What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

Well the question is simple, which game has proven to be your favorite. Whether it be an enjoyable game to watch, a fun robot to build or the year your team had a great season. After giving your favorite game discuss what made it a great game.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

2000 hands down. This game can be put on TV now. It is probably the only game that FIRST has done that is TV-ready.

It had everything that made a great game: strategic decisions, variety of robots, simple scoring, easy to follow, exciting start, exciting finish, and you could explain the game to your grandma in about 15 seconds.

It also had some GREAT design decisions, like do you design to go under the 2.5 ft bar (good game play advantage, but makes the robot horribly complex)?, do you design to hang on the bar, or settle with sitting on the ramp? What about de-scoring?

My only knock on the game was the qualification ranking system. I suppose if we did it again I would prefer some higher quality game pieces also. Other than that, the game has no real flaws.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

this is my third year, and second team, in frc.

of the three games i've experienced, my favorite was this year.

last year, robot-to-robot contact was illegal... which killed the game...
the year before, our team was too disorganised to do much.

this year was fun, since there were some pretty spectacular collisions, and, everyone had to think outside the box, with a new CS, and crazy flooring...
We also got to the championship which is a big bonus no matter what (in our case, no matches won... :( oh well, it was still an incredible experience!

i wish that FRC would get more into auton, but i'm not the programmer...

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

2004 FIRST Frenzy: Raising the Bar.
The game was multi-faceted and exciting.
The robots have never looked more athletic.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

2007 was my favorite game I've seen our team play in.

I also really liked the 2005 game, though at the time, the hardware given wasn't really up to par with the challenge we had. Imagine if we could have another chance at that game! Autonomous could have really been useful.

If I had been unleashed in 2005, we would have had a really competitive and pretty robot. 2005 is our prettiest robot to date.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I haven't voted yet, because I've really only seen the last 4 games enough to judge, the ones before that I've only seen short clips of.

I enjoyed watching nationals the most in 2008. All the big guns were up there and the game was very exciting to watch.

2007 and 2009 both required a little more strategy than 2008 and I enjoyed the defensive aspect. Overall, I think I liked 2007's game a little better than 2009. (it might have been because my team was better in 07 than 09). I also liked the dual aspects in 2007. In 2009 if you could handle balls, you could do anything, but in 2007 I liked how there were ramp bots, tube bots and teams that did both, it made scouting a lot of fun.

2006 was a cool game, but overall I didn't find it as exciting as the 3 years that followed, I didn't find 2006 to have as many dimensions as 2007. 2008 proabaly had the fewest dimensions to gameplay, but the game itself was so epically fun to watch that I liked it a lot.

I hear a lot of good talk about 2004 and wish I was involved that year to see it.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

Lunacy

It allowed our team to do things in drivetrain that we would never have thought about trying on a normal surface.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I prefer not to date FRC games, I will stick to girls. But in all seriousness my favorite game is Rack and Roll, I think it had some great defense and the best endgame so far, it definitely beats supercells.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I liked how Rack n Roll offered like 2 types of robots to build and equal incentive for both. Ramps could get you 60 points while scorers could get anywhere from 2 to 256.

Teams could focus on one or the other and robots all handled the challenge in different ways. The field was pretty open but not chaotic. Scoring was easy to follow (assuming you knew about the 2^X multiplier for ringers in a row), and there were enough rules without overdoing it.

Finally to top it off, while there were 2 classes of robots, there still existed the challenge of making a robot to "do-it-all" and while that type of robot was difficult to build it was still a strong possibility for many teams.

It was just great in so many ways, and I'd like to see another game like it for 2010.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I second 2004

of all the robots we have 186's 04' robot is the coolest looking.........

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I agree, 2007 was my favorite year and I wish we could redo that year. Can't wait for the 2010 game and please bring back carpet, please.:D

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I'm going to third Frenzy, that game was incredibly fun and really was the last year to have a variety of different robots. Yes every year there are some really creative and different robots, but in this game there were very few that even looked similar. Some could hang, some could pickup the small balls, some could pick up the big ball, some could do all three. It was a very diverse game, great human player interaction, plus stairs and hanging. The only thing wrong with that game was too many points given for hanging, when they redid it with vex the next year and lowered the points for hanging it evened the game a bit.

