S1E2 - Robo Rally (Computation)

We dive into one of Jason's all-time favorite games: Robo Rally, where you program little robots to play capture the flag while shooting each other with lasers and avoiding deathtraps. Also, some stuff about remote-controlled bacteria and computers destroying the world with paperclips.

Timestamps

0:04 - Remote-controlled bacteria
2:18 - Robo Rally background
7:54 - Game mechanics and updates
12:07 - CPUs, GPUs, and computing
17:32 - Machine learning
22:12 - Factory automation
25:38 - Grades and final thoughts

Links

• Life-sized RoboRally
• CPG Grey and AI (video 1)
• CPG Grey and AI (video 2)

Gaming with Science™ is produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

Full Transcript

Brian  0:04  
Hello, and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.

Jason  0:10  
Today we'll be talking about Robo rally by renegade game studios. Well, welcome to another episode of Gaming with science. I'm Jason.

Brian  0:18  
I'm Brian.

Jason  0:19  
And today we'll be talking about Robo Rally. Well, before we get into the main topic, though, fun science fact. So Brian, your turn this time? What fun science thing Have you learned in the past bit?

Brian  0:28  
So yes, what did I find for us this week, based on the inspiration of Robo Rally and expressing my very severe biology bias, I found an interesting story about remote control the bacteria, maybe were more remote activated than remote controlled, there's a particular strain of E. coli that's approved for medical use in humans. And it can preferentially be taken up by cancer cells, you inject the bacteria into the bloodstream, and they will colonize cancer cells, because they're pretty good at living with less oxygen and solid tumors will often have a lower oxygen environment inside of them. They carry a type of engineered gene that can be turned on by heat very specifically. And by getting them to turn on this gene, you can have the make anti-cancer drugs, for instance. Now how do you turn this on inside of a human being, you basically use a combination of soundwaves to raise temperature in a very specific location at the site of the tumor, which is now colonized by these bacteria. And you kind of like trigger them to maybe not detonate but just start pumping out things that will kill cancer cells.

Jason  1:34  
So you basically turn E. coli into a bunch of little suicide bombers.

Brian  1:37  
Well, a bunch of little Yeah, a bunch of little attack robots, but a little attack drones saboteur. Yes, saboteur is for sure. Under normal circumstances, you probably don't want E. Coli in your cells, but the enemy of my enemy, I suppose,

Jason  1:49  
as long as they don't cure the disease by killing the host. If they're approved for clinical trials, then I assume that little hurdle has been passed. Yeah,

Brian  1:57  
you're you're able to use this inside of people, there is a strain of E coli you can inject into someone's bloodstream, and that is an approved form of therapy. 

Jason  2:05  
Okay... Well, on to the actual topic for today, which is Robo rally. I wanted to do this as soon as I thought about this podcast. Robo rally has been one of my favorite games, since I first played it way back in college. It actually has an interesting history. So it was first published back in 1994. It was first designed in 1985 by Richard Garfield, whose name you might recognize if you're in the gaming area, because he took it to a little gaming company called Wizards of the Coast, who told him that it looked like a great game, but it'd be too expensive for them to produce. So they wanted something that would be cheaper and easier for people to carry around. They could play at a convention. So he spent a few years and came up with this little like unknown card game called Magic the Gathering. And after that became a smash success was there said okay, maybe we can publish the robot game now. So interesting sidenote, Richard Garfield, he's not just some random game designer, I think, based on the time and it looks like he designed Robo rally while he was getting his Bachelor's in Computer mathematics. And he did Magic the Gathering while getting his PhD in combinatorial mathematics. So he has the actual like scientific computational chops behind this, and I think it shows in the game design. Anyway, it's gone through a few iterations. There's the original 1994 release. There's the 2005 rerelease under Avalon Hill, that's the one that I originally owned. Then it got released again in 2016, with a major rules upgrade. And then the one we're going to be talking about is the current edition, the 2023, one by Renegade Games Studios, which mostly builds off the 2016 edition with a few little tweaks in terms of like product quality and tiny little rules tweaks, as far as I can tell,

Brian  3:42  
oh, wow. So this is the third edition of this game at this point, basically.

Jason  3:46  
Basiicaly or 2.5, or something, there's only two really different editions, there's the original one, which is like 94, and 2005. And then there's the 2016 2023, although there's some some minor tweaks, so it's more like 2.5 edition.

Brian  4:01  
So it's just like Dungeons and Dragons, you skip over one edition.

