plenty to think about, lots to do, and both expansions, of course, are going to give you more things to think about. In my opinion, friends here to a greater degree than
the first expansion. The first expansion gave you this idea of this is the the pets expansion. this idea of triggering things that are adjacent to the pads or in the same column as the pads. So, it cared about the geometry of the board, your player board. Um, and it was good, but it could definitely get sort of bogged down and you you'd have to be very methodical in the way you're triggering things so that you know what you're doing. This one's going to have some of the same concepts at play. By that, I mean methodical play that you have to be careful about. Um, but it doesn't have any of that adjacency stuff. instead here. The big pushes are endgame scoring, which I like that quite a bit. Uh, and then the the module that gives you these characters that behave kind of like mini versions of your inventors. And that I really really like. I think that's my favorite thing in the expansion. the feeling of the modularity basically that feeling of I have my own special character and now I have a buddy that's that I can kind of use their abilities as well that feels tremendous but that aspect just like everything else in this expansion is clearly targeting power users if you would expert players of this game because any one thing in this game if I point to it and and highlight like that thing would be I think possibly a negative for a new player or a positive
for an expert player. So here's what I mean by that, right? So the ability to that new ability to search for any card in the deck of robots is very slow. It's going to slow you down. You don't know what you're looking for if you're a new player. It's just sort of going to be in the way. It's going to get in your way. If you're an expert player, then you know you're diluting the deck of cards by introducing the new robots, and you probably know what you're looking for. So, it's really interesting. You get to pinpoint a thing and go, I need this. And you might even know which card you're hoping to run into, right? Um, so very good for again power users. the um having more powers, having that secondary inventor basically is tremendous cuz you now have more abilities that only apply to you. But again, a new player is going to go, "Wow, there's they might just take the victory points, right? They don't really want to deal with more unique abilities they now have to learn and implement well enough to that that it was worth giving up the victory points to do that." having that module that is going to be, you know, that will sit there and sort of check for you to achieve these triggers and then give you victory points or the helpers, the friends.
For a an expert player, that's going to be something else to think about. It's going to give you more to do. It's going to be challenging and enticing. For a new player, it's just going to pull focus from the main sort of juice of the game, the main main thing you are doing. You're going to forget you triggered one. You might miss that you're supposed to be have achieved one. You are going to either get distracted and then not do the things you're probably meant to be doing more so than not. And so it's an interesting expansion because it really really rewards, you know, in in a in a significant way people that have played this game a lot that are very comfortable with it. It's going to give you a lot more to think about more than the first expansion in my opinion. If you are someone that likes raising robots a lot and you don't have either expansion, I would recommend this one first because I think it has more meat on its bones. In fact, I'm not a big fan of combining them because I don't like then that you can run into that whole infinite loop thing. I don't know. I just that I don't I don't like the the possibility of that. It it might never happen. You might never see it. I just don't like that they had to dedicate two whole pages to hey, be careful. This might be a thing that happens when both of these expansions are in play. Um, if I'm playing again with people that really enjoy the game that already know it, I think I'll throw this expansion in. I could see myself putting in the other one maybe as someone starts to get comfortable with the game. But this is your power users
expansion and it's good. Um, it's got fun stuff. Now, the artwork is, while fantastic, just like the original core box is, cannot hold a candle to how adorable the pets expansion is. That one just took what I already thought was hilarious, adorable artwork of these robots being anthropomorphic and and, you know, doing all these neat things and gave you pets, gave you animals that now are made of robotic parts and are just incredibly adorable. This one celebrates the different cultures. It's neat. You know, the Swiss Army knife on top of the Swiss clock and you're like, "Okay, that's cute. You saw that one in the overview." But it's not um it feels like a celebration of these places.
Not uh as cute. Not It's not as um I don't know. It doesn't make me sort of u as warm inside as the other ones did. Right. Um so there you go. That's what I think of it. Overall, I think this is a good expansion. I think it's one that I would certainly recommend to people who play the game a lot, and I think it makes sense that this be the second expansion they released. But if you haven't played either one and you love the game, you play it a lot, I would just jump right to this one. I think it's really, really good. And I love the modularity of what they give you. You can choose to put that in, you can choose not to put it in. I like that a lot. Um the game is complicated though and this is adding to that complexity. Does where do you draw that line, right? Do you need this much complexity in the game? Do you need this many new symbols to now contend with? You know, uh so that's certainly a consideration. I like it. I'm going to give this one a seven out of 10. I certainly recommend it.
Like I said, if you fall into that category, but if you're still coming to terms with raising robots, certainly get comfortable with the with the original game first and then consider picking up the expansion if you want a little more interaction with the players because you're now competing for these things in the middle of the table, whereas the original game is sort of multiplayer solitary in many ways. And if you just like the idea of uh you know these endgame scorings and having more unique abilities to you, if you like all of that stuff, then I think this is a really interesting expansion. So for me, 7 out of 10. That is a seal of approval everybody for Raising Robots Friends, the expansion for Raising Robots. And that's going to do it. Thank you very much for tuning in and checking this out. My name is Z Garcia. I'll see you on the next one.
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