Thank you GDC for an incredible game!

[Jared Russell]

Now that we have seen the official FRC competition season come to a close, I wanted to create this well-deserved thread...

Whether this was your first FRC game or your 18th, you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who didn't enjoy Breakaway.

Breakaway was a HARD game - possessing soccer balls without carrying them, reliably traversing the bumps, kicking balls accurately over varying distances, and hanging a fully loaded robot above the ground are each very difficult technical tasks that in most years would be *the* game challenge. This year, we had all of them! Our team, and most others, were tested in ways unparalleled by other recent games.

Yet despite the complexity of the robot design, Breakaway was ingeniously simple. Three ways to score, each completely unambiguous. A zone system that required teams to constantly trade off the need to control the ball returns with the need to score offensive balls, and once the playoffs hit, the need to defend your opponents' goals. All great sports are simple at their core, and yet fantastically nuanced so that no single strategy is always effective (as the finals on Einstein showed).

Although the game had its inevitable bumps - DOGMA, balancing winning with coopertition, balls that somehow always found their way into/under/on top of even the most cleverly designed robots - in my opinion, the GDC did an amazing job in creating a game that turned the past four months into "the hardest fun we'll ever have".

FIRST Community: Please do NOT use this thread as an opportunity to rip apart every little aspect of the game that you thought could have been better. There will be ample opportunity to do that before next January. The GDC is made up of humans - albeit very, very smart humans who have already demonstrated that they can see what works and what doesn't. But as humans, they also deserve to hear our praise when they have earned it.

Thank you!