On this game night, six knights race some robots across a crazy factory floor in Robo Rally (2016 edition). Robo Rally is a programming race game that is on the short list of my favorite games. The original game was released in 1994 and has come out in many editions with many expansions over the past 26 years. Garrett brought over his copy of the 2016 edition, this my first time seeing the changes in the new edition. Cormac and Scott were new to the game with the other four knights being experienced in the older editions of the game.

Some highlights of the tweaks in this new edition; each player now gets their own deck of programming cards; the priority of movement is given to the robot closest to a control tower; damage no longer reduces hand size and locks registers, instead it fills your deck with useless SPAM cards.

The heart of the old game still beats in this new edition. You do your best to plan the next five movements of your robot from a random hand of cards and hope that other robots or mistaken planning do not foil your plan. The winner is usually determined by the robot who can get out ahead of the chaos which ensues when robots are running close to each other.

Leave it to this game for insanity on the very first turn, Cormac runs his robot right off the side of the board and takes Garrett’s robot with his into the pit. Yup we are playing Robo Rally welcome to the party on the factory floor, just need a disco ball to go with the lasers!

Scott took off down the board in the lead right away. He had some misfortune, not seeing a printed wall on the board under one of the flag checkpoints, causing him to run his robot into said wall for half a turns’ register phases. Twonky got squeezed between Cormac and Tim’s laser fire along the side of the board when he tried to gain energy cubes to purchase add ons for his robot.

I managed to catch up to Scott and we reached the second board on about the same turn. It was really close for tagging checkpoint one but I managed to get there first with my card draw while Scott had to come back around to the flag.

Tim managed to get his bot down toward the first checkpoint then had trouble getting the right cards to program his robot onto the checkpoint. It was mass chaos on the board around checkpoint one. I managed to escape the scrum and found my way to checkpoint two quickly.

My bot tagged checkpoint two and was turning for the conveyer belts to take me to checkpoint three. Tim then knocked Garrett’s bot down a pit for the best line of the night “WHHYYYY!?” The answer to that question Sir Garrett is simply Robo Rally that is why.

I touched checkpoint three to finish the game while there was a pile of robots in a confused mess around checkpoint one. Yup this edition still feels like Robo Rally.

Robo Rally Final Positions:

  Knight Score
1 Luke 3 Flags
2 Scott 1 Flag
3 Twonky (Frank) 1 Flag
4 Tim No Flag
5 Garrett No Flag
6 Cormac No Flag