Jason  4:04  
Something like that. Yes. And the Board Game Geek ranks on these are all over the place. I mean, the originals, the highest rank that around 500, 2016 is about 1500. The current one is around 5000. But I think there's a bias there in terms of just how many people have reviewed them, because the current one actually has the highest average rating among users. But it's got the lowest rank. So there's something with the algorithm putting it there, but the people who have ranked it on average seem to like the most recent one best. And I've got to say after playing it, I kind of like it. There's a lot of quality of life changes that happened from the my original version to this one that I like it's a little bit more streamlined. There's some of the clunkiness that has gone out. I do enjoy this version better. As far as what the game consists of, for those of you who've never played it. The idea of the game is that you're playing these little robots that are running around the factory floor playing basically battle bot Capture the Flag, they're trying to touch a little flags on the board. and shooting each other with lasers. And if that were all it were, it'd be, it'd be an OK game. But the thing is, this is a nightmarish factory. And so there are conveyor belts and bottomless pits, and pushers and lasers, some of the expansions, you can get to have water or things, the old ones have like oil slicks, and flame throwers, crushers, there's all sorts of stuff going on on these boards. And your goal is to move your robot around the battlefield. Now, the main thing that makes this challenging is that you do this by virtue of having a stack of cards that are your programming cards, you draw up to nine every turn, and then you put five of them down facedown in a row. And those are your next five moves. So you have to program your robot five moves at a time to move it around the board. If it were just an empty, featureless void, this would be trivial, it would not be a problem. But the fact is that with all the board elements going on and other players going around, you have to keep in your mind visualizing where will my robot be, which direction will be facing, what board elements will be changing things, and what my other people do to screw me over. So really, the strategy in the game comes from being able to visualize multiple steps ahead and keep all these different moving parts in your head and how they affect what your robot will be doing. And a lot of the fun comes from that going wrong, either for yourself or my personal favorite being able to screw over other people by running into them, or pushing them off the plant track, or anything like that. So it's a bunch of little computer controlled chaos, basically. And so why is it on here, because it's actually not trying to be a science game. And most of the games we're aiming to do in this podcast are science focused? Well, I mean, the primary reasons, because it's one of my favorite games, and that's one of the hosts, I can do that. But the other one is that it actually is a pretty decent representation of computer programming. For my day job, I've been doing computer coding for oof, 20 years now?, something like that, ever since graduate school. And playing the game actually feels a lot like programming a computer, you've got to think several steps ahead, you have very specific incremental steps you can do in the game, it's like you move forward two spaces you turn, right, you make a U-turn something like that very small defined steps that you have to piece together into a much more complicated whole to in order to accomplish some objective. And as happens with real computer programming, things go wrong and crap happens. And what I thought would be great, I make some mistake, or I forgot about something on the board and everything goes wrong, because in the game, if you turn right instead of left, or if their conveyor belt moves you two spaces when you thought it would move you one, suddenly your entire program is off. And instead of touching the flag, this turn, you instead end up falling off the bottomless pit or ramming into a wall or getting shot by four different laser beams or something crazy like that,

Brian  7:49  
you're still running that program, the fact that you made a mistake doesn't matter, you still have to deal with the consequences. 

Jason  7:54  
Yeah, and so the main parts of the game are the actual boards that you go on. This version comes with four double sided boards, there's already some expansions out, you can get to have additional ones with some additional board hazards. You can also just find these online, not necessarily the copyrighted ones that come with the game, but people have liked the game for 30 years at this point. And so people have just made custom boards or icon elements, so you can download custom sheets to print out. In fact, I think the quintessential one of that is you can look up YouTube videos of people doing a like life sized one made out of Lego robots at GenCon a few years ago. So you can watch people programming them and seeing these life side robots, which they made look like some of the robots in the game. And some of them are like R2D2 and Wally and such moving around this life sized board. So anyway, you've got your boards, you've got your minis, you've got your cards, and there's a few other things, some tokens and like little energy cubes, but the main things are the board that you move around to the robots you're moving and the card to use the program along with a shared set of damaged cards and upgrade cards that represent when you take damage that kind of fill your deck with useless stuff or random stuff. And the upgrade cards which let you do extra things.

Brian  9:09  
So one thing about this new version is the actual bot minis got a significant upgrade, right? 

