My team has had some radically different Kickoff experiences in my 4 years as head coach. (Team info: very rural community, about 12-18 students, 1 head coach, 1-2 engineering mentor.)
In 2011, I had no idea what I was doing so we didn't even meet right after Kickoff. I only brought 3 students to a small local Kickoff and then we spent 5 school days in my room talking about totally random, off topic ideas (circular robot that we could never build in a million years anyone?). It was kind of awful.
In 2012, we went to the University of Minnesota for a big Kickoff show and workshop. It was great and we learned a lot. We had the right idea but poor execution that year. That's nobody's fault! We just didn't have the ability to carry out our design to the fullest. Plus, we were a very young team.
In 2013, we tried to replicate that workshop Kickoff experience in Fargo, ND. It went pretty well but we were so exhausted from all of the workshop work, that we barely met on Kickoff day. We focused on reliability and simple game strategy (given our mildly low engineering experience at the time). Ended up working out great.
This year!! We are again attending just a smaller local Kickoff (no workshops). We are going to prioritize reading the rules and building the field when we return to our school on Kickoff Day. Getting an idea of scale and size (and the rules) helps with the probabilities that other posters have been talking about with game strategy. We will run some human simulations and try our best to devise our best game strategy by Monday.
One item that has been really powerful for our team
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4E...it?usp=sharing
It's a Needs/Wants List from that 2012 Kickoff at the U of M. Credit to GOFIRST, Danny Blau, and any others. We've done a little editing but you get the idea.
I truly believe, as a team in a smaller, rural community, identifying our resources and limitations is absolutely the most important aspect of game strategy. We had some super funky, kind of awesome, climbing ideas last year but we just could not build them. Focusing on things we could do (and do reliably) was the foremost idea in our minds.
My hope is that this year we can blend 2012 and 2013 together. We can shoot for the moon and still understand our resources and knowledge base.