Robot Rising

The AI takeover is upon us. It's as bad as we feared. Robot Rising is a solo deck-building game where you must program the bots (cards) in your hand to quell the AI takeover. Each turn, new bots may join the uprising, making it more difficult to regain control. Use Config Settings to maintain your bot population, keep your Code clean to avoid compromising CPUs, and Install USBs with data patches to regain control of mutinous bots. Can you find a way to keep the robots from rising to power? Humankind depends on it... Your objective is to regain control of all the bot cards in the Uprising deck to quell the rebellion before the bots compromise ten CPU chips and take control of the world. Each bot card in Robot Rising has a helpful ability when you control the bot, and a separately harmful effect when the bot instead joins the uprising. The game is played in rounds until you've either defeated all bots in the uprising or the bots have hacked all your CPU control. Each round, you start by rolling a die - the Bot Roll - any card in the population with a matching value will join the uprising, and is another bot you will have to regain control of in order to win. Next, the active bots in the uprising take actions based on the bottom of the card. After the uprising bots have finished their turn, you may use the bots in your control to fight back. You can Code lines (improve your health), Install patches in uprising bots (each bot requires a certain amount of USBs before falling), gain Configuration Settings (the game's currency), and lots more! At the conclusion of each turn, you may acquire bots from the population if you have adequate Config to do so. Robot Rising was designed for the 2021 54-Card Game Design Contest on BGG