[Donut]

This game was more exciting to watch than I expected, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the race to stack the most in Einstein Finals 2 after the High Rollers managed to get the cans from 118 and even it up at 5 cans a piece. Seeing the end result of towering 8 foot stacks all over the field vies with a triple balance as the most impressive visual of the last 5 years (30 point climbs had that potential but were valued too low relative to difficulty to attempt for most).

Using average score was a good move. It won't make sense for most games and made for harsh quarterfinals but did a good job of finding your top 8.

It's definitely not my favorite game and is worse than the last few years in overall experience but I liked it better than 2009 - 2011, or its historical ancestor (Stack Attack in 2003). The two biggest game flaws were tote chutes and litter. Totes not landing upright coming out of the chute was the biggest barrier to scoring for the average team, it gave box on wheel bots nothing to do because the totes would come out awkwardly so they were hard to push, and for good teams it made having a tethered ramp or an internal tote catching mechanism mandatory rather than a competitive advantage. You would have seen better stacking overall with a better chute since virtually no one figured out a good method for flipping totes (see unused upside down totes in the landfill). Litter was also silly, as litter caught in your drive train could effectively end your match.

Autonomous requiring all robots to do something is a horrible game mechanic, and put any points out of reach except for those who could say "get out of our way, we can do it all ourself". A good number of alliances on Einstein didn't bother with it, that should tell you it's pretty broken. Cooperation is good to encourage but requiring the whole alliance to score is rarely worth it (2005 and 2006 end games) whereas needing only some alliance members but giving additional points for all results in more utilization (2007 end game, 2014 possessions).

Summary: not a great game, bottom third of games I've played, but has some redeeming qualities that should be emulated in the future. It will be overly ridiculed because it was radically different and brought an end to The Golden Age of FRC* (2012-2014).

*2004 - 2007 would have been The Golden Age but 2005 is smack in the middle of it, and was merely an okay rather than great game because of a poor autonomous and end game. I'm sure someone will correct me that it was actually 1997-2000 when robots were real robots but I don't know enough about the games in the 90s to say.