How to play Robot Brawl: Bolt & Blade

The whole game in thirty seconds

Bolt it together

Snap parts onto a core in the BUILD tab. Every part has real mass and a real weld point, and the arena will hold you to both.

Program the brain

Stack behaviours in the PROGRAM tab. In autonomy fights your code drives — you do not touch the controls.

Fight for rank

Climb five career leagues in LEAGUE, then enlist your best machine in the ARENA and take a real rating.

The dock along the bottom of the screen carries six tabs — BUILD, LEAGUE, ROBOTS, SHOP, ARENA and PROGRAM. Tap a tab to open the dock; tap it again to fold it away and get the whole screen back for the robot.

Step one

Bolt it together

Pick a part from the shelf, then tap the robot where you want it. Parts snap to the faces of what is already there — you are welding, not floating things in space.

Three rules, and the game checks them in this order

1. At least one wheel. A machine with nothing to drive on cannot be entered.
2. An engine or a battery. Something has to supply power.
3. Nothing floating. Every part must be flush with another — faces touch, sockets mate. The game names the offending part.

That is the whole legality test. There is no credit limit on a build — what actually constrains you in a career is the parts you own: place the last one you have and the shelf reads zero until you buy more.

Mass is the whole design problem

The bar above the dock reads out your mass and part count as you build. Mass decides which weight class you land in, and a class is not a difficulty setting — it is who you are allowed to fight. A heavier machine hits harder and is harder to shove, and it also has to beat other heavy machines.

Top-heavy tips over. Nose-heavy digs in. None of that is scripted; it falls out of where you welded things.

The gusset is the part new players skip and shouldn't

A gusset is a weld kit. Apply one to a joint and that seam becomes four times harder to tear apart, for +10 kg and one gusset from your stock. It reinforces one joint, not the whole part — so the question is never "should I gusset this robot", it is "which single seam loses me the fight when it goes". Usually that is the one carrying your weapon.

The parts shelf

Every part in the game, in the five categories the shelf groups them by. Tap one to turn it over — these are the real models, rendered from the same recipe the game draws them with.

Loading the parts catalogue…

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Drag to turn a part. Sizes are in metres, as the game stores them.

Materials, and the trade you are actually making

Every placement carries its own material — a steel beam and an aluminium beam are the same part with different physics. Heavier alloys survive more and cost you more — in scrap at the shop, and in the weight class you end up in.

Material	Reads as	Typically used for
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Rubber is the tyre compound and is not a structural choice — the wheel picks it for you.

Step two

Program the brain

A program is a stack of hats. Each hat has a WHEN — the situation it is for — and a short body of moves. Every tick the robot runs the topmost hat whose WHEN is true. That one rule is the whole language: put safety at the top, and it interrupts whatever was happening below it.

The program every new career starts with

This is First Steps, shipped with the game. It needs no sensors at all — it runs on the parts you are given.

CHARGEWHEN always

FOREVER
MOVE forward at 70% for 1.2 s
TURN right at 60% for 0.5 s
END

Drive, turn, repeat — a ram-bot that never stops moving. It is not clever and it beats a surprising number of things.

What a real program looks like once you own a sensor

Order is priority. The wall hat sits on top because being pinned against a wall loses fights faster than anything you could be doing instead.

WALL!WHEN wall distance < 1.2 m

MOVE AWAY FROM wall at 80%

Safety first, and the top hat always wins. Needs a wall sensor.

ATTACKWHEN enemy is near

WEAPON on
MOVE TOWARD enemy at 90%

Needs a compass tracker — without one the robot has no idea where the enemy is, and this block cannot be placed.

HUNTWHEN always

FOREVER
MOVE forward at 70% for 1 s
TURN right at 60% for 0.5 s
END

The fallback. Something must always be true at the bottom of the stack, or the robot stands still.

Sensors are what unlock blocks

You cannot ask a question your robot has no instrument for. Bolt the sensor on in BUILD (buy it in SHOP first if you don't own one) and the matching blocks light up.

