Last year, before Atlanta, our team tried to come up with a role playing game that would allow the drive team to “try out” different strategies against different teams.
The idea was to have a setup similar to Axis and Allies or some other game that would model the short time, the fast pace, and the different robot capabilities (speed, defense, highest tetra, max tetras per stack, autonomous, etc.). Ideally the robot capabilities would come straight from real-world scouting info.
Time was broken into 5 to 15 second periods, during which the robots would all move simultaneously (just like the real-world) to a new position, or would be attempting some function like loading, capping, or pushing.
Has anyone else tried this?
If so, was it useful, and can you post the game rules/field setup/pieces required here?
This may not be exactly the same thing as you’re speaking of, but many teams after kickoff will use people as robots to play the game (even better if you have a practice field and elements). We have our kids pretend like they are robots in the game, to bring about things we may not have realized without doing this. They run into each other, push each other, score points, move fast/slow, block scoring, etc., and it’s very useful.
Other teams create a miniature model of the game with mini robots and play it, then use it for strategy decisions.
All these things help with robot design and concept, as well as strategy concepts.
I’m sure doing this before Atlanta helps that much more by already knowing many of the existing strategies and robots. But it’s something you can apply to kickoff as well. Having game elements is very benficial, but it can still be helpful without. We just use the game rules as we know them.
We tried something similar, but never worked the kinks out of it. I can e-mail you the draft of the rules if you want.
What we ended up doing was playing modified tick-tack-toe. Each player had seven turns. They could ‘cap’ in whatever spot they wanted, even on top of spots that were already taken, similar to the 2005 game.
We also had two versions of this. One that alternated turns between the players, and another that they players could make their move every ten seconds, regardless of the opposing player.
This drill worked well for coming up with general strategies.
We also did the same drill using the robot versus a person on the playing field. This gave the drivers practice with coming up with strategy while driving the robot.
We do it right after kickoff. We play a game or two or more, using chalk for the field and humans as robots. Every time we do a match, we go over it in detail afterwards, and we make sure to try different things. (For example, some of the “robots” last year were multistackers–they did not come out well in our version.) We use current rules and game pieces if we can, or choose a substitute game piece.
We haven’t done it for specific teams, but for strategies in general. If Team A uses Strategy X most of the time, but Strategy Y beats Strategy X and we play Strategy Y as our main strategy because we found that it works better than Strategy X in practice, Team A better have a backup plan!
If you do it right, you could just play the game. If you have a team member play as another team, you may be able to figure out how to beat them.
It might be possible to make a warhammer 40k like game. Each robot would move at different speed ( inches ) and turning rates to,get the maneuver tactic in, have different abilities ( shooting, harvesting, etc ) or be better at certain abilities than other robots ( some might have a higher BS or something thing like that)
I’m not sure how the Axis and Allies thing would work, seeing as how the acutal competition isn’t turn based. I’d imagine if you did something like that in real time where each robot could move farther than others and what not, then it would work great.
Hey I’d be willing to try and work out the kinks for this kind of game. If we could get a system going the stratigy assistance would be invaluble. If anyone is interested in trying stuff out or wants to contribute give me a pm.