I had played a few games of RoboRally in the past, and felt pretty “meh” about it overall. The concept is certainly different and intriguing: each player controls a robot, which moves by executing a series of five commands each turn. From a hand of cards like “turn left”, “move three”, and “u-turn”, a player selects the five that will best advance her robot toward its goals and lays them out face-down on the table. The fun part is that all players do this at once. All players set out their robot’s program, then all players reveal and execute their first instruction, then all players reveal and execute their second instruction, and so on. There are two advantages to this: first, since everyone plans out their moves simultaneously, the amount of downtime is minimized—a timer even comes into play to hurry along any slowpokes. Even more importantly, one robot can interfere with another. You may plan out the perfect route, only to get bumped by another robot and knocked into a pit—because the game board is full of hazards that can create all sorts of trouble for the hapless robots. In addition to the danger of falling into a hole or off the edge of the board, the robots must also contend with damage-inflicting lasers (both fixed on the board and on the other robots) and conveyor belts, among other things. Conveyor belts, as you might expect, carry the robot along either one or two spaces each turn, sometimes in straight lines and sometimes going around corners. This can make it difficult to plot your robot’s path even without interference from rival robots, and miscalculation can lead to death. Needless to say, things can get pretty chaotic—which some people might already consider an indicator of a fun game. There are different boards with varying degrees of difficulty and varying playtimes.
So, what are you actually trying to do? In the most basic version of the game, you’re trying to navigate from one flag to another. The first person to touch each of, say, three flags in order wins the game. If this doesn’t sound very inspiring it’s because, in my opinion, it’s not. 755
Everyone is doing exactly the same thing, just at different speeds; and once the group is separated, the interest declines even further: it can be hard to catch up with the leader, and part of the fun in general comes from one robot interfering with another’s course, which doesn’t happen if they’re too far apart. So I had played this game a few times about a year ago, and while I liked the concept, it wasn’t something that I was eager to play again. I certainly didn’t feel the urge to buy my own copy.
Fastforward several months: we had a problem on game day. There were six people, and we were at a loss for what to do. All the games we wanted to play took only five. No one was enthusiastic about splitting into two groups, so one person was even considering sitting out. Then we realized there was one other option: RoboRally actually does allow for six, or even eight, players. Someone also pointed out that there’s a Capture-the-Flag variant: players split into two teams, and each team starts with a flag on their side of the board. The goal is to grab the other team’s flag and take it back to your side, while simultaneously preventing your own flag from being stolen. Even before we started, it was clear that this would allow for more varied game play. For starters, not everyone was doing the same thing! Rather than following a more or less fixed route around the board, the two teams were heading in different directions. There was also a bit of team strategy involved—how many people should go forward and how many should stay back to defend? The fact that some people stayed back to defend also led to more upgraded robots: players can pick up improvement cards by ending their turn on specific spaces on the board, but this didn’t seem to happen much when everyone was rushing from one place to another (though I should specify that I had previously only played on the shorter, easier boards). When one person was staying back near their flag, it made a lot of sense to pick up a few improvements, which led to more variety among the robots and sometimes offered additional decisions to the players.
In brief, I loved it. For a variety of reasons, the six-player capture-the-flag variant was much more satisfying than any other RoboRally games I’d played. We ended up playing twice in a row, with the game session lasting longer than originally intended. And I came away from the experience fully satisfied, planning to add this game to my own collection in the near future. 755