Well the question is simple, which game has proven to be your favorite. Whether it be an enjoyable game to watch, a fun robot to build or the year your team had a great season. After giving your favorite game discuss what made it a great game.
2000 hands down. This game can be put on TV now. It is probably the only game that FIRST has done that is TV-ready.
It had everything that made a great game: strategic decisions, variety of robots, simple scoring, easy to follow, exciting start, exciting finish, and you could explain the game to your grandma in about 15 seconds.
It also had some GREAT design decisions, like do you design to go under the 2.5 ft bar (good game play advantage, but makes the robot horribly complex)?, do you design to hang on the bar, or settle with sitting on the ramp? What about de-scoring?
My only knock on the game was the qualification ranking system. I suppose if we did it again I would prefer some higher quality game pieces also. Other than that, the game has no real flaws.
this is my third year, and second team, in frc.
of the three games i’ve experienced, my favorite was this year.
last year, robot-to-robot contact was illegal… which killed the game…
the year before, our team was too disorganised to do much.
this year was fun, since there were some pretty spectacular collisions, and, everyone had to think outside the box, with a new CS, and crazy flooring…
We also got to the championship which is a big bonus no matter what (in our case, no matches won… 
oh well, it was still an incredible experience!
i wish that FRC would get more into auton, but i’m not the programmer…
2004 FIRST Frenzy: Raising the Bar.
The game was multi-faceted and exciting.
The robots have never looked more athletic.
2007 was my favorite game I’ve seen our team play in.
I also really liked the 2005 game, though at the time, the hardware given wasn’t really up to par with the challenge we had. Imagine if we could have another chance at that game! Autonomous could have really been useful.
If I had been unleashed in 2005, we would have had a really competitive and pretty robot. 2005 is our prettiest robot to date.
I haven’t voted yet, because I’ve really only seen the last 4 games enough to judge, the ones before that I’ve only seen short clips of.
I enjoyed watching nationals the most in 2008. All the big guns were up there and the game was very exciting to watch.
2007 and 2009 both required a little more strategy than 2008 and I enjoyed the defensive aspect. Overall, I think I liked 2007’s game a little better than 2009. (it might have been because my team was better in 07 than 09). I also liked the dual aspects in 2007. In 2009 if you could handle balls, you could do anything, but in 2007 I liked how there were ramp bots, tube bots and teams that did both, it made scouting a lot of fun.
2006 was a cool game, but overall I didn’t find it as exciting as the 3 years that followed, I didn’t find 2006 to have as many dimensions as 2007. 2008 proabaly had the fewest dimensions to gameplay, but the game itself was so epically fun to watch that I liked it a lot.
I hear a lot of good talk about 2004 and wish I was involved that year to see it.
Lunacy
It allowed our team to do things in drivetrain that we would never have thought about trying on a normal surface.
I prefer not to date FRC games, I will stick to girls. But in all seriousness my favorite game is Rack and Roll, I think it had some great defense and the best endgame so far, it definitely beats supercells.
I liked how Rack n Roll offered like 2 types of robots to build and equal incentive for both. Ramps could get you 60 points while scorers could get anywhere from 2 to 256.
Teams could focus on one or the other and robots all handled the challenge in different ways. The field was pretty open but not chaotic. Scoring was easy to follow (assuming you knew about the 2^X multiplier for ringers in a row), and there were enough rules without overdoing it.
Finally to top it off, while there were 2 classes of robots, there still existed the challenge of making a robot to “do-it-all” and while that type of robot was difficult to build it was still a strong possibility for many teams.
It was just great in so many ways, and I’d like to see another game like it for 2010.
I second 2004
of all the robots we have 186’s 04’ robot is the coolest looking…
I agree, 2007 was my favorite year and I wish we could redo that year. Can’t wait for the 2010 game and please bring back carpet, please.
I’m going to third Frenzy, that game was incredibly fun and really was the last year to have a variety of different robots. Yes every year there are some really creative and different robots, but in this game there were very few that even looked similar. Some could hang, some could pickup the small balls, some could pick up the big ball, some could do all three. It was a very diverse game, great human player interaction, plus stairs and hanging. The only thing wrong with that game was too many points given for hanging, when they redid it with vex the next year and lowered the points for hanging it evened the game a bit.
My runner up was hexagon havoc, you could tip the goal, there were no pinning rules, flipping was also allowed, you could separate parts of your robot, again it had two different sized balls (oddly enough the same two as Frenzy). You also had to score your color game balls, so there was sorting to deal with.
I would very much like to see a game with more than one sized game element again. Or hanging.
My top three, in no particular order:
First Frenzy
Rack n’ Roll
Lunacy
The first two are because initial strategy turns into rock, paper, scissors pretty quickly and the last one is because it’s a very strategic game, with no one way to win, and any alliance could conceivably win any match.
One other thing I totally forgot about Rack n Roll:
Weight classes, it let you balance what you thought your robot needed most, you could be taller…but then you better shave weight, or you can be a heavy tank of a bot, but it better be short.
Another weight class choice next year with options for teams will help bring more diverse robots to the field, and I’m sure everyone can appreciate that.
279 2004 robot was my all time favorite. It would grab the bar pull up, flip over, hand upside down on the bar.
And 67’s bot that year might have been their greatest bot ever. They just ran into the one bot that could stop them on Einstein in 868 (actually 237 could have done the same thing).
As a former driver, my pick is Rack N’ Roll. That game was an absolute blast to watch, play, as well as describe to people. It was fast, it was rough, it was difficult at times, and you never knew what was going to happen when the next ring went on the rack.
Definitely kept people on their toes!
I voted for 2004 also. Great game! As for keeping 67 off the bar, if we had managed to not get hung up we could have kept 868 on the other side of the bar & gone on to the finals, but it wasn’t meant to be.
As for a ranking, I’ve only been around for 10 years so I’m biased.
2004 - so many things to do
2000 - easiest game to re-do as 3 vs 3
2006 - you got to shoot things, how much cooler could it have been?
2007 - easy enough to understand, team deployed ramps made for a nice switch
2003 - King of the hill! I heard there were bins in this game also.
I’ve been involved for the past four years so I can only pick out of those, and I have to pick 2007. I prefer games that require some sort of arm to those that use a shooter as it leads to be more robot to robot interaction when going for a single target. Plus I still think 2007’s autonomous mode was the most interesting of the past four years and the end game was also awesome.
While Tripple Play was my favorite game I played in, but Aim High was my favorite game overall.
Anyone have any wild ideas for a game that could integrate the best features of '04 and '07?