Unusual, potential game pieces
 

I love speculating about future games, and surprisingly I haven't found an old thread talking about game pieces in particular. So I thought we'd talk about what would make a good game piece so that we might be able to identify the beginnings of a future game.

IMO, a good game piece:

• is durable
• is cheap and abundant
• is relatively light
• won't cause injury
• is fun to toss around, and looks good on camera
• hasn't been used before (though we can let this slide if the game uses an old piece in a way that requires new designs)
• is reasonably consistent between manufacturing batches (edit, as suggested)

Thinking about what fits those criteria, and hasn't yet been used I've come up with a few candidates:

• football or nerf footballs (oblig.)
• badminton birdies
• cheese wheels (or perhaps a rubber tire)
• batons or javelins (perhaps from pvc pipe)
• Ringette rings
• Bean Bags
• Bowling Pins (hollow)
• Ball on Ropes (dog toy)
• Flutterboards
• Great big or heavy pieces that can't be lifted, only pushed (perhaps tethered to the field)
• the beach ball I had as a kid that had a weight to one side so it flew crazily (can't find anything similar online though)

What do you think? Have I missed any good candidates? Are there other criteria for what makes a good gamepiece? Do any of these spark some ideas for game rules?

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I'm still holding out for FIRST using these for game pieces.

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Oh that would be cool. i would love an 'wierd shape/hard to grab' gamepiece. Only 135 more days:yikes: .

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Several years ago someone posted a picture of Dave Lavery holding a ~10 inch long piece of 3" sched 40 PVC pipe, capped at both ends. The thing resembled a giant drug capsule, suitable for medicating a blue whale or some similarly massive fictional creature.

I imagined it half full of pea gravel, to make its center of gravity shift while it is being handled so that manipulation by a robot is more challenging.

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Traffic cones.

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American footballs

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Another "good game piece" criterium: NOT inflated.

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While I completely agree that those points can help identify a good game piece, I can't help by come up with recent exceptions to all of them. Orbit balls, for example, were not durable or abundant. A number of game pieces, if ejected from the field, weren't particularly safe - frisbee to the head, or a huge ball from Over Drive knocking people over. Totes aren't particularly light weight, or cheap in the quantities needed for an off-season event. It's incredibly difficult to find a really good game piece. Most pieces are deficient in some area.

I would add to the list that game pieces need to be accessible to teams of all skill levels. Having a game piece that some teams (especially rookies!) Can't effectively interact with is pretty bad, in my opinion!

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Most of the bad things about frisbees and trackballs could have been mitigated with either rule or field changes.

Orbit balls? I pretend that year never happened.

And when did we use totes in the modern era? No game has used totes.[1]


But I think the OP had a good list of what would be optimal. Obviously choosing a suboptimal game piece happens at times.


[1] Like Mini bots and Jar Jar Binks these things never happened in my mind. A significant amount of therapy was required for this, I can suggest a guy.

Re: Unusual, potential game pieces
 

See Floppies from the 1999 game

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Oh cool, I hadn't seen Double Trouble before. Interestingly the Floppies really fail the "looks good on camera" test - they're pretty lifeless.

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I think some teams would have an inherent advantage with cheese wheels (looking at you, Wisconsin and 1086) :)

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Needs to also look good from the stands, so visible from 100 feet away.

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Spectrum has a mock game we are working on putting the rules together for that involves used car tires and rugby balls.

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I believe the game rules can either aggravate or alleviate the shortcoming that you are describing. 2015's divided field with no robot to robot interaction beyond the can wars between alliances serves as an example of a rule set that operated to reduce the effectiveness of robots with limited game piece manipulation abilities. Having a role for limited ability robots should be a key consideration for the GDC every year imo. Unlike 2015, many games from the past have at a minimum allowed some defensive role and a lesser scoring role for these robots (examples include: defensive inbound pass-blocking and shot-blocking; offensive bridge balancing in 2012; offensive low goal and passive low climb/hang in 2013; offensive assist in 2014.

