Mixbots, A Robot Building Trading Card Party Game Now On Kickstarter

Funamite LLC launches Mixbots, a robot building trading card game on Kickstarter. Robots are built by applying stickers onto trading cards, and combat is played with the hand game, Rock Paper Scissors. Combat is fast and furious for one on one duels and team battles with 10 or more players. Mixbots is enjoyed by tweens, teens, new gamers, and groups of friends.


Building robots is half the fun and putting them in action against other robots completes the whole experience. After building their robots, players will have a chance to personalize them by writing a name on the back. In team battles, players can help their own teammates by using their robots’ special abilities. “Students were on the edge of their seats. They were very engaged and enjoying the game”, said Christine Ha, a middle school teacher.

Funamite decided on using stickers instead of transparent cards to build the robots because that allowed the player’s creations to remain intact when being carried about, and to easily be seen. When multiple transparent cards are stacked on top of one another, details become blurry, so stickers were the easy choice. Funamite decided on Rock Paper Scissors as the combat mechanism because it’s already a familiar system with many and therefore lowers the learning curve and barrier to entry.

Funamite LLC is game publishing company founded in 2016 and based in Elk Grove, California. Mixbots is the company’s first product.

Real Warbots

A fundamentally new approach to real-time strategy games! We transfer the mechanics of genre from the virtual world into the real world, on the real robots.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/382353368/real-warbots

Real Warbots is a strategy game for two or more players. Game mechanics is the same as computer real-time strategy games. As usual, players will collect resources, defend the base and eliminate the enemies. However, the game is not on the computer screen, but in the real world with the participation of real robots. Moreover, as there are robots, the control will be also different from the standard “clicking and dragging”.

There are three types of robots:   Scout, Worker and Tank

It is a seemingly well-known set of actions as in all RTS games; however, these are robots, and nobody is preventing players from racing with obstacles, hunting the cats, passing beer bottles or anything else that may spring into your mind.

Controlling robots

The player must make an algorithm of robot actions from simple blocks like shoot, move, turn etc. After that, the algorithm is wirelessly sent to the robot who begins to carry out his task. If the situation changes, the player makes a new algorithm, sends it to the robot and it starts acting in a new way.

The player is free to make algorithms of any difficulty. Someone will make them small, of several clicks, and will be sending new tasks to the robot all the time. Another player will spend some time before the game and make a big algorithm from maybe thousands of commands.

Which approach is right for you will show only practice and player experience.

Map.

Everything that the robots see by their sensors is displayed on the screen on the player’s map. Obstacles are shown as simple lines and help to understand where the robot can’t go. Other robots or resources are shown with the special icons.

It helps the player to understand the distance between robots and their surroundings even if he can’t see it by his eyes.

Personification.

Every robot has its own identification number given to him “at the factory” that will never be changed. That means every robot will be unique and have its own name.

The number of each robot will be placed in the general base and all its victories on official competitions will be written in the hall of fame of Real WarBots.

Accessories.

Apart from robots, there are several other things necessary for the game:

  • “Energy” and “Materials”.
  • Walls
  • Ammo for Robot-Tank
  • Beacons(optional)
  • Factory(optional)

Heroes.

Robots get experience points which can be spent on improving the various characteristics: hit points, speed, etc. or for the purchase of various perks.

Later, will be created the robots-heroes  with the best abilities, possibly on a completely different chassis, such as hexapods

Interface

Players are provided with software environment. It can be divided into several areas for convenience:

  • a working area, where you can make the algorithm from several blocks;
  • a map with obstacles which robots see around them;
  • a list of buttons for program blocks;
  • a list of player’s robots. Every robot has its own identification number, the part of which will be shown in the list

Kickstarter Site: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/382353368/real-warbots