Racing Robots – Into the Machine Review

There’s something to be said for a game where you’re not chasing the usual points to win the game. Where you’re just doing something and hoping you’ll win the game.

Of course, a good game won’t have you hoping. It will instead let you actively work towards that goal.

But it’s nice not to care about points at all, at least sometimes.

Basically all racing games are like that, and Into the Machine is a racing game at heart, though it is also an engine-builder!

Of sorts.

Into the Machine was designed by Kasper Lapp with artwork by Len H. Nicholas. It was published by Alderac Entertainment Group in 2026, or at least that’s when the Kickstarter fulfilled.

Quick story about how I got this, as it ended up being a gift by Alderac in exchange for an honest review, but it didn’t start out that way.

Instead, I did the Into the Machine Kickstarter solely for the expansion content for Smash Up, War Chest, and a mini-expansion for Space Base.

The description of Into the Machine didn’t entice me to actually want to spend money on it.

However, when the Kickstarter fulfilled and I got my expansions, I also got another box with Into the Machine in it.

I messaged them about it, saying I’d be willing to pay for it, ship it back (if they paid for shipping), or consider it a review copy since I do a boardgame review blog.

They said to keep it as a review copy, so essentially that’s what this is.

Now that I’ve played it a few times, what are my thoughts?

That’s what this review is about.

I wasn’t thinking much about this game, but when bringing it out onto the table, things changed a bit.

This is a game about robots who have been toiling all day, and when it’s time to stop for the day (do robots really stop, ever, other than for maintenance maybe?), decide to do a race to have fun rather than just go back to their recharging stations or something.

Some of these robots not only go racing, but try to upgrade themselves to make themselves better workers (or just winners of the race), which is kind of frightening when you think about it.

However, this is robot leisure time, so just go with it and see what you think.

When I say engine-building, that’s because you start with a set of different types of robots, and you will have action selection areas to place them on in order to either gain more robots or move some of your racing robots in the machine (which is at the top of the board and can be seen in the above picture), or maybe upgrade those.

You are essentially placing circular robots in the machine to race to one side, convert them into hexagonal robots, and race them back to the starting line.

You do this by placing circular, triangular, or square robots into essentially worker placement areas in order to do certain actions.

These actions can consist of everything from gaining new circular workers, to placing circular bots into the machine track, to maybe upgrading one of your machine bots into a better worker.

Each row on the board has certain action types on them.

They are not distributed randomly around the board, but within their own row.

So the top row actions are always the top row actions, but just maybe in a different order.

The top row can have any shape of bot (circular, triangular, square) sent there. The middle row can’t have circular ones, while the bottom row can only have square bots.

In essence, this is an engine-building race game because you need to create the bots that will let you do those stronger actions toward the bottom of the board.

Circular robots only won’t cut it.

But you also need to race your circular bots in the machine to the right side, converting them to hexagonal bots, and have the hexagonal bots race back.

You can’t win if you don’t do that.

Upgrading your bots to make them better workers will also remove bots from the Machine, so it’s almost a push-pull on when you do it.

Not to mention the fact that it’s only the spaces closer to hexagonal bot conversion where you can convert to a powerful square bot, though bots less further along still can convert to triangular bots.

You may have spent a lot of time moving that bot just to make it so you can convert it into a powerful worker, removing it from the track.

What helps in doing this is that, not only do you do a worker placement action on your turn, but you can play one of your cards as well.

The cards, for the most part, just basically give you a second action, as most of them mirror the actions on the board (except one, which I’ll mention in a moment).

What’s really cool about the worker placement aspect of the game is that no place is blocked to you, at least not in the normal way.

Instead, when you place a bot in an action space, that makes it more expensive for others (or even yourself!) to go there in the future.

You have to place a stack of bots (any bot that can go there, so square bots can fill in for triangular bots, etc) with one more bot than the highest stack that’s already there.

If you are running out of bots, or you just don’t have any actions that you can afford or want to do, you can take a Return action, which brings all of your bots back along with giving you a new circlebot.

This may (or may not) make spaces less expensive for other players, so they may thank you.

As mentioned above, there is one type of card that will actually let you ignore this restriction, placing one bot even if there are huge stacks in the space.

The bottom part of the card on the left will let you do that.

The other cool aspect of the worker placement system is the joint spaces.

You can keep going to an action space, even if you’ve already gone there, as long as you have enough bots.

But once you’ve done two actions that are connected by a joint space, you can place one bot in that joint space to do both connected actions.

You can only do this once for each joint space, but it can be incredibly powerful.

What’s even cooler is that some of these joint spaces, like shown above, will let you use a lowly circlebot to do two square actions.

Amazing!

Ultimately, you are trying to get your hexagonal bots back to the starting line in the machine in order to win the race.

If one player gets two bots there before anybody else gets one, they win immediately.

Assuming that doesn’t happen (and it did happen once in our games!), the first person to get three bots past the finish line is the winner.

I was really impressed by this game even though I didn’t think I would care for it when the Kickstarter first came out.

The combination of engine-building and racing is quite delicious as you are trying to gauge when you need to stop building your engine and actually try to win the damned race.

If everybody is spending too much time on their engine, that’s when you get somebody sneaking two hexbots onto the winner’s platform and winning the game outright that way.

Moving in the machine has some interesting aspects too, because no two bots can occupy the same spot, no matter which direction they’re going.

So when you “move 3 spaces” (like the above action), you then bump up into the next unoccupied space if there are bots already in that third space.

That can be a big move!

Most other move actions only count empty spaces, so a Move 2 spaces action could move you 7 or 8 if there is a long line of connected bots in front of you.

Part of the strategy is lining things up so you have a huge move rather than moving one or two piddly spaces.

If the red player chose a Move 2 action, it would move to the right 5 spaces because those are the open spaces that you count.

The conceit behind this game is actually a neat idea, even if as a theme it really makes no sense (robots don’t need leisure time!)

It plays 5 players comfortably, with the only change being the track is bigger. There are no different action selection spots, and it does so in a reasonable amount of time.

It doesn’t overstay its welcome.

It sure seems like a random game, though, right?

Kind of, but actually not as much as you might think.

The action spaces are randomized within each row, but that’s only 4-5 different spaces for them.

It’s not like any action can be anywhere on the board.

The cards give you an extra action each turn (if you have them), which does add to the randomness, but not that much.

The action selection/worker placement mechanism, and how you are never totally blocked from a space as long as you have the bots to pay for them, really makes this game shine.

If you see this one in the wild and get a chance to play it, give it a shot.

The description didn’t sell me on it, but the gameplay definitely did.

Of course, if I were a robot in need of leisure time, I’d write a boardgame blog about my fellow worker robots rather than do something like running a race.

But that’s just me.

(This review was written after 3 plays, and as mentioned above, this was a complimentary copy given in exchange for an honest review)