Orbs vs Drones Preview – The lesser of two evils?

A prototype copy of Orbs vs Drones was kindly provided by Last Stand Games. All art, components and rules are subject to change. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

Orbs vs Drones is an asymmetric two-player only game. One of you plays the titular Orbs, aliens from somewhere in the great beyond, while the other plays as the Drones, mechanical representatives of the combined forces of the world’s governments. It’s not much of a choice, really, is it?

I get a lot of new game proposals, but the team at Last Stand Games caught my eye. They’re UK folk of a similar age to me, trying to make a dent in the market, and staunchly anti-GenAI. All big pluses to me, before we even mention their commitment to donate 5% of profits towards mental health charities. Fantastic stuff.

As regular readers will know, I love to shine a spotlight on smaller, independent designers and publishers as much as I do the big boys and girls. I said from the very beginning that Punchboard would showcase these games, especially those homegrown games from the UK. It’s very easy to go all dewy-eyed at the latest small-box nonsense from East Asia, because I’m as guilty of it as the next person. But there is some great stuff slipping under the radar from right on your doorstep.

And speaking of things on the radar…

Invasion!

The premise of Orbs vs Drones is pretty simple. The aliens have sent their orbs to our home, our planet, our blue marble. Earth. They want to wipe out the population to build big factories, or farms, or theme parks – I’m not really sure what they want. But they want us gone. By the end of the game, the orbs’ mothership will have arrived and be careening towards our last remaining population centre.

Fear not, however, because we plucky humans have something up our collective sleeves. Drone remote controls!

What follows is an area control game set on a near-future map of the world. The world has, somewhat helpfully, been segmented into hexes, and it’s these hexes that the orbs and drones use to navigate our shores.

The orbs have opened blue portals all over the planet, which they’re using like interdimensional Tube stops to come to Earth. The drones have to try to control and cover all of the portals to win. The orbs have to hold out until Big Bertha (my name for the mothership) arrives and wipes out the last pocket of resistance.

What follows is an asymmetric game of cat and mouse. If you’ve ever seen crows trying to defend their nests from birds of prey, it’s a bit like that. The orbs move fast and direct, but in limited numbers. If they so much as touch a drone, it gets turned into scrap metal and plastic. However, what the drones lack in manoeuvrability and structural integrity, they make up for in numbers. They swarm. If you manage to get two drones on either side of an orb, they kick its sorry ass back to whatever cosmic backwater it came from.

A game? This is war!

The gameplay loop in Orbs vs Drones is super smooth. Orbs move first, and the pointer on the big orb track tells you how many actions you get. Actions let you move the orbs around in long, straight lines or spawn more orbs onto the portals. Drones get to move second, and can use their action points to move a single drone one hex, or spawn more drones all over the world.

Slowly, slowly, catchy monkey.

Both sides get to draw from a shared Media deck after their turns. Cards belonging to their side (orbs or drones) can be played on future turns to the regions they relate to, offering bonus actions at the start of the turn if you control said regions. Cards belonging to the other side can be discarded for bonus actions similar to your standard actions.

So while there’s no real engine-building as such, you can certainly bolster your strength and presence in different parts of the world, and try to lean into that as the game goes on. During the early game, the drones get very few action points, which makes putting a dent in the alien forces really tricky. The orbs get to advance their track quickly if they control lots of parts of the world, which they want to do because once that track limit is hit twice, the mothership lands and starts its slow, inevitable crawl towards our untimely demise.

It’s a really clever build which feels like it’s been honed during a lot of playtesting. No matter how the early game goes, the whole thing builds to a crescendo in the last 20 minutes of the game. The mothership is crawling towards its target, wiping out all craft in its way. The drones are desperately swarming into the distant corners of the world to try to close the last portals. The orbs zip around trying to mop up the flood of drones. It’s pure cinema at that point.

Final thoughts

I went into Orbs vs Drones with zero expectations, and honestly, it really surprised me. Orbs vs Drones might not be the catchiest game name out there, but the gameplay is tight and polished. The presentation throughout is great, and you can easily learn the game from the (not-too-thick) rulebook.

The only real negatives I can mention are the humour and some of the design choices. It’s not to say the humour is bad as such, but there’s some strong political satire in there. There are jabs at Putin and Jeff Bezos to name but a couple, and while I hold neither of them in high regard, it might put some off. It’s best to know ahead of time if sarcasm isn’t your thing. The only other issue was in the colours used in the card backs for two of the three decks. The colour is the only way to distinguish between them, and even for my eyes, I found it hard to tell them apart in a room with warm lighting. Maybe that gets sorted between now and final production, though.

Those minor gripes aside, I had a blast with Orbs vs Drones. It’s quick, it’s easy to pick up, and there is tons of space for tactical play and nuance. I love the way population centres are just off of direct lines from Orb spawns, meaning they need multiple moves to get there. I love the feeling of the growing strength of the drones as the game progresses. It’s just really refreshing to play a new, asymmetric, two-player battle like this. If you enjoy the tug of war of games like Watergate (review here) and Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth (review here), despite the game itself being very different to both, I think you’ll get a kick out of this.

Try something a bit different. See what the UK indie scene is coming up with. Take a look at Orbs vs Drones, and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. I was. Sign up now to be alerted when their campaign goes live towards the end of May.

Pros & Cons