My runner up was hexagon havoc, you could tip the goal, there were no pinning rules, flipping was also allowed, you could separate parts of your robot, again it had two different sized balls (oddly enough the same two as Frenzy). You also had to score your color game balls, so there was sorting to deal with.

I would very much like to see a game with more than one sized game element again. Or hanging.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

My top three, in no particular order:

First Frenzy
Rack n' Roll
Lunacy

The first two are because initial strategy turns into rock, paper, scissors pretty quickly and the last one is because it's a very strategic game, with no one way to win, and any alliance could conceivably win any match.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

One other thing I totally forgot about Rack n Roll:

Weight classes, it let you balance what you thought your robot needed most, you could be taller...but then you better shave weight, or you can be a heavy tank of a bot, but it better be short.

Another weight class choice next year with options for teams will help bring more diverse robots to the field, and I'm sure everyone can appreciate that.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

279 2004 robot was my all time favorite. It would grab the bar pull up, flip over, hand upside down on the bar.
And 67's bot that year might have been their greatest bot ever. They just ran into the one bot that could stop them on Einstein in 868 (actually 237 could have done the same thing).

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

As a former driver, my pick is Rack N' Roll. That game was an absolute blast to watch, play, as well as describe to people. It was fast, it was rough, it was difficult at times, and you never knew what was going to happen when the next ring went on the rack.

Definitely kept people on their toes!

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I voted for 2004 also. Great game! As for keeping 67 off the bar, if we had managed to not get hung up we could have kept 868 on the other side of the bar & gone on to the finals, but it wasn't meant to be.

As for a ranking, I've only been around for 10 years so I'm biased.

2004 - so many things to do
2000 - easiest game to re-do as 3 vs 3
2006 - you got to shoot things, how much cooler could it have been?
2007 - easy enough to understand, team deployed ramps made for a nice switch
2003 - King of the hill! I heard there were bins in this game also.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I've been involved for the past four years so I can only pick out of those, and I have to pick 2007. I prefer games that require some sort of arm to those that use a shooter as it leads to be more robot to robot interaction when going for a single target. Plus I still think 2007's autonomous mode was the most interesting of the past four years and the end game was also awesome.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

While Tripple Play was my favorite game I played in, but Aim High was my favorite game overall.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

Anyone have any wild ideas for a game that could integrate the best features of '04 and '07?

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

Play '04 with 3 teams per alliance?

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

There was barely enough room for four robots on the field in 2004 nevermind 6.
That platform was huge!

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

There was plenty of room as long as you could climb the steps...:cool:

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

My top 3 (in my nine years of FIRST)

2004 - So much to do and so many creative designs, this game was always non-stop action and excitement. I still love watching that video of 190 climbing over another robot to hang on the bar (I don't remember what off-season competition this happened at off the top of my head).

2002 - A game of great strategy (unless you were 71 and all you had to do is to not have your arm break (nations) or not get entangled (IRI (Thanks Baker!:p ))). In qualifing rounds, the winning alliances score was actually 3 times the losing alliances score. So if you dominated 40 - 3, you actually only got 9 points.

2009 - The reason I liked this game was because it was easier for the public to understand than what many other years was. It was fast paced and involved a lot of scoring (especially during elims and the championship).

I also would like to give a consulation prize to 2005 and 2006. I loved how there was such a big emphasis on autonamous mode where you recieved additional points for scoring the vision tetras or the most amount of points (you can contest 2004 was big with the 10pt ball, however most robots were not able to do this).

