I don’t know League of Legends and I never have, so this got bought purely on word of mouth about the box, and the box is, genuinely, the best-produced thing on my shelf. Sealed mission envelopes you don’t open until you’re ready, real plastic mechs that snap together, a rulebook that teaches itself scenario by scenario instead of front-loading every rule on day one. I taught this to two people who had never touched a programming game before and had the first mission running in about fifteen minutes, and that’s a real teachability win, most games this component-heavy make you dread the first setup, not this one.

The programming itself, plotting five moves in advance and watching your careful plan collide with your teammate’s equally careful plan, is the actual game, and it’s a lighter version of RoboRally’s chaos with a co-op layer bolted on, which some reviewers find takes the sting out of the original’s chaos and others, myself included, appreciate as the more approachable version. It’s not a difficult game once you understand the shapes of the pieces, and the icons on the action cards read clean from across the table, no squinting required, which matters more than people give it credit for in a game this fiddly to set up.

Where the shine wears off, and I felt this by the fourth mission, is the ceiling. Ten scenarios, a fixed campaign, and once you’ve run through them the game doesn’t obviously ask you to come back the way something with a deeper card pool would. It’s a phenomenal one-time experience I’d recommend to almost anyone regardless of theme buy-in, but I understand why some owners quietly retire it to the shelf once the campaign’s done. Four stars, mostly earned by the production and the onboarding, with the longevity question left honestly unresolved.