odd Robots

For several decades I have been fascinated with games that directly reflect their constituent physical parts. How can mechanics and rules, systems, coexist cozily with how pieces and how can the pieces be part of the system? This started with a Lego based game and now I am noodling around with a Cairn/Mausritter variant: modular robots. This quixotic task, or at least the recent iteration, started a week or so ago.

I bought Micro Circuits, and it wasn't what I imagined it to be. Seems much more like human-in-robot-costume kind of game, which is not a bad thing, just not as deep a dive as I was looking for. What I think I was imagining was a system where the nature of being a robot allowed the characters to mechanically take on features and items from other robots or from the environment. In other words I was looking for a system where the nature of the subject matter reinforced or incorporated the mechanics, that there was synergy between the two. That was not the case, so I started working on...

C.A.I.R.N. is my operating name here... Cellular

Automatic

Independent

Regenerating

Nodes 

Still figuring out the acronym! But I think I have a nice core concept, where everything, even the individual core stats, are a modular part of the robot, and can be reconfigured.