RoboRally is a humourous science fiction board game for two to eight players designed by Richard Garfield, published by Wizards of the Coast. Several expansions have been published.
The fundamental game mechanic is somewhat original: from a limited hand of cards with very basic instructions (turn 90° to the left, turn 90° to the right, turn 180°, move 1, 2 or 3 steps forward or one back) each player builds a five instruction program for his/her robot. These programs are then executed simultaneusly on the «factory floor», a board filled with walls and hazards for the robots to zig-zag between to reach their destination.
The game that has been built around this interesting mechanic is, however,
quite bland. Player interaction (the fun part) has no other positive aspects
than possibly picking on the leader, which is often necessary since the game
suffers badly from the leader breakaway syndrome.
The expansions do nothing to alleviate this; the first one, Armed and dangerous, only introduces extra boards, markedly inferior to the original ones, and rather uninspired extra gadgets for the robots, some reqire tedious bookkeeping discouraging their use.
In order to «rescue» the cool core concept, I have (with good help from other members of Hexagon, Trondheim gaming club) developed a variant game building on the same basic mechanics but with a different goal.
This variant requires three decks of 26 cards each, containing bugs, secret goals and minor options. These are collected in a nine page 300 kB colour pdf-file: Cards.pdf
Update 2003-03-22 playtesting has shown one `minor option' card (`Heatsinks') to be too powerful, so it is recommended to to use this replacement page instead of page 5 in the cards file.
The rules list the few other components needed.