This game turned out much better than I thought it would at kickoff. Parts of my perception may be because my daughter's team had a better robot than in the past 3 years, and that I've already spent more time reffing than I did last year and we're not to the off-seasons yet.
Overdrive didn't have the "something special never done before" aspect that we've had for the prior 3 years:
- Triple Play was the first time we were 3v3, and had a unique shape that no one had ever worked with before. (I still have a certain affinity for that game, even though I had little to do with the team or robot build; perhaps because I enjoyed strategizing from the stands where the next tetra should go.)
- Aim High - we were encouraged to fling objects about!
- Rack-n-Roll - climbing up on your partner to score the bonus.
I wasn't keen on the "drive by remote" part of hybrid this year. Especially since it didn't work so well. The good part about hybrid was that all robots on the team could do something, and do it pretty much simultaneously, without conflicting with their teammate's efforts. Triple Play you had to decide who was going to go for the vision tetra, if anyone. Aim High sometimes two bots from the same team would fire balls into the same place, resulting in them scattering rather than scoring. Rack-n-Roll had very few multiple keepers scored, sometimes because the robots interfered with each other. Yes, we had a few robot collisions that stopped one of the teammates from crossing a line or getting a ball. But pretty much teams could all get going to score at least one or two lines. Also the points given for hybrid were well-balanced with the rest of the game. In Triple Play and Rack-n-Roll the auto points weren't enough; in Aim High if you won auto you pretty much had won the game.
Penalties were severe and easy to earn this year - I should know, I called enough of 'em. Still, I really enjoyed reffing this game. Maybe because you had to pay attention so closely, and it made even a less-than-stellar match to view exciting for a referee.
I was also pleased to see how many variations there were in robots. After kickoff, the general sentiment was that we'd have a bunch of grippers on elevators. I was glad to see shooters, flingers, arms, elevators, suckers - and lots of variety of end effectors too.
My personal rank for the last for years is
- Triple Play
- Overdrive
- Rack-n-Roll
- Aim High