Roblins!
- Board's Eye View
- Mar 28
- 3 min read
No, it's not a misprint. Those are goblins on the box but the name of the game is Roblins! not Goblins. The rationale is in the premise: this is a two-player tower-defence-style tile laying and combat game between two rival goblin clans primarily intent on robbing each other's treasure hordes. The game is designed by Peter Tillisch and published by Baroque Games.
Roblins! is played using hexagonal tiles. Players each have their own pile of treasure cards with three road connections leading off them. To win, you need to deplete your opponent's treasure horde before your own runs out. Players each start off with one terrain tile, two basic goblins and three or four coins in hand. On your turn you get to draw a total of three tiles from the draw decks of terrain, unit or special unit tiles. These go to your hand but to bring any of the tiles into play you need to pay that tile's gold cost in coins. Treasure cards show a value in coins but you can also trade in any three other cards for one coin.
Most of the terrain tiles have a defence value, either draining an attacker's hit points or requiring an attacker to pay a toll. Any goblins you place out at the end of a road as defenders will also soak up attacker's hit points. To protect your treasure horde from attack, you'll try to build strong defences. To raid your opponent's treasure horde and rob them of any of their coin tiles, you'll need to assemble a force whose hit points exceed those along your path of attack and who have the carrying capacity for the tiles you want to steal: your basic starting goblins, for example, only have a carrying capacity of half a tile, so you'd need to get two of them through all the defences before you could rob your opponent of just one treasure tile.
There's no limit on hand size, so at the start of the game players will inevitably mostly just be picking up tiles with the expectation that they'll need to trade most of them in on a future turn for their low coin equivalent. This means that the majority of games will start off with a slow build up. Until you recruit more goblin units there's not much point launching an attack because even if you got one basic goblin through they won't have the carrying capacity to draw any benefit. A few turns in tho', players will increasingly have added to their defensive capacity and/or built a force that's strong enough to break through and carry away some loot. When you do succeed in robbing your opponent, the coins you steal don't just deplete their horde but they are also available to you to spend on a subsequent turn.
The units in your goblin reserve are open information, so you'll want to keep an eye on what units your opponent has recruited and take account of that knowledge in your own deployment. For example, if your opponent has recruited mountain goblins that take one less damage from mountain terrain tiles, then you'll probably not want to place out any more tiles using that terrain.
There are some tactical choices to be made too. It can seem painfully expensive paying to add support cards early in the game but these can give you an ongoing advantage, albeit one that will take several turns before it pays its way. For example, adding a Cartographer support unit will cost you 4 coins but will let you draw an additional terrain tile every turn. Since terrain tiles can be traded in at a value of one third of a coin each, it will be 12 turns before the Cartographer will have paid for itself; tho' you may well profit before that from the additional choice of tiles. There's more of a push-your-luck dilemma over whether or not to make use of the Banker support unit. That gives you the option of drawing a card each turn from your own treasure horde: great for giving you earlier access to recruiting more powerful units but at the cost of running down your horde...
Most of our plays of Roblins! at Board's Eye View have run to around 30 minutes. And tho' it's a light tongue-in-cheek game, Roblins! offers players enough tactical choices to keep things interesting and for players to want to come back for more. The game is due to launch soon on Gamefound. Click here to follow the campaign.