partnerships

Imagine that you're a supercomputer. Now imagine that you're bored. So you dream up a little contest for you and a couple of your supercomputing buddies. Your task is to move one of the stupid little robots out on the factory floor through a series of checkpoints scattered throughout the factory. The wrinkle, however, is that the factory floor is filled with all kinds of inconvenient (if not down-right deadly) obstacles located in various locations: conveyor belts, crushers, flame-throwers, pushers, teleporters, oil slicks, pits, et cetera. But the real fun comes when the robots cross each other's path, and suddenly your perfect route is something less than that...

In RoboRally players each control a different robot in a race through a dangerous factory floor. Several goals will be placed on the board and you must navigate your robot to them in a specific order. The boards can be combined in several different ways to accommodate different player counts and races can be as long or as short as player's desire.

In general, players will first fill all of their robot's "registers" with facedown movement cards. This happens simultaneously and there is a time element involved. If you don't act fast enough you are forced to place cards randomly to fill the rest. Then, starting with the first register, everyone reveals their card. The card with the highest number moves first. After everyone resolves their movement they reveal the next card and so on. Examples of movement cards may be to turn 90 degrees left or right, move forward 2 spaces, or move backward 1 space though there are a bigger variety than that. You can plan a perfect route, but if another robot runs into you it can push you off course. This can be disastrous since you can't reprogram any cards to fix it!

Robots fire lasers and factory elements resolve after each movement and robots may become damaged. If they take enough damage certain movement cards become fixed and can no longer be changed. If they take more they may be destroyed entirely. The first robot to claim all the goals in the correct order wins, though some may award points and play tournament style.

The game was reprinted by Avalon Hill (Hasbro/WotC) in 2005.

Crack the Case is a party game for 2 or more players and is ideal for team playing. A moderator reads one of 108 case cards to the active playing team. The players then have to solve the case by asking the moderator the right questions. Solve the most cases in the least amount of time to win the game.

Outburst is a game of lists. Two teams take turns trying to guess as many of the 10 answers to a topic on the cards. Bonus points can be earned by guessing a Target Answer determined by a die roll. The first team to 60 points wins! The game mechanism is very similar to the long time TV game show Family Feud, and itself seems to be the basis for the Canadian game show Talk About, which also spawned its own home game by Pressman.

An example would be a Topic Card of "10 Cars Rich People Drive." The team whose turn it was, would have to name the 10 cars on the Topic Card by the time the minute sand timer runs out.

The earlier versions of this game have a lot of dated topics. The 1995 version by Parker Brothers is more recent topically.

Re-implemented by:

Outburst II
Outburst Remix!
Electronic OUTBURST

One Thousand Milestones. On French roads there are small marker stones giving the distance in kilometres to the next town. In this famous old French card game, players compete to drive 1000 km, dealing with hazards along the way. Draw a card to your hand, play or discard. You must lay a green traffic light to start, play cards showing mileage, dump hazards (flat tire, speed limit) on the other players, remedy hazards (spare tire, end of limit) from yourself, play safety cards (puncture proof), and try to be the first to clock up the distance.

This game is like Charades on 'Speed'. The active player gets four cards. Each card has two words on it, one easy, one difficult. The harder the word, the more points it's worth. The player picks one word from each card and loads them into the timer device. S/he then has about a minute to communicate the words to teammates; when a word is guessed correctly, the card must be snatched out of the timer. The timer, meanwhile, will "eat" the cards, one at a time, if they aren't snatched. You get points for each card successfully rescued from the timer.

Reimplemented with different rules: Electronic Guesstures