Nanobot Battle Arena is a game where the goal is to finish the game with more nanobots in play than any other player. This is done by playing nanobots, and by using a hand of cards that contain different abilities. These powers include things such as permanently destroying enemy nanobots and laying down one or more of your own, or replacing an opponent’s with one of yours. The game ends when one player has no more nanobots to put into play.
The game is relatively easy to play, but the rules can be somewhat difficult to decipher through the rather long-winded rulebook. Each player can play one nanobot per turn and use one card per turn. The nanobots also have an affinity which affects the cards they play. If you’re red and you play a red card, it gains +1 effectiveness, but if you aren’t and you try to play a red card on red, it gets -1 effectiveness. This was poorly described in particular in the rules, and we were initially under the impression that each color could use these abilities once per turn without a card. This led to an entire game of green placing down two bots per turn, which almost certainly contributed to their (surprisingly) narrow victory.
Overall, however, once we did figure out how play worked, it was a surprisingly strategic game. In the end, it came to a tie between red and green, and green won thanks to the tiebreaker rule.