[Official 2007 Game Design] Radical Tournament Ideas

[Ryan Foley]

Originally Posted by 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.

or for even more fun, simply express the starting size as a volume, for example, a 28x38x60in robot has a volume of 63840 cubic inches. A little harder to measure, but could spawn some very creative ideas.

Some other twists:
1) Call me crazy, but why not have house rules? At every regional, or just each weekend of regionals, the game would be slightly different than the other regionals/ weekends. Why? It would be harder to figure out basic strategies just from watching another regional. Then, at championships, all 4 divisions have house rules, maybe the same ones as some of the regionals, with Einstein being some brand new house rule, to give the division champions something new and challenging. It could be length of rounds, how to win automonous, point values, anything (just not robot rules). Oh, and don't reveal the house rules for that weekend until the Monday or Tuesday of each week, to really keep teams on their toes. Then Dave Verbugge could change the target colors on Einstein.

2) Someone suggested this one of the prior years, but what about tag-team alliances. Then you could get 4 robots on an alliance at a time, but only with 3 active. Teams could switch which robots are active manually, or the field would if the 4th robot hasnt gone active within a certain time limit. For even more fun, let the field randomly choose a robot on each alliance to deactivate at the 1minute remaining mark and activate the 4th robot on each alliance.

3) Don't give each team a list of who is in every match and on which alliance. Simply give teams a list of which mathes they are in, without their partners or opponents listed. This way, teams will need to be able to strategize with alliance partners in the "on deck" stage, with only 2-5 minutes before they go on the field. It's more fun that way.

EDIT in response to post 12 from Andy,
Ok, yes #3 isnt a "new" idea, but it would certainly be a radical change to the complete match lists we have had since 2002. The lists FIRST gave out in 1999-2001 had a list of 12 teams on it, so you had a slight idea of who you might be with. #3 suggests giving teams absolutely no idea who they are with. It's another way for FIRST to raise the bar.