By the same token, I would not want to see another game in which the role of the limited ability robot is restricted to serving as an anchor point for a piece of string.:( The performance floor for a limited ability robot should be reasonable, attainable and meaningful to the outcome of their matches.

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I have been hoping for a cylindrical game piece for years. Capped and half filled would be an interesting challenge, but I would prefer to see thin walled, hollow tubes. Length, diameter, material, weight, and quantity TBD. The length-to-diameter ratio should be near 1:1. This would make it feasible to acquire the tube by several methods (grasp OD, skewer the bore, etc.) with no obviously "correct" method. Game pieces could lay on their side or stand on end, and the orientation of the robot to the game piece would affect the way the tube reacted during acquisition. There is a broad range of tasks options to challenge teams with different skills, and few robot mechanism ideas from previous games would be useful. Game piece placement options include: (easiest) move it into a defined scoring zone, (easy) place in bin, (moderate) toss it into a bin that is higher than the robot, (harder) hang it on a pin rack with more points for higher pins, or (harder yet) fit the game piece through a round hole with modest clearance to the tube OD for highest points. Color coded tubes? Different size tubes? Moveable goals? Options galore! Tubes could be cheap and readily available (PVC), robust, visible from the stands, wouldn't require inflation, and would fit thru a door.

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Bowling Ball. main rule is you can't let it leave the ground.

American (nerf) Football. Heck, a Rugby ball would be fun too.

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That's not too difficult. A 3" diameter game piece at 100ft is about 9 minutes of arc, which is more than large enough for even people with poor eyesight, (also fits highway sign guidelines for roman characters). That said, bigger pieces (maybe at least 6" diameter) might be easier to focus on.

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Our last mock game meets most of your requirements.

http://spectrum3847.org/PIPEFALL

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I've always liked the idea of absurdly heavy or light game pieces (i.e. bowling balls or balloons). Really big ones (like 2001's goals) would be cool, as well.

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The big issue with really heavy things is that, given the amount of power in today's kit, there's not much we can't lift in a timely manner.

(Within the limits of sanity, I don't think we're going to be playing Recycle Rush 2 with Fiat 500s)

Re: Unusual, potential game pieces
 

If you want excitement, try deliberately dropping a bowling ball on the gym floor in front of the head basketball coach.

An important but so far thus far overlooked criterion is consistency in how it responds across both batches and time on the field. An object should not handle differently during the final match than the first, nor should they be different for a week 1 event and the Championship.

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Remember 2012? A LOT of teams were thrown off by new balls once they were replaced for elims matches.

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Not to mention the change in balls that occurred at Champs before eliminations. They were not just new, they had a totally different compression characteristic iirc.

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I think a game using Roomba's (cute but useless robotic vacuum cleaners).
I even came up with a game for it called Roomba Roundup. Teams gather up Roombas and place them in their corral. Teams can also steal Roombas and place them in their corrals. The team that has the most Roombas in their corrals (they have to be in the corrals) wins the match.

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One other criteria in my book is the interest the game piece has outside of the game in things like parades and demonstrations where there is only one or two robots. Kids love to catch a ball/other flying object. A robot stacking totes is not so exciting.

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our most used robot for demos is by far 2012 (it was our best robot, but it also demonstrates super well), and before that was 2009's. however, that can't happen every year, or there won't be enough variation in how the game is played (after 3 years of shooters from 2012-14, I was kinda glad that Recycle rush had a different sort of design challenge for my last yer, tbh)

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I think that kong dog toys would be great personally. http://www.petsmart.com/dog/toys/kon...pfm%3Dcategory

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The most important question about the new game pieces is going to be do they sink, float or have neutral buoyancy?

