Stress Botics
- David Breaker
- 13 minutes ago
- 3 min read
As I prepared to write this review I was very mindful of this quote: 'It's not stress that kills us, it's our reaction to it.' Well, let's dive into the stressful world of Stress Botics! Fernando Barbanoj designed Stress Botics. It's apparently his first board game design. We all have to start somewhere. According to BoardGameGeek, this game comes in at a 4.38 complexity, so it certainly was a heavy start, and wow is that rating accurate! This game is super heavy with lots of rules and things to learn. Just reading the 32-page rulebook was enough to trigger my stress response!
The theme of Stress Botics is a sci-fi adventure in which four easily-stressable robots (known as Beta Bots) are sent to an exoplanet called STR-355 by their corporation Cubebotics Corp® to mine its resources. Once those resources are extracted, the Beta Bots' task is to deliver them to the corporation's ships.
This may seem a simple idea but I can tell you this process is not easy. To start with, the exoplanet is unstable, so the Beta Bots have to adapt to a constantly changing environment. On top of that, each corporation ship requires different resources and each payload delivery requires perfect timing and alignment with the orbiting trajectory of the matching ship. And last but not least the rival corporation Cylindroids Inc® has sent its bots to snatch resources and interfere with your bots...
Mechanically, this game is one of the heaviest euros I have played in years, using a lot of mechanics such as worker placement, action programming, resource generation and management, and contract fulfilment (which also is very tight to achieve) to score points. This sadly leads me to my first and main criticism of Stress Botics. This game is a masterpiece in causing genuine stress for the player. The rules are far too complicated with far too much going on. You need to remember multiple small but impactful rules which are made tenfold worse by the state of the rulebook. It is not the worst rulebook I have seen but fairly high up there for its confusing use of language. The main problem tho' is that the game has far too much going on.
The player aids are shockingly useless because they are all symbol-heavy with little explanation as to what each of those symbols means unless you know the game inside out after multiple plays. We play and enjoy a lot of complex games, like Nucleum (Board&Dice), for example, but in comparison we found this game a chore to play. The game is so convoluted that we didn’t know what we didn’t know to plan for for well over 2/3rds of the game. We felt like we had little to no choice in our actions because we were so unsure what it was we needed to do. As an example, the battery system on your robot relies on you knowing a turn in advance what actions you plan to take on the next turn. This caused us heaps of stress; maybe that was the intent of the designer.
We had no complaints about the quality of this game's production from publishers 2Tomatoes and Token Synapse. Stress Botics has good-quality components, tho' the complexity of the game means you'll need to allocate a fair amount of time setting up all the bits and pieces. The artwork by Pedro A Alberto is good and fits the theme. Tho' the game has top-quality components, the game board is so busy and full of symbols it scared off some prospective players when we set it up at our local board game club,
I hate being this negative about Stress Botics but sadly this game has just not been a fun experience. I'm sure that some people will love the theme and complexity of this game but for me, it was just too much. To go back to my quote regarding stress at the start of the review, my reaction to the stress caused by this game is that I never want to touch it again for fear of popping a blood vessel.
(Review by David Breaker)