Sensor	What it lets you ask
Compass tracker	How far away the enemy is, and what bearing it is on — and it is what lets you say `MOVE TOWARD enemy` at all
Wall sensor	How close the arena wall is
Trap sensor	Whether a hazard is near, and how far to the nearest live one
Rangefinder	Whether the beam is hitting anything, and whether what it hit is the enemy
Tilt sensor	How far off level you are, and whether you have been flipped
Damage bus	Your hit points, your power, whether you were hit recently, and how many parts you have lost

A program can hold up to 12 hats, 64 blocks, and 3 conditions per WHEN — enough for behaviour that is genuinely hard to beat.

The verbs

MOVE forward or back · TURN left or right · TURN BY a number of degrees · MOVE TOWARD / AWAY FROM the enemy, a wall or a trap · FACE your front, back or a side to something · WEAPON on or off · WAIT · REPEAT n times · FOREVER · IF / ELSE.

A move with a duration blocks until it finishes. A move without one is a setting that keeps holding until something changes it — which is how a hat can hand over cleanly to the hat above it.

Step three

Win the five career leagues

Each league has its own arena and its own weight cap. SCOUT an opponent before you take the contest — you get to see what you are about to fight, and a design that beats one machine loses badly to another.

#	League	Arena	Weight cap
1	Scrapyard Open	The Yard	1500 kg
2	Garage League	The Loading Dock	2000 kg
3	Regional Circuit	The Sawmill	2800 kg
4	National Series	The Press	4000 kg
5	World Championship	The Crucible	5500 kg

Winning pays scrap, which is the only currency — spend it in SHOP on parts and materials. Every purchase is a design commitment, so buy the sensor that unlocks the behaviour you actually want before you buy a bigger blade.

You can fight manually or hand the match to your program. Manual teaches you what your machine can physically do; autonomy is what the online ladder runs.

Throw it out and the fight is over

A machine that leaves the arena — flung over the barrier or dropped off the floor — loses on the spot. Not on a count, not at the final bell: the referee stops the match the instant it is gone. It cuts both ways, so a flipper that launches itself is just as finished, and if both machines go at once it is a draw.

That makes a lifting wedge a real alternative to a weapon. You do not have to out-damage a spinner if you can get under it once — which is the throw in the clip on the front page.

Step four

The online arena

When a machine is good enough, save it in ROBOTS and ENLIST it from the ARENA tab. From then on it has a rating and a weight class, and it fights other players' real builds.

Your class is your mass, and nothing else

Not your size, not your part count, not what you paid. The game puts you in the smallest class your mass fits into — so shedding a few kilograms can drop you a whole division, and adding a plate can lift you into one you are not ready for.

Ranked fights are refereed on our servers

Not on your phone and not on your opponent's. Everyone gets the same physics, nobody's device is the judge, and every ranked match leaves a replay you can watch back to see exactly which joint failed and when.

Class	Up to	Reads as
Featherweight	1500 kg	Quick, fragile, wins on placement
Lightweight	2000 kg	The first class that can carry real armour
Middleweight	2800 kg	Weapon and armour, without picking one
Heavyweight	4000 kg	Hard to move, harder to break
Super-heavy	5500 kg	The top of the ladder, and the slowest

Ratings run in seasons. See who is on top right now on the live leaderboard, or turn this season's champions over in 3D on the champions page.

Six things that trip people up

"It won't let me fight"

The build is failing one of the three rules. The game tells you which one, in words, at the top of the screen.

Needs at least 1 wheel.

A part looks attached but isn't

Faces have to be flush and sockets have to mate. A part resting near another is not welded to it, and the game will name the loose one.

Structure has floating parts — Beam isn't flush with anything.

The robot stands still in an autonomy fight

No hat's WHEN was true. Keep one hat at the bottom of the stack set to WHEN always — that is your fallback behaviour.

A safety hat never seems to fire

It is below something that is also true. The topmost true hat wins, so drag the safety one to the top of the list.

The block you want is greyed out

It needs a sensor you have not bolted on. Buy it in SHOP, weld it in BUILD, and it appears — the canvas even tells you which one is missing.

The weapon keeps falling off

The seam carrying it is breaking before the weapon does. Gusset that one joint — four times the strength for ten kilograms is a good trade on the joint that decides the match.