Cyberion is the most recent in a series of mainly solitaire games designed by Shadi Torbey and published by inPatience, tho' the game can also be played as a two-player cooperative. Like other games in the 'Oniverse' range it benefits from the attractive colourful art of Élise Plessis. It's a card game where you are using cards from your deck of robot cards to repair cards that represent sabotaged machines.
Each turn you'll have a display of machine cards that show the symbol or number needed to repair them; initially machines will need a pair of symbols or numbers but those requirements increase as higher levels of machine cards come out. You also start each turn with five robot cards, and these each show a number and a symbol.
On your turn you can take repair, trigger and upgrade actions. To repair a machine you need to discard robot cards that match the machine's symbol or number requirement. You need to take at least one successful repair action pretty much every turn or you lose the game. In addition to a repair action tho', you can discard a robot card to trigger the ability indicated by its symbol. The problem is, the actions all start off having no effect! Before you can make use of any of the actions, you need to upgrade them. You do this by taking out of the game one of the machines you've previously repaired. It's increasingly expensive to further upgrade actions but when you do so you make them increasingly powerful.
Cyberion then is a puzzle optimisation game where you are balancing the need always to repair at least one machine while managing and making use of potentially powerful upgrade abilities. It's satisfying to play and has proved addictively engaging with members of the Board's Eye View team but, even tho' it steps ups in difficulty when the Level II machines appear, it's not an overly taxing game. Once you find you are winning most of the time, however, you can add in one or more of the five expansions that come included in the box. Each of these shake the game up and add to its replayability.