Super Robo Rally at school

Last week, we took Super Robo Rally to a school carnival near Bryan's house.  

We set-up SRR to play "King of the Hill", where players had three turns (about 1/2 hour) to program the robots to race to the flags (red squares) and stay there as long as possible.

The people running the carnival were great!  They set up a system where up to six kids could get a "Quick Pass" ticket for each half-hour game, and two others (waiting in line) would also join.

Bryan would spend a couple minutes explaining the rules to the players and their assistants (parents).

We weren't really sure how this would play out for elementary age kids, but in retrospect, I'm not sure what we were thinking...  Kids (mostly boys)... programming robots...  made of LEGO...   to race... and shoot each other.

Win.

All our games were full, and the only complaint I heard was from a parent watching her son play in the last game.  She said, "I'm just mad we didn't find this game sooner."

Overall, this format worked VERY well in this context.  The kids had enough time to understand the game, they were able to play several turns, and everyone seemed to think it was super cool.

Boxes for Super Robo Rally

Transporting 200 LEGO baseplates can be quite a problem.  It's even more of an issue when they're all covered with tiles.

A single baseplate with tiles weighs about 1 pound.  It's really hard to find a cardboard box that can survive very long, even filled with only 30 of the boards.

Last weekend, my father-in-law helped me build some very nice wooden boxes that I can use to transport the baseplates from show to show.




They are designed to stack, to make it easy to transport and store them.

Today, I'm taking them to their first show.  We'll see how well they work.

Gen Con Results

Gen Con went well.  People recognized Robo Rally, and I was surprised by the number of people who said "This is the most awesome thing I've seen at Gen Con this year!"

We played on one board on Thursday/Saturday, and a different board for Friday/Sunday.

Thursday/Saturday's board was a pretty easy start, except you had to fit through one of four small doorways. That caused a lot of collisions.

The board for Friday/Sunday had much more use of conveyor belts.

Video will follow...

Super Robo Rally for Gen Con

We're putting finishing touches on Super Robo Rally for Gen Con. The board can be layed out however we want, but this is a super small 8 player board.

Zoe getting pictures, and showing the scale of the board
Zoombot, Hulk, and a Dalek
Spinbot & Android
R2D2 & Alpha Rex
Twonky & Twitch
The 8 player board

... and a screenshot from the game status screen

RR Software

Working hard on PC software to play Robo Rally on a PC.  This will control the game when we take it to Brickworld.  If all goes well, it will work next week.

SRR Board Design

I still have to figure out what sort of line-following we're going to do.  We could have blank boards, full lines to follow, or just a small alignment area in the middle of each square

 Which look best?

Making boards

I got together with some friends and built some boards for Super Robo Rally.  We're planning on building about two hundred of the boards, and in the first day, we built about 50.

There were only about ten of us building on the first day.

 On the second day, we had less-experienced help...