Rise of the Combiners Thoughts

Link to the RotC spoiler list, for reference.

My friend Jason came down last weekend and we opened up four boxes of Rise of the Combiners. We played a whole lot of sealed, most of it incorrectly, so hopefully you can not only learn from our mistakes but glean something from the other thoughts.

First; it's more expensive.

In Wave 1, you could open two or three boosters per player and just play the game. This is particularly helpful when wanting to teach someone, because the threshold of complexity wasn't that high.

Since the Transformers game has players go through their deck rapidly, they get to see the cards over and over. Familiarity is a good thing when teaching a game.

To play sealed in RotC, you need to open five booster packs, and then build a deck of twenty five battle cards.

This is because there are so many 'dead' cards. The enigmas, for example; not a single one of them is playable in sealed and since it only has green icons on it, that card needs to be eliminated from the deck. In every game, it was easy to immediately cut anywhere from 3 to 5 cards, right off the bat-there isn't a situation where they can or should even be considered. This isn't a great look for Sealed.

On top of that, players now have to build decks. That increases the difficulty when trying to teach people how to play. It isn't insurmountable and almost all CCGs have this quality but it's different than Wave 1 and that isn't a good thing.

Unfortunately, it took Jason and I a box and a half to figure out how we should be building decks. This is likely our fault but I'm glad we figured it out. Our games of sealed became much, much more entertaining after that.

Second; the gameplay has become more deliberate. Green icons are extremely useful, and the new keywords of Brave and Stealth mean that there's a little bit of a pushback from the Wave 1 gameplay of 'smash those robots together!'.

That's not a bad thing: it's easy to understand what the new keywords do and the green icons encourage players to pause and evaluate what's in their scrap pile. This slows down the game, nudging players into thinking out lines of play.

So far, though, Rise of the Combiners hasn't amped the complexity up so high that the "smash robots together" feel is lost altogether, and that's also a good thing. When a turn based game takes about thirty minutes, it's important that players don't get bored waiting for their opponents to do something and Rise of the Combiners still felt brisk enough that I was analyzing things and engaged, not waiting around.

Finally, a word about the art. The battle cards can vary: drawing from decades worth of comic lore might save money on art assets but it can also mean a wild swing in quality, style, or tone between cards. That's not a dealbreaker for me but it is worth pointing out.

The quality of the character card artwork, however, is worth a special mention: These characters look amazing both in robot and alt mode. They are super cool and are great modernizations of classic characters.