Jason  9:15  
Yeah, so previously, they're just unpainted plastic miniatures. For any of you that have the old version, good life hack, you can use those little plastic things that go around house keys. You can put those around the base to differentiate them if you're if you like me have no skill at painting miniatures, but these ones are actually all pre painted minis there's only six instead of the original eight, so maybe they're aiming for a smaller player count. But yes, they're pre painted. The original original game was actually pewter minis which are really high quality but also kind of expensive and apparently some people complained about that at the time because while nice, it did make the price significantly higher. Okay, so Robo rally builds itself as being for two to six players, ages 12 and up. Again, you can play with younger kids but if you want to play, especially the more advanced courses, probably on the upper end of that, I know my daughter used to love not playing the game, she wanted to set up the board for us to play and she was a sadist, she would make the most difficult hardest board she could possibly do when she was like eight, because she didn't want to play it, she just wanted to watch us suffer. She has thankfully gotten beyond that a little bit. Normal game times it claims is about 45 to 90 minutes. Obviously, that's very scalable. You can do this on just a single board with a single flag, in which case, it can be over in 15 minutes if you play it fast. Or you can have multiple boards hooked together with multiple flags all over the place. And you could do a two or even three hour game. I mean, theoretically, if you get a bunch of the expansions, you could make an absolutely massive board that takes probably multiple days to run. But why would someone do that to themselves? It's a game enjoy for the time it is, Brian, you're usually talking about the metaphor of the game. Well, the metaphor of this game is that basically, this is what happens after the lights go out at the factory. So the humans go home, then all the robots power up and they do this little racing while the humans aren't there to stop them. I think in previous editions, they actually said this is a highly advanced automated factory in the future. And the AI's that run it are just super, super bored. And so this is how they're entertaining themselves. 

Brian  11:16  
But, that's not the metaphor anymore? It's not the super advanced AI? 

Jason  11:19  
No, no, this is just what the robots are. autonomous robots are just battling with each other for entertainment.Yep. Because that's what you do when the humans go home. 

Brian  11:28  
Yeah, I guess if you could just be reassembled, and it doesn't really matter if you fall into a bottomless pit, then why not?

Speaker 1  11:33  
Yes. And that's definitely one of the quality of life upgrades is that previous editions, you had limited number of lives, which if you lost them, then you're out of the game. And that's just not fun to just sit on the sidelines watching everyone else. So now you have infinite respawns, although you do take a little bit of a hit every time, just so it's not free. Especially because there is a valid strategy of touching the flag of one point, killing yourself so that you respond closer to your next flag. And you can basically get a jump on that.

Brian  11:57  
Yeah, we actually did that in one of our family play sessions, I think. So like, well, if you just dive yourself down to this pit, you'll be in a more tactical position for the next flag.

Jason  12:06  
Yep, All right. Now as for the actual science here, so I admit, when I first put this up, I knew I wanted to do Robo Rally, I didn't really know where the science would be. So I started looking at it and looking at the pieces. And the part that really stuck is the programming phase where you put down the five cards, and they call that the register. So there are five registers each turn, and you have to do those five in order as you lay them down. Now I knew that registers were something in computer programming, but I didn't really know what so I started looking up and then I went down a rabbit hole. Because it turns out this has to do with the way CPU architecture is built the difference between CPUs and GPUs, which we'll get to cryptocurrency machine learning, like this is like literally the core of all computation here, in this little board game, the five card register, roughly speaking, well, similar to that, that computers can do more than five things. But yeah, because the register turns out the register is part of the CPU, the central processing unit, that is what makes a computer run, it's what handles all the computation and data and stuff. And the register is what actually does those computations. And it can only hold a small number of things at a time. And kind of the size of that register determines the quality of your CPU. A lot of you have probably heard about like 32 bit architecture versus the 64 bit architecture. And the 64 bit architecture is the newer that's determines how much stuff can actually be held in the CPU 64 bits. And it just lets it do more things at once and handle larger numbers. Now, the interesting thing here is when I started looking into it, I've heard about CPUs and GPUs graphical processing units, because they turned out they're very useful for certain types of computation. They were actually originally designed for what the name says graphical processing. So these are the things running in your game consoles, PlayStations, Xbox, etc, to do these high end 3D graphics, but then people found out they were really useful for all sorts of other things, the biggest ones probably being machine learning. So programming, these AI algorithms, including things like chat, GTP, and Dali, and these other big AI programs, and then cryptocurrency mining, specifically Bitcoin, but presumably also the others. And the reason has to do with the way they're built. So a central processing unit, the one that's in most people's computers, its goal is to be able to do everything. So it can be highly flexible. It can take all sorts of different things in it can take different processing functions and different needs, and it can move them around and allocate resources and be very, very flexible. But because of that it's not super fast, relatively speaking. I mean, obviously, nowadays, chips are actually quite fast relative to previous ones. But relative to the other person in town, the GPU, CPUs are actually kind of slow, because they have to have that flexibility. A GPU is not flexible. It has much, much less ability to do other types of programming or do with different types of programming, but what it does is it does a certain type of calculations over and over and over again very, very well. It's basically set up to do many, many more times this calculation in parallel, thus making that particular calculation faster. Now, this is really useful for applications where you essentially have to do the same thing. a bajillion times, like with graphics processing, you just have to render the screen. That's all you're doing. It's always the exact same thing. Just render what the screen looks like, with crypto mining, you have to do the I actually don't know how Bitcoin crypto mining was it something about hash codes, curious

