RoboRally has certainly captured my imagination of late, as I’ve enjoyed the puzzle-solving aspects of the game, but my pure solo runs through the various boards were not very compelling, for all of their educational value.
When I sat down to play a solo game Monday night, I decided I’d try to mix it up a bit, including three other “guard” robots on the board that would start on the objective flags and be randomly programmed.
In this post I’ll describe what I did as well as my thoughts for what I might try next time. I certainly welcome your comments and suggestions.
- It was a three flag board, so I chose three ‘bots, placing one on each objective flag.
- I decided each bot would get three random program cards per turn. (My thought was that this would be manageable, keep them in a pretty tight range of their defended position, and it also made sure that I was still dealing out cards in multiples of 9, keeping things somewhat neat in that regard)
- I activated the guard ‘bots program cards in registers 1,3, and 5, making sure that I could be affected by their actions in the beginning, middle and end of my turn … and, again, it worked with the multiple of 3.
- I decided that the guard ‘bots would be affected by “Invisible Fence” technology, keeping them from running off into pits or off of the board.
- If a guard ‘bot were to receive a program card that propelled it into a pit space or off the board, I would simply treat it as if it ran into a wall (This turned out NOT to be ideal, and I have some ideas on improving it)
- Guard ‘bots could be damaged (and, potentially destroyed) by lasers and other “damaging” board hazards, including the weapons on my bot as well as “friendly fire” from other (stupid) guard ‘bots.
The board I chose for my experiment was one of the beginner boards from the Avalon Hill edition rule book, utilizing the Island grid and a docking bay.
The guard ‘bots displayed different movement characteristics early on, all of which would limit their early impact. One began wandering off into a corner of the board, one played merry-go-round on the conveyor belts and one was exceptionally unpredictable and hesitant to range far from its home post.
I was able to make the first flag with limited difficulty, and the guard bots also did little to impede my approach to the second flag (although I had a little miscalculation involving the “turning” conveyors that slowed me down a bit).
To this point, the only noticeable effects of the guard bots had been 1) A single laser shot from the confused bot in the corner, which I repaired on the objective marker and 2) To make the game a little less monotonous and 3) affect my card draws, as they were “stealing” cards that would have been mine to use in a simple solitaire game.
However, as I began my run for the third flag, two of the guard ‘bots began converging on the corner of the board where I was maneuvering to get back “inside” the island. Again I found myself under laser fire, and suffered one point of damage. I rammed one of my antagonists and was able to position a wall between my Twonky and another laser happy guard ‘bot.
Things looked a bit hairy as I found myself with very few beneficial move cards in the center of conveyor belt centrifuge, but the guard ‘bots began to veer off and I received a fresh batch of program cards and zipped to the final objective.
Overall, while it will never rival a game with actual thinking opponents, I’m not entirely displeased with this approach to a solo version of RoboRally. There is still plenty of room for improvement however.
To that end, here are my thoughts for what I might try next time.
- Guard ‘bots will no longer simply mimic a “wall” effect when a program card propels them toward a pit or off the board, instead they will immediately UTurn and move one space. This should make for a much more dynamic experience.
- Guard ‘bots will begin play with one randomly selected option card (discarding any that do not make sense with the random movement).
As for the video, I recorded it with my laptop as an afterthought as I set up for the game, and I’m not sure it lives up to what I normally strive for with my nonstoptabletop.com session videos, but I do believe it offers a decent glimpse into what the random movement of the guard ‘bots looked like.
You’ll also note in this video my custom player program sheet and custom docking bay board which I use to “upgrade” elements of play of my second edition copy to third edition conventions. You can download my RoboRally Upgrade Pack for owners of previous editions from BoardGameGeek.com by following this link:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/filepage/40708
