Cyber Pet Quest is a cooperative boss-battler campaign game.  This game was on Kickstarter back in April 2024, and it promised delivery in October 2024.  My copy arrived late October just before Halloween, so it arrived right on time!  Congratulations to Dead Alive Games for shipping on time!  

My version is the deluxe version with lots of little Kickstarter extras (see above).  

This is a smallish game, but it still has a 6+ chapter campaign game contained therein!

Let’s take a look!

Unboxing

This is a small game: see the can of Coke for perspective.

Yet, there’s quite a bit crammed into this box!! See above!  So, what is this game all about?

Players each take the role of the cyber pets (above, left-to-right): Roman the Canadian Goose, Clay the Australian Cattle Dog, Freya the North American Racoon, and Jane the Bionic Cat!  

You can choose to pick up the pet minis, but I prefer the wooden meeples that come with the game (much like Run Run Run! from a few weeks ago!)  Wooden meeples for the win!

Players embark on a 6+ campaign (starting with chapter 0 to get you acclimated) working together to find their master!  The campaign is all documented in the little book that comes with the game.  It’s a tiny but long (at 108 pages) book describing the rules and the campaign.

Each cyber pet is actually quite different!  The cards (above) describe the differences: how many Dodge dice, how many hit points, what actions you can take and their costs, and their special powers!  If you look closely, you can see that each pet is very different than the others!

For example, see above for the Actions of Freya with their cost!

Each cyber pet gets a nice dual-layered board for marking energy, luck, hot points, and “sneak status”.

On a cyber pet’s turn, it is either sneaking (metal name token above turned upside down) or in AGGRO mode.  When sneaking, most things cost more energy (except for healing which is cheaper) and that pet can’t attack!  When the pet has the AGGRO token (bigger metal token), it may attack … but the bad guys are naturally drawn to it AND it takes one more damage from them!  Choosing when to sneak and AGGRO is an important strategic part of the game!

There are bad guys to fight: this is a boss-battler after all!  The bad guys are the red, green, blue, yellow and BIG BOSS pink meeples! See above!

You generally have 4 CyMS (Cyber-Memetic Sociopaths) … these are generally “the minions” of the big bad boss.  See above as we choose 4 for the start of the game!  (That dual layer board with the CyMS is the top of the box. …. what??)

Each Chapter on the campaign happens in a group of Location cards: See above for the apartment (where the cyber pets live and start on space 1).

Each Location generally has some items of interest (like the Massage chair) where you have to “interact” or “look at it” to activate it!

Once the cyber pets get comfortable with the mechanics of the game (chapter 0), the CyMS come out!  See above as the cyber pets try to get out of the apartment with the CyMS chasing them!

Over the course of the game, you get many things to help you in your quest to find your master!  Sometimes you get Items like above (which are one shots) …

Or you may get extra powers that help you! See above as Roman gets a Level 2 power!

There’s also “Charms” which are permanent items that are usually powered by the “luck” resource.

Finally, each cyber pet levels up as they get further into the campaign See above as Roman is on Level 3 … which influences his hit points, powers, and actions!  

At the end of most chapters, the pets get some kind of upgrade, and usually it’s a choice!  Level up the character card?  Get a charm?  Get one of two powers?  The pets really do feel like they get better as you play!

This is a boss-battler, so there will be big-bad bosses that you fight long the way!  See above for the bosses you may encounter!!  The story has a few turns along the way, so you may not see all the bosses on your first play-through!

In the end, the components are a little small so they can fit in the smaller box, but they are all well-labelled and very readable  I have played through at least one full campaign, and I never had a problem with the smaller components: they are quite nice for this little game.  The theme is a bit odd with cyber pets.  And the game is surprisingly small.  So, this is an odd little duck of a game! (EDITOR: maybe better said, this is an odd little goose … since Roman is a GOOSE not a duck …)

Rulebook and Campaign Book

The rules and campaign are all found in this little spiral bound notebook of about 108 pages (yes, 108 pages!).  See the Coke can above for perspective: I wanted to point out how little the rulebook is!

This is about a B or B- on the Chair Test: I can leave the rulebook open on the chair next to me while I am playing , but the form factor is just a little too small; the font is just a little too small to be well-readable.  Since the spiral notebook stays open, we leave the grade in the “B” region, as it is still very usable.

Now, the rulebook doesn’t have an index or glossary (booo!), but it does have a nice Table of Content (see above).

The rulebook is replete with Story! It starts off with a nice intro (see above), and continues a story (I should hope so with 108 pages of rules and campaign!).  

