RoboRally!

With a player missing from the usual Sunday night Deadlands campaign, the rest of us turned our attention to RoboRally! Sorry for the poor photo, the pub just isn't the best for photos.

This fantastic board game has an interesting history. It was designed by Richard Garfield, who took it to Wizards of the Coast in the hopes of getting it published. WotC agreed to publish it, but as it had a lot of expensive components, they asked Richard if he had anything smaller that they could publish first, something like a card game...  That card game was Magic: The Gathering. Several hundreds of millions of dollars later, they published RoboRally.

I love this game because the premise is simple, and the basic mechanics are completely logical. You just have to set out movement cards each turn to give your robot instructions - move forward, turn left, move forward, turn right, etc., and be the first to touch all of the flags. It should be easy, but because you get a random draw of cards, and because the robots can bump each other off course, and because elements of the board can move and turn you around, the results are often utter chaos.  

I laughed a lot last night.