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Here are a few ideas for things we haven't dealt with yet:
REALLY big balls (diameter more than twice as large as the largest permissible robot), octahedrons, dodecahedrons, isodecahedrons, solid/walled tetrahedrons, ellipsoids (either prolate or oblate), "very light" shapes (e.g. ping pong balls, whiffle balls, open-cell foam), stiff long cylinders (bats, batons, clubs, broomsticks, virges), and of course, familiar objects with irregular shapes: flat broom, mop, weed eater, boom box, brief cases, bungee cords, baloon animals, animal chew toys, books, component parts (e.g. what if we had to replace a laser printer cartridge with a robot?), dumbells, jingle bells, real bell-shaped bells, bottles (pick your size and shape; I'm thinking of 6.25 oz classic coke bottles), aerobies, model cars, teddy bears, Barbie/GI Joes, loaves of french bread, calculators, laptop computers, USB memory sticks (you have to plug them in and read data off of them to know what to do next), I-beams (or lengths of railroad tie), lincoln logs/tinker toys/erector set pieces, shoes (human, horse, or brake), mannequin parts, pillows, lengths of pipe, pipe fittings, skillets, strainters, Anderson Connectors (plug 'em in?), hammers, wrenches, pliers, wheels, and soma cube puzzle pieces.

This was the result of about 10 minutes of brainstorming by one guy, who intentionally didn't run any seam more than about three or four items (I could have gone on with kitchen stuff alone as long as the list above). The GDC won't run out of "new" game pieces anytime soon...

And on the OBTW front:
I completely blocked my memory of having seen Star Trek V until about half an hour into seeing it for (presumably) the second time. Makes mini-bots and Jar Jar seem well-considered by comparison.

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Best idea in the thread

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I, too, have been hoping for traffic cones.

That being said, we haven't had playground dodgeballs in a long while, probably due to the "inflatable" and "consistent characteristics" problems.

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Hula hoops could definitely present an interesting challenge. We invented a VEX game with foam rings and tall posts and teams got extra points for having the top ring on the post. It was probably my favorite game we have used for our VEX classes because it always kept the action moving around since teams were incentivized to score on a different post each time. Hula hoops would be an easy way to do something similar for larger FRC bots.

I also think the cylinder idea would be awesome. The GDC likely takes into account transportability, so I could see them using something like that but maybe more like a cone. They would stack for easy transportation and field reset and they would add the extra challenge of not rolling straight.

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YES!! Bumble Balls are the best! Robot gets extra points for turning them off when in possession. I figure about 50 on the field would be a gas.

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Same with us, 2012 is pretty much our go to demo bot. (We try to use 2013 and others but it's a bit risky. The frisbees could break things or hurt someone, so we have to be extra careful when demoing 2013) Also we don't have to worry about accidentaly hitting other people with 2012 game pieces.

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About using pipes as a game piece. In Israel we hold each year a preparatory competition for teams called Falafel, this gives team a chance to practice another (more laid back) build season. Last year our game piece was PVC pipes and it was a great success for the following reasons

• Very cheap
• very easy to find
• Can handle rough contact from robots
• New challenge for FRC teams but it does have a few known solutions in the outside world

We got great feedback from teams about this game piece and it'd be pretty cool if FIRST used a similar game piece in the future.

If anyone is interested here are some videos from the final matches of the competition (The goal was to move as many pipes to the goals on the other end of the field and then hang during the end game)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpn_...DdAEER10c1ejz9

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We used our 2013 robot for demos at the Monroe County Fair. There were many children injuries (many from them doing brutal things to one another chasing down frisbees) and one very scary moment where an eager toddler try to frontload the robot just before it fired and the launch was quickly aborted.

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I'm still in favor of a heavy game piece greatly changing a robot's dynamic. Most teams assume year in and year out that their robot will weigh 150ish lbs fully loaded, but if the game requires the robot to pick up and drop off 50-100 lbs of game items, drive trains will really require some thought, as well as manipulators.

Also the biggest crowd pleaser in recent game history was the bridges from 2012.
Heavy game object which can be un-scored + requirement to balance with game objects + robot v robot interactions would be awesome.

