Over the years, the FRC community has made many a game to bolster their strategic senses, and in rare case ‘fix’ broken games that they played the season thereof. I figured I’d try to accumulate some of them into a thread, and if I miss any large number of them, feel free to post down below!
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Billfred**
(2006) - Aim, Well, Kinda High
Team 2122 Alum
(???) - Falafel (Offseason Game for FIRST in Israel) 2016 Game
These last sets aren’t strictly designed with strategic play in mind, but their different methods of play may encourage some creative design that people so desperately want during the season.
Definitely a great list to put together! I know there are others missing, and Andrew has made a few more I have seen (more recent probably) as well as some others out there! My team has gone through a series of mock kickoffs this year, and the next one will likely be a game FRC has never seen before like one of these, so I will be sure to post it on here if I don’t just totally rip off one of Andrew’s games.
I think that BunnyBots should be added to this list. Since these games were actually played you can see how different strategies actually played out. 2009-2016
Thanks for collecting these! I love user made games for FRC! A side note: The DesignComp group was led by me as well - I just didn’t run the CD profile. You can combine the games under my name and DesignComp into Design Comp if it makes it easier for organizing since it was roughly the same group of people.
Some recognition should also be given to Griffin Sawchuk, who helped work on the game design for most of our shared projects.
Bonus round: this was actually played. (The regulation field set up outside flooded, so we just evicted everyone from the indoor pits and moved the show the next day!)
Team 2212 alumni make a new game every year for an Israeli off-season event called Falafel (yes, like the food). The competition is held over Hanukkah break each year. I don’t have the manuals on hand right now (and I think they’re in Hebrew anyway), but I figured I should acknowledge them anyway.
I updated the initial post with as many of them as I got from this post, some of which are absolutely awesome (Billfred what the heck.)
Ari, if you get the manuals at all for Falafel, please upload them and I’ll add them on regardless. There may be some Americans who can read Hebrew and make use of them, and in my limited time in FRC, I learned even the oddest of requests can make a big change.
I found the game manual for 2016 online here. I believe the MOST Group (a.k.a. 2212 alumni) have been doing this since 2012, but I can’t find manuals for other years.
I did find kick-off animations for the past 3 years on their youtube channel though: 2016, 2015, 2014
I’ll add that you can only edit posts for a day (?) after posting, so if you want to keep updating this list you should make something more permanent.
By the time I ambled up to the volunteer room that Saturday, most of this game was already designed–yes, the headline could’ve been “Florida Men and Women Redesign Legendary Robot Game”. I just codified it so we all had something to point to if we needed to as a referee. This also made our job really easy, as the only thing refs really had to do was count pins. Shenanigans on top of the ramp were a no-call, because you knew what you were getting into there.
Surprisingly, the field (and this was a regulation FIRST field–the carpet that got slashed up for drainage was the Einstein carpet that year) slotted together like it was meant for this. The high goal was custom-fabbed for the low ceiling height, but was the correct aperture width. The FMS was “lol let’s run the OI wall warts to one surge strip and shut everything off at the end manually”. And it was frankly a glorious day of robots.
IRI: Rules are tweaked each year to fix problems (elimination of nuisance penalties, removal of coopertition scoring, etc) and/or make the game more suitable to top level play (extra game pieces to eliminate a scoring cap, etc.). Also was AFAIK the first event to use four team alliances and also does not use serpentine draft for round 2 picks. Heck, it is the oldest offseason in existence (I don’t know when they started modifying/adding rules, possibly the first event to play with modified rules ).
Not an entirely new game, but some years have been more tweaked than others. 2015 had extra recycling containers and no container race, which did change the dynamic.
For those that are curious, OCCRA is roughly 2/3 scale in size, though as FRC robots have become a bit more compact, the actual robots are getting very close in size.
This is by rules a student design/fab/compete competition. They also have fabrication restriction on more complex machining. Basically hand tools.
They played several years ago one of my favorite games which was a bit like the 2005 FRC game. There were 9 vertical goals in a tic tac toe formation (3x3) spread out around the field. Points were scored by scoring balls into the goal. Top Ball “owned” the goal, and 3 in a row got a bonus.
I am a huge fan of the tic-tac-toe games as when playing in real time, I think they offer a lot of scoring early on, but towards the end a lot of tactical/strategic play over owning certain goals comes into play. This leads to both some interesting offense as well as good opportunity for defense.
It is also reasonably easy for audience members to follow along with real time scoring, as long as Auton based bonuses do not get too confusing.