Brian  15:38  
primes or something, I don't know.

Jason  15:40  
Something like that. I don't do crypto mining, I don't understand it. But lots of people are trying to make lots of money by using GPUs to do that. And then machine learning it's training. It's crunching all the data and running all these different algorithms on it, actually not running that many different now the same algorithm just many, many times. And so that's why GPUs are so favorable for some things. And that's why there's actually a shortage of them right now. I was talking to someone the other day, they said that someone I think they were saying the UK has basically bought all GPU units that are going to be produced in the next six months already, like they're backlogged at this point. Now, I suspect that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but it gives you an idea, these things are in really hot demand precisely because of their ability to run these sorts of computation. I suspect the UK wants them not for crypto mining, but probably for machine learning applications.

Brian  16:29  
Interesting, so a GPU is good at doing one thing, it's it's a brute force solution to one type of calculation.

Jason  16:37  
Yeah, basically, someone made the comparison that a CPU is like a fighter jet. It's fast, it's maneuverable, it can do all sorts of things. But you can't actually carry that much stuff in it. So if your goal is to move something from point A to point B, you don't want to use a fighter jet. Whereas if you have like a shipping barge, like it's not fast, it's not maneuverable, but it can move a ton of stuff. And so by virtue of having the GPU being able to move a ton of calculations, the net effect is that you're able to do those calculations much, much faster. A different comparison someone made is that a CPU is like a small team of geniuses who can do anything you want them to do, but they take a little while to learn the new system and get it set up and going. Whereas the GPU is like a an army of people who may not be geniuses, they're just Okay people, but you have them doing the same thing over and over and over again. And so they just due to the scale of how many you have working, they're able to get it done quickly.

Brian  17:37  
So in the metaphor of Robo rally, we're dealing with a CPU a flexible programmable register,

Jason  17:43  
pretty much yeah, this it's too simple to be a GPU.

Brian  17:45  
So what would a GPU be in Robo rally?

Jason  17:49  
Ooh, that I don't know if it could be represented in the game. Because unless you were doing something where you were actually trying to learn the game, by playing it against itself, it's almost like you'd have to be a bit of a metagame where you use it to play the game a whole bunch of times to learn the strategies and then implement them on the individual CPU calculations. Because I can't think of any way where you want to have like 12 different registers going at once and all your different robots going in different directions to figure out which one actually works.

Brian  18:20  
You're, you're running an army of bots instead of one bot.

Jason  18:23  
Yeah, although people have done that, not to play the game, but as a teaching tool. So when I was looking into this, I found that Robo rally has been used for a long time to teach computation to people, to high school students and undergraduates and such, sometimes it's really simple. It's just a basic board. And they'll just have the robot that they write the programming code to help it navigate around obstacles and end up getting to the flag. That's pretty simple. But I saw one person who had enough that they were actually doing machine learning on it. So it was the students tasks to train a machine learning algorithm to play Robo rally by itself. It's not explicitly programmed that here's the flag, make sure you go forward towards the flag, turn to avoid obstacles, but rather just play the game a bajillion times, and learn the rules so that you can play it on your own. This is things like Deep Mind and stuff did with AlphaGo. The original chess program was deep blue, I think. And it was more of a brute force programming. But modern ones I suspect use machine learning like this. They're using it for go for poker for pretty much all the things you're doing now with games, they're not trying to explicitly program in the rules of the game. They're just trying to have the computer essentially play against itself a whole bunch of times and learn the rules. 

Brian  19:36  
That's interesting, because in those systems, I've seen people do things like this to try to teach an AI how to play Pokemon and you need to set the rules up very carefully to reward and punish appropriately. And I know the flags are the objective, but how's it going to accidentally find the flags? train it to Oh, don't go off the board or you can't stand still or stuff like that.