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I think the New England teams would have an advantage in this game :p

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Please, in the name of Kamen, no.
We've already got gigantic tetrahedrons, trackballs, yoga balls, innertubes, basketball goals, and recycling cans taking up space in our workshop. Please no more enormous, useless game objects.

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Maybe u can use the traffic cones to fence the old game pieces? :)

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Well at least the recycling can you could repurpose :)

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This happened a few times to us this past season unintentionally. Had to have a student clean it out at one point.

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You know the track balls, yoga balls, and inner tubes can be deflated right? :P

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Why haven't you disassembled your tetras by now? Do you still do demonstrations with your 2005 robot?

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I was being a bit overdramatic, but my point stands.
Thank you all for doubting my sense, friends. It's appreciated. :)

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FVC (yeah, with the V) used softballs in Hangin'-A-Round, the first year as a program. Bright yellow and about 3.75" diameter, I think those would be a great game piece for a pick-and-place game. Limit the robots to ejecting them less than five feet from the frame, and I think they'd stay safe.

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This years' game involved picking up and dropping off ~60 lbs. The problem with heavy objects is that the game looks less like a sport and more like a bunch of construction equipment.

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Well, so does Megabot and I'm psyched for that... :cool:

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Wasn't including this year's game because for the most part it was 3v0 on a cramped field.

If the game object was a 45 lb plate slightly modified from the standard weight lifting, and robots could manipulate 2-3 of them at once...

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What, you don't want to reserve parking for the team? No intra-team pickup soccer games (see: goalposts)? Not even donate 'em to the school proper for hazard marking after the offseasons?


Trust me, my family has 4 good-sized traffic cones in the garage, along with soccer cones. They're great for sports use if you need something VISIBLE--and they stack, so you get one single stack of all the cones...


*takes tongue out of cheek*

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Soc em boppers, if you remember what those are.

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They may be more fun than a pillow fight, but I have no idea how you would use them as a game piece besides using them as beach balls.

Side note: They changed the name to Socker Boppers now...

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I how been toying with a game that would use a axis (think jack of ball and jacks). It would be 3 sticks/tubes bolted together.

I really like the symmetrical cylinder tube. As Wayne said. Lots of opportunities.

Homer buckets could make for a interesting object.

One parameter that IMO is easy for robot to manipulate. Tetras were great for that.

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The old FTC rolling goal tubes with some endcaps could be a decent game piece.

http://www.andymark.com/FTC-s/531.htm

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OMG, I found it! The ball was called Oopee, and it was a giveaway from KFC of all places. The video is 80s-tastic too :)

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Like a Czech hedgehog? Though, I wouldn't want it as a field barrier.

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Imagining game object shapes might partially be an exercise in looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

Instead, imagining what the robots should be required to do with any object might bear more fruit.

Maybe physical keys need to be inserted in locks, and then (optionally?) moved precisely once in the lock.

Maybe optical patterns need to be read or obeyed or responded to at speeds too quick for humans to satisfy (in order to learn something about the rest of the field).

Maybe opposing robots need to compete to stay ahead in a zero-sum game that involves object orientations/locations, or involves continuously manipulating objects in more than one manner (lift one, twist one, throw one, weigh one, etc.),at several locations around the field?

At the least, combining thinking about what you do with the object, with thinking about the object's properties, is an important part of creating challenges.

Blake
PS: Lots of small objects can approximate a fluid.

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Rubber Ducks + Water Game = Win :D

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The real question is what would the ducks do in the underwater game and how do we gain points? :ahh:

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The ducks have QR codes and/or colored dots on the bottom, identifying their point value and what alliance they score for when captured.

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Sounds a lot like an autonomous robotics class competition back in college. Only we were using Easter eggs, not ducks. And building with Lego's. Man, those were the days...

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How about shopping baskets... these come in two convenient colors:

http://www.uline.com/BL_8919/Shoppin...A&gclsrc=aw.ds

Robust, store compactly, lots of bot interaction possibilities. Handles could be secured in 'carrying' position or in stacking position or be left free to move.