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

Aim High was my favorite. It was fun to watch and had some great robots. There was constant action and good strategy by switching offense and defense. I also liked the autonomous because it gave you a bonus.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

You're in FRC and manage to have time to date girls? Lucky. :/

I've only played in one FRC game, so I can't really say, but of the games I didn't play, FIRST Frenzy looks the most interesting.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I said Lunacy, because of the games I've seen (Rack 'n Roll, Overdrive, Lunacy) this one was the most fun to watch. Also, my team did a little better than we normally do, so that was a good incentive. However, of the ones I've never seen except in old videos of matches, my favorites would be Zone Zeal, First Frenzy and Aim High. Shame First Frenzy happened already, I feel like I could build a really good robot.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

2007 and 2005 were my favorites. 2007 had the opportunity for such great strategy, the tradeoffs of weight classes, the duality of tasks, and was very visually centralized and appealing to the audience. 2005 was my introduction to FIRST, and also had great strategy involved.

Games I wish I could have played include 2004 and 2000... but I still think 2007 would be my favorite ever.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

Wow, this thread makes me feel old. My favorite game I participated in was 2004. It had a great end game, human centric scoring with bonuses decided by robots (from either alliance) And there was a strategic benefit to Auton that year.


Least favorite was 2005. I blame the game pieces and the fact that if I ref thought you were to close to a robot loading in the human loading station it was a 30 pt penalty. I understand the safety risks but I just dont like penalties like that. The game piece was heavy and broke often. Cameras just didnt cut it that year either.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I loved 2007 it was a great game to drive and watch. It had a perfect balance between offense and defense. It was just such a fun game.

Matthew Simpson
Team 75 Leadership/Driver

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I've been around for 9 years.

Favorite: Aim High
Nothing beat the "wow" factor of a bunch of poof ball-slinging tanks with automatic targeting. And it could have been even better! (the field needed something in the middle in my opinion - maybe a 2003-style king of the hill instead of ramps for each alliance?)

2nd: Rack 'N' Roll
I loved the scoring dynamic, the role of defense, and the climactic endgame.

3rd: Lunacy
Call it slow if you wish, but Lunacy was one of the most strategic yet conceptually simple games we have ever had. And I loved that any robot could beat any other with good strategy and teamwork.

4th: Triple Play
Another really conceptually simple game with such subtle strategic nuances, even if in the end it often just came down to who could do the most volume.

5th: FIRST Frenzy
So many things going on on the field! Too many? And hanging was worth way, way too much. I did love the innovation you saw, and we need to bring back steps!

6th: Stack Attack
It was a blast to play, and holds a special place because of its introduction of autonomous mode. Exciting endgame too. But once again the endgame was worth too much.

7th: Overdrive
I just did not enjoy this game that much. Racing around in a circle. Tossing/lifting balls. No hitting. Repeat.

8th: Zone Zeal
This game had a lot of potential, but unfortunately the rounds were often only exciting for about 20 seconds, after which nobody could seem to push anybody around and we sat still for another minute and a half.

9th: Diabolical Dynamics
I appreciate the change of pace, but 4 vs. 0 missed out on so much of what I love about matches. And I wasn't a fan of the qualification system at all.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

Triple Play with out a doubt.
1) Crazy Strategy: So many idea's and way things could change on the fly
2) Tic Tack Toe Insanity: Simple, Elegent, easy to Follow and so much fun!
3) "King of the Hill" aspect for teams to fight over which really hasn't been present since.

Second surprisingly would be Overdrive, which was not what I would have expected when I first saw the game.
Low Marks on Lunacy because it was slow, crowded field, too much scoring to keep track of it all and just really dull to watch.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I noticed a heavier weighting on the latest games. The old timers are outnumbered. My favorite was zone zeal. Brute force wins. Second was stack attack - the first year of autonomous. Seems like every year the game gets more complex - nothing wrong with that - but basketball has remained simple for its entire life, is simple to understand, simple to score, and keeps viewers interested. How about FIRST robots playing a basketball game - one ball, two goals, 3 on 3, blocking shots, goaltending, 3 second rule at the goal, 10 second shotclock, passing, shooting, foulshots at the end based on penalties, dunking, three point line, etc. Bet the game would be TV ready.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I too was noticing that pattern, it could be interesting to weight each persons vote by their years in FIRST, this would mean people like Andy Baker would count for a lot more than a rookie who has very little basis for comparison. Obviously this would break down for some people who have relatives in FIRST and have seen every game but not participated in them.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