Jason  19:58  
Yeah, basically, and again, And I don't know the algorithmic details of this, I know some of the terminology. But basically, when it does something that you want, which the first many hundreds or 1000s of times will basically be by random chance, it gets rewarded. So something about the way code is executed, that time gets strengthened, so it's more likely to happen again. Whereas if something bad happens, you go off the board, you fall down a pit, whatever, then you get punished. And we're literally talking 1000s upon 1000s of plays, just to get the first step, and then you iteratively go there. So these complex machine learning algorithms that can play Go and chess and pokimane, I've seen Minecraft and StarCraft being worked on, they take probably millions to billions of plays to learn the rules, basically. But by the end of it, they're actually really good. In fact, I remember when AlphaGo beat the world Go champion. The thing with it was that because it had played against itself, instead of learning from past human ones, it came up with strategies that humans don't do. Because Go is taught from essentially master to student you learn from other humans. And so there's a bit of culture in terms of like, Oh, these are the kinds of moves you make, like chess has certain opening moves and such. The computer didn't care. It just did whatever it happened to find. And so it found some solutions that were way outside the box, as far as human Go playing was, someone described it as Go from Mars, in some ways, that was probably give it an edge to beat the humans just because it did things that they weren't expecting,

Brian  21:27  
Sort of developed its own culture. Here's my biology bias. Again, this sounds an awful lot like natural selection.

Jason  21:32  
That's exactly what it is. In fact, early versions of this were called genetic algorithms, because you would actually mutate them, and then select the ones that worked best. And then you'd mutate them again, and so on. If you look under the hood, what they're doing, they're actually making many, many, many different versions of these AIs, randomly mutating them, keeping the ones that do best mutating those again, over and over and over again. So they're iteratively, improving it. And they are essentially evolving computers that can do these tasks.

Brian  22:00  
I guess it's almost an extreme example of artificial selection, because you've set the task in front of it that you wanted to do, but you could do it millions, billions of times.

Jason  22:10  
Yeah. And there's some really good YouTube videos on this. So it's CPG. Gray has a good one on just general artificial intelligence training. And then there's a bunch of people that actually show you what it looks like to train an AI to do something like to have a make a little AR avatar walk, just giving it basic instructions or play various games are such they're all over YouTube. So it's interesting. I mean, it's very fascinating. Watching the computer learn to do things also may be a little bit scary as people are realizing what's chat GTP as we're getting ones that are good enough to mimic a human and do things. I'm not worried about computers taking over the world yet, although that actually kind of leads into the third thing I wanted to talk about. Because looking into this, like I found stuff about basic computer programming, I found stuff about CPUs and GPUs, the last one I looked into was automated manufacturing. This is sort of like the quintessential end goal of replacing people with robots in factories, which is where you have a factory that is essentially completely robotic, there are no humans there. Or maybe there's like one to make sure things don't break, or maybe a few people doing quality control. But otherwise, the factory runs itself. So the company Phillips, that makes razors, they have a factory like this in the Netherlands, apparently there's got they've got some humans there that are only for quality control. And then this next one actually made me laugh. So there's a company called FANUC, F A N U C don't know how to pronounce that. In Japan, they have a an automated factory, where the robots are making more robots. And they can do about 50 robots per day, they work 24/7, they can go a full month without any humans checking in. And it has the advantages that they don't have to have lighting or heat or air conditioning or anything like that, that the humans need. But as I read that, I had to think Have you not seen any science fiction films about how robots actually do take over the world? The point at which you have robots making more robots is the point at which they start taking over the world.

Brian  24:06  
Oh, they have. That's why they did it. What sorts of robots are they making?

Jason  24:11  
I don't know. I mean, they could just be other manufacturing robots and such. The thing is like, I'm actually not concerned about robots taking over the world in terms like, oh, they suddenly develop sentience and want to command themselves and be autonomous and get rid of their human over masters. I don't think we can make AI that good yet. I'm more worried about what someone called, I think it was termed the paperclip problem. All you need is for a sufficiently powerful AI whose job it is to make paperclips. decide the best way to do that is to convert all other mass on the planet into paperclips. And that's not being able to stop it. It has no intelligence as far as we would understand it. It has no morality. It's not evil. It's just doing its job in a very efficient and kind of unfortunate way. That's the kind of AI I'm worried about is where it will do what we have programmed it to do so well that we suffer unintended consequences from it. Probably not from paperclips. But well, this is not the time to get into a spiral off tangent in terms of what social media and all that sort of stuff is doing with AI. That's where it concerns me. But thankfully, Robo rally is just cute little robots playing. When that laser tag gets actually they're shooting each other trying to blow each other up. So cute little robots playing battle bot, capture the flag in a factory at night when the humans have gone home.