Although there are pictures of most of the major components, there are aren’t a lot of pictures of set-up except the one above.  There were MANY MANY time where the rules referred to some component, and I just had to guess which it was (I found the sleeper components, I think I found the Horde token, but I never found the Hack tokens).

The rules were okay.  There were a lot of time when I really wish there had been further elaborations of some of the rules.   Many times, I just make the best call I could knowing the basics of the game.

There’s a lot of cute story here, the rules are pretty good at getting us going, but there were just too many times when things were underspecified (which token? Explain this rule please?) so I can’t call this this a good rulebook.  

It was adequate to pretty good.  I was able to play the game and move forward quickly most of the time.

Solo Rules

So, Cyber Pet Quest does support solo play!  (Thank you for following Saunders’ Law!)

Unfortunately, the solo mode for Cyber Pet Quest is “play and operate all 4 Cyper Pets!”  In fact, at any player count, all 4 Cyber Pets must be in the game at the same time!  

Some of you might remember Set A Watch: Forsaken Isles from earlier this year: it’s solo mode also has the players operate all four characters at the same time!  See above!  

It’s not that uncommon to have the solo gamer play all four characters: recall that both X-Men: Heroes Resistance and Marvel Zombies: Hero Resistance also have the solo player play all four positions! See above.

In Set A Watch, although we initially had our reservations about the 4-character solo mode, it really grew on us and became the default way we played the campaign game Set A Watch: Doomed Run!  See above.  This is because the Set A Watch characters are simple enough that it’s not too much work to context switch between them. 

Marvel Zombies: Heroes Resistance is harder to play solo with 4 characters because the characters get more and more complicated as the game goes on.

Cyber Pet Quest sits somewhere between Marvel Zombies: Heroes Resistance and Set A Watch.  At the beginning of the campaign, it’s pretty easy to context switch between the Cyber Pet characters as they don’t have too many powers, items, charms or actions.  So, the initial games are easier to play.  But later in the campaign, after each character has levelled-up significantly, each character has a wide array of Powers! Charms!  Actions!  Each character gets MUCH harder to play, as there so much to do!  

See above as the characters have so many cards in the final game: Powers, Charms, Items!!!  I admit, the sheer amount of options for each character does get overwhelming … BUT … as the solo player, I have been playing and upgrading the characters by myself!  It’s gratifying to see all the characters get better.  I think since they have been levelling up gradually (between campaigns), it doesn’t feel that bad.  I think it’s actually harder in Marvel Zombies: Heroes’ Resistance to deal with the powers creep as the characters go up quickly in the same game!  At least with Cyber Pet Quest, you have a chance to become familiar with the new powers/abilities between games.

Still, there is a lot of context switching between characters as you play.  I can recommend playing the first Chapter 0 solo to see if you think you can handle this 4 character solo mode;  even if you don’t like this solo mode, the Chapter 0 solo mode makes it easy to learn the base mechanics to teach your friends.

I have to say, despite the complexity of the 4-character solo game, I had fun!  I found myself playing through the entire 6+ campaign game in a solo mode last weekend!  Wait, what??  It so easy to play each game, it was fun to level-up, it was interesting to see what happened next.  I must admit, I am a little surprised I ended up playing the entire campaign solo last weekend!  But I was having fun!  And the fact that each chapter is under an hour contributed to that.

Cooperative Play

Cooperative mode is a little bit more fun than solo mode: for one, you have more people controlling the 4 Cyber Pets!  Above, Teresa and I split up the Cyber Pets so that she was operating two (Roman and Freya) and I was operating two (Jane and Clay).  I do think it’s interesting that we got very invested in our characters; so much so that we really did know them by name!

This is a light cooperative campaign, where cooperation seemed to happen pretty naturally.  Clay was VERY good at taking out the CyMS, while Freya was VERY good at dealing with items and passing them around.  Jane was the mover, getting to far-away stuff and distracting the CyMS.  And finally good old Roman was good at doing a little bit of everything!  We focused on each pet’s strengths and naturally felt empowered and potent as we moved around the apartment.

The game is light and fun!  I suppose the best recommendations we can give this game is 

 1) I am playing it again cooperatively EVEN though I have already gone through the entire campaign!
 2) We are planning to play more games (cooperatively) in the future

In a family situation, I can see this “4 characters” working out okay! Maybe give the “favorite” character to the little ones (Teresa really liked Roman, so she got Roman), but they can still give input as how the rest of the pets work.  In other words, assign the pets in the way that brings the kidlets in the most!  And the “adults” can just make sure the game stays on track!

