Move over whatever held the King of Overproduced Games title before this, Mechs vs. Minions is stupid in the best way with what it puts in the box, real minis, real terrain, a rulebook that’s actually a comic. My group is about halfway through the ten-mission campaign and the production hasn’t stopped earning its keep once.
Here’s the honest part. The game almost lives up to the components and almost is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The action-programming core, where you’re queueing commands for your mech a few turns ahead and watching the plan survive contact with minions doing something you didn’t predict, is genuinely clever the first several missions, streamlined and fast-flowing in a way action programming games don’t always manage. But it can drag when the randomness spikes against a plan you spent real time building, and packing everything back into that insert after a session is its own small chore nobody warns you about going in.
I don’t love programming games as a genre going in, the disconnect between planning and execution usually loses me, but the story campaign here was fun enough and the production carried it far enough that we played the whole thing through before I’d normally have bailed on a mechanic I’m lukewarm on. That’s a real compliment even if it sounds backhanded.
Worth knowing before you commit shelf space: this wants three to four players to really sing, and it’s a one-and-done campaign game more than a forever game, once you’ve beaten all ten missions there isn’t a strong pull to run it back.