From Maize Craze to Deep Space:
FIRST Robotics Served Up Unusual Games
By Louis Craig
The Foley Freeze, along with thousands of FIRST Robotic Competition teams, watched as Jan. 5 as FIRST released the game challenge for the 2019 season: Destination Deep Space. Each year, organizers develop a challenge that will help students learn skills they can apply in real world engineerings. To understand the context of this game uniqueness, one must look back at the past FRC games.
Among the Highlights:
- 1992: Maize Craze. This was the first FRC game. The robots were much smaller than the current machines and the game was played on a field of corn.
- 1999: Double Trouble. This was the first game that featured teams working togethers in pairs known as “alliances”, a feature of FIRST games which has remained to this day. Each of the 2 alliances had 2 teams.
- 2002: Zone Zeal. The Foley Freeze, along with hundreds of other teams, started this year. The game was fairly simple, with teams taking possession of movable goals and moving them into their endzone, scoring balls inside for extra points.
- 2003: Stack Attack. This was the first game with the 15-second autonomous period to start a match. It featured a king of the hill in the middle of the field and teams stacking totes around the field.
- 2005: Triple Play. The first game to feature the now standard 3 vs. 3 alliance setup. This game was essentially a larger version of tic-tac-toe. Team 910 fared fairly well this year, ranking first overall in their subdivision and reaching division finals at the World Championship, losing to the eventual Championship winning alliance.
- 2007: Rack n’ Roll. This year featured robots scoring tubes onto a rack into the middle of the field, with an endgame featuring teams climbing onto ramps of other teams to elevate themselves. Team 910 won the Cure Division at the World Championship, appearing on the Einstein field for the only time in team history. The Einstein is the final four of robot championships.
- 2016: FIRST Stronghold. This was the first themed game, starting a trend that has carried through this year. It featured a medieval theme, with alliances crossing their opponent’s defenses and shooting boulders into their castles. This was also a successful year for Team 910, with our 2016 creation Polaris winning the 2016 Windsor Regional in Canada as the first overall ranked team and making it to the Carver Division finals at the World Championship, losing to the eventual Championship winning alliance
- An interesting fact is that in both 2005 and 2016, Team 910 lost the division finals to Championship winning alliances captained by Team 330, The Beach Bots, from Hermosa Beach, CA. In 2007, Team 330 captained the alliance that 910 joined to win the Curie division at the Championship.
