[Official 2007 Game Design] Radical Tournament Ideas

[Rick TYler]

You want some out of the box ideas?

1. Robot size restrictions changed to a sum. Rather than 28x42 (or whatever) make it limited to a footprint of a certain number of square inches. FIRST inspectors are clever people -- they'll figure out how to measure them.

2. Create a total weight limit for the robot or robots fielded by a team. Only one robot can be radio controlled, the others have to be autonomous. For example, you might build an 80-pound "main" robot with two 20-pound autonomous slaves as helpers.

3. Have a "house" robot on the field, running under autonomous control that:

• Plays defense
• Plays offense
• Just drives around aimlessly
• Is attracted to other robots and gently nudges them
• Something else?

4. Place random obstacles on the field, which move from match to match. These range in size from Bots dots to shoe box in size. Some of these light up and can be used as scoring objects during autonomous.

5. Have powered, mobile scoring objects. You don't just pick them up -- you have to hunt them down first.

6. Have a variable number of teams on each alliance. The tournament has three rounds instead of two, with four robots per alliance in round 1, three in round 2 and only two in the finals.

7. Replace the finals best-two-of-three single-elimination format with a double-elimination tournament. All alliances which lose in the first round finals games are put back in a pool, and new alliances are picked from the first-round losers. These newly-formed alliances are then reinserted into the "loser's bracket" of the double-elimination tournament. The winning alliances in the first round are left intact.

8. Instead of doing alliance selection as they now, allow the top seeded teams to bid on partners using virtual bucks. Give each team $100 virtual dollars and have a silent auction for alliance partners. Team numbers and a picture of their robot are posted on a wall (or other conveniently flat surface) and the top-seeded teams then enter their bids on a bidding computer. A top-seeded team (alliance captain) on which other teams have bid can choose to allow themselves to be "sold" or not. If they choose not to accept the high bidder, they are "off the market" and will be an alliance captain. The high bidder gets their bucks back and can rebid them. Maybe this is done in real-time from eight bidding computers and the current bid amounts are displayed on the big screen. I know this seems complicated, but I want to noodle on it a bit. I like the games theory aspect, and it would introduce teams to a lot of modern mathematical theory they don't normally see in FIRST -- but it needs work. I promise to post a more fully-developed version later.

9. Instead of just scoring won/lost records, allow the accumulation of "team points" similar to some auto racing series. This might work best if there were four alliances of two robots each on the field at the same time. The first place alliance would get 12 points, second 6 points, third 3 points, and fourth 0 points.