What I Liked

Game Length: Even though this is a campaign game, I like that each chapter feels “doable” in under an hour. The game box says the game is 30-45 minutes and that’s about right! (Oh! And you can jump into any single game of the campaign if you want a one-shot! There’s a nice page that describes “get theses upgrades for set-up if you just want to play a single session!”)

Sense of Humor:  This game is kind of light and fluffy; it has a sense of humor!  See above as one of the cards is Red Dog Energy!  And there is a Cat Videos on the Internet item as well!  This is a campaign game, but it’s light enough that the game never feels “overwhelming”.  It just kind of fun.

Readable: I was very worried, since this game was so small, that the components would suffer readability issues.  Although I wish the rulebook was bigger, in general, everything was readable at the small size!

Story: The story is quite cute and keeps you in the game.  It’s a light story, but still engaging.

Upgrades:  At the end of each chapter, there are SO MANY ways you can get upgrades! Charms! Powers! Levelling-Up!  And you get choices: Level 1 or Level 2?  Side A or Side B? It feels really great to be moving foward and making so many choices!  We saw a lot of this same feeling in Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders from a few weeks ago!

Cooperation: There were a number of mechanisms in the game that encouraged cooperation.  The Pet Collars that you got in the very beginning allowed Cyber Pets to do extra stuff, but only if they were close to other pets!  This made for interesting tensions!  And many times, there were things to interact with that required TWO cyber pets in the same round to do something!  I liked that! It felt like the pets were cooperating to get stuff done!

What I Didn’t Like

Underspecified: As the campaign gets further and further along, it feels like there are more and more places where the game needs a little more elaboration/specification. The final villain you fight has some real questions about how to operate him (Do you round up or down when you halve? How many hit points does he have?), and these kind of questions came up more than they should have during the game. As an experienced gamer, I know when to just make a ruling and move on. But I worry a family-friendly game like this might cause problems for families that aren’t as comfortable with under-specificity. Caveat Emptor.

4-Character Solo Mode: Although I had fun playing the solo mode, the fact that you always have to have all 4 Cyber Pets in play isn’t ideal. I made it work, I had fun, but it’s hard to recommend the solo mode with a 4-character mode.

Left-To-Right:  Every set of Locations had the Cyber Pets move left to right.  The topology was fixed in a straight line, and the pets almost always had to move all the way to the right from the left.  Although this kept a lot of rules simple (with the AGGRO token and CyMS movement), it felt a little “constricting” that every single Location set “moved left-to-right”.  It got a little tedious ALWAYS going left-to-right; I wish there had been some more topology to move around in.  And I am tired of saying left-to-right.

Turn Order

The gameplay for Cyber Pet Quest has something of interest from turn order perspective:  the game play alternates between pets and CyMS!  It’s still variable, as you don’t know which pet is coming out or which CyMS is coming out, but it keeps the game balanced between the two!  Recall we have discussed Variable Player Turn Order many times here at CO-OP Gestalt (see here for a culmination of that discussion)!  The solution that Cyber Pet Quest employs against the problems of Variable Turn Order is the same as one from Adventure Tactics: Adventures in Alchemy: the Static Initiative Invariant.  Basically, this just means we alternate between Heroes and Villains.

Now, I have to admit, even though I do like this solution overall, I was worried it might still be a little too random.   But, I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the game introduce Charms and Powers and Items that would mitigate some of that randomness!  See above as the Honk and Bonk Charm gives the pet some agency over turn order! As the game goes on, and the players become more powerful, they CAN affect the turn order!

So, I was happy to see both Static Initiative Invariant here as well as Power/Charms/Items to help the players control the turn order! 

Conclusion

I like Cyber Pet Quest. I really didn’t expect to go through the entire campaign solo this last weekend, but I had so much fun playing, I went ahead and finished it! I like heavy campaign games like Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders (from a few weeks ago), but sometimes it’s nice to have a light campaign game (like Cyber Pets Quest) that feels “finishable”: there’s only 6+ chapters to this game, and you can do it in a weekend! I am living proof!

There’s just enough wonkiness with the rulebook being underspecified that I worry non-gamers might get frustrated with the rules.  Although there’s a lot of unique and interesting set-ups and interactions in the game, sometimes they aren’t that well-specified.  Just be aware that you might have to make some rule judgements in order to move forward.  

I think this game is better as a cooperative game, since it’s just easier to share control all four cyber pets with more players.  But I still quite enjoyed the 4-character mode; but you have to be aware what you are getting into with all the extra context switching!

This is a fun little cooperative boss-battler for 1-4 players; it has a cute story and a light vibe that’s quite enjoyable. I’d give it a 7/10 overall: it loses some points for some of the rules wonkiness and limited left-to-right topology, but Cyber Pets Quest was an overall enjoyable experience!