It would be even more interesting (in my humble opinion) to compare the player's views to the audience view. Some games may be more interesting to the audience than the team members.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

Even though 2007 was my first year, I think Rack 'n Roll is the only game I've seen that relies heavily on good strategy. On the newer games (2008, 2009) the alliances can play the match very easily, and good strategy (and also a real time change of strategy in the game) was not very relevant to the success of the alliance. Lunacy seemed like it would be very boring to watch at kickoff, but it wasn't that bad once competitions started. I also think that big game elements contribute a lot to the excitement of the game. I mean, the Rack just kills the Overpass or the trailers from '09.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I agree that 08 didn't require quite as much stratgy as past years, but I would argue that strategy played a large role in the 2009 game, my team found that the matches we were best prepared for with scouting info and a good strategy were the ones we did best in. I still liked 2007's game more than 2009, but 2009 certainly required a lot of strategy. Don't get me wrong though, I still think 2007 required a lot of strategy, possibly more than 2009, but I can't agree that 2009 required little strategy.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I think that what made Lunacy interesting was the new flooring, so the game itself was a little harder to play/drive. Some strategy went into that, too.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

There are a few very good ones it is a tough decision

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I loved watching stack attack,
That first wall with all those crates coming down was awesome.

I did enjoy this year's game though with the new surface and having to chase down other robots.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I think Lunacy 2v2 should be included.

It's almost a completely different game!

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

agreed

I was on the 971 drive team, and in the time beofore the matches on Einstein, we would discuss stradegy for sometimes a half an hour before a match.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

Lunacy was extremely strategic. Ball managment, empty cells, defensive pins, autonomous configuration are all just some of the vital decisions you'd have to make when playing Lunacy to determine the outcome of a match. Any alliance in the Top 8 at any event could beat any other with a good enough counterstrategy, in my opinion.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I will list the ones I actually know about:

1. Aim High- great game overall. Very strategic, lots of action going on, so much fun to watch, and the robots that performed had interesting concepts. I wish I was on the team in middle school to watch an Aim High match.

2. Overdrive- Also a lot of fun to watch. The only problem is that the robot on the third alliance did not really have to do anything except run, since there are two trackballs and three robots.

3. Lunacy- Very strategic, interesting robots to watch. I personally did not like it, but I cant base what I think is good by how much I liked it.

4. Rack N' Roll- This game was interesting, seemed fun to watch, but I did not get it what-so-ever. I looked it up to try to understand it, and I understood it somewhat, but not completely.

5. Triple Play- I found this game very confusing, but it did seem interesting. It seemed difficult, placing wire triangles on pillars, which is good so it can challenge the teams to make a good robot. I was trying to understand how this game operates, and it did not work out too well.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I REALLY want to see Lunacy as 2v2. If anyone has any video, could you please uploaded it to youtube and post a link?

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I think this proves that every top game as chosen by the CD community are ones that the field is a pain in the butt to build!

I remember a reports of a quote from a night before kickoff in 2007 (which is currently in the lead) that a satellite kickoff field builder crew stated "this thing is the most complicated field to build to date" without going into any more detail.

GDC, if you want a good game... make the field complicated to build!

Whether that is the true link, or it's somthing else, you can't deny the proof from the current poll results.

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

Ugh, 2007's field was horrible. I mean honestly, there seemed to be more steps to build the field than some teams took to build their whole robot! (I exaggerate of course but it really was a pain to build)

Re: What is your favorite FRC game to date?
 

I'd have to agree on it being tough to build. Not the field border, mind you, the rack. Not only do you have to put it up (and it's got some heavy pieces), but then you have to go inside and put in the spider legs, and somewhere along the line you have to take the box for all the lights (or the battery cord) up to the top and plug in the lights. And hope that the A/V guys gave you enough cord for decent rack movement...

But it was a very strategic game, tough to win, and strategy was a killer if you did it wrong.