Brian  25:28  
It's full contact laser tag.

Jason  25:30  
Yes. Oh, definitely pushing is a big part of this. There's nothing better than being able to push someone's robot one space to the side and throw off their entire plans.

Brian  25:39  
Yeah, we went pretty pretty far away from I can't remember which direction a conveyor belt goes to AI is making paper clips that convert the entire planet into paper clips.

Jason  25:48  
Yes, well, I mean, maybe we'll be better off and we'll just have the AI is will convert the entire planet into computational infrastructure for them to play Go against each other. That may be more like where we're heading now. But yes, we did have that issue where you cannot remember which way conveyor belts go. So I know any game in the future, I just need to introduce conveyor belts, so I can win.

Brian  26:08  
But how well do you think the aim of Robo rally sort of represents the science of the metaphor? Is it doing a good job?

Jason  26:16  
So this was tricky for me. And I was thinking about this because we wanted to give letter grades like how well does this actually represent the science of running a robot. And on the one hand, there's not that much science here, I mean, I did have to go looking a little bit to try to find something because it really is just Battle Bot Capture the Flag. That's what the game is trying to be. It's not trying to encapsulate a scientific project. But on the other hand, playing the game feels like writing computer code, it actually feels very similar to me. And I can see it being a good introductory thing for like, middle schoolers or such to teach them the very basics of, hey, this is how programming goes. And such. And so I think, for that point, in terms of capturing the the feel, and the essence of writing code of programming a computer, I think it does pretty well. I mean, if I were to give it a grade, I'd probably give it. Well, here's the thing as just pure science portrayal, probably like a B, B+. But if you take it like how much science is actually trying to convey, I'd bump it up to an A or an A-, because it's not trying to convey a lot of science. It's just trying to be fun. And using a little bit of computer science to do that. And it does that little bit quite well. 

Brian  27:21  
Okay, well if we're going to look at it just purely from the science perspective, you think maybe a B+ then?

Jason  27:26  
something like that. And that's mostly just because it doesn't have that much in it. 

Brian  27:29  
Yeah, this is not an inherent objective of the game. It's there, but you kind of gotta go looking for it.

Jason  27:35  
Yeah, which is not a problem. Like not all games need to have something in the science. So

Brian  27:40  
Well, that's true. But our games do you have to have at least a little bit. So what does this game feel like to play? So let's see. Not facts, but feelings on this. For me, it makes me feel like I'm crazy.

Jason  27:54  
How so? like, like, I can see frustration. But what do you mean crazy? 

Brian  27:58  
It makes me feel like I am five years old and can't remember left from right. 

Jason  28:02  
Okay yes, that happens. There have definitely been times I turned left when I meant to turn right. Yeah, I think one of our games that happened at least once, possibly twice.

Brian  28:09  
It's interesting to me that the metaphor of the game is no longer I am an advanced AI because if I am an advanced AI, I evidently am one that cannot solve basic CAPTCHAs of what is a left and what is it a right, so maybe in that way, sure. I don't mind playing Robo rally, it's fine. I'm not good at the game. So it's really about feeling that I am offering very little competition for someone I'm playing with. But as long as they don't mind, I don't mind being a bad player at the game. It's enjoyable to watch your robot get pushed in unexpected ways.

Jason  28:38  
I totally agree. In fact, it was infamous in my family that we owned this game. And it was my favorite game for like five or six years before I actually won a game. But I still loved it. It's one of those games where I don't care if I win. It's just fun to play. And sometimes it's even more fun to lose spectacularly.

Brian  28:56  
So for those of us might be more videogame inclined for anybody who played Portal 2 the end of the game involves sort of a collaborative work of two robots trying to solve a puzzle and get through a complex factory. That's a collaborative game. In a way Robo rally feels a little bit like that. But you are not working together. You are explicitly working against each other. But it would be interesting to see what a collaborative form of Robo rally would look like.

Jason  29:21  
I bet people could hack that and now you have me wanting to make the portal gun upgrade for you just be insane. Although there are teleporters and one of the expansions so actually not that crazy.

Brian  29:31  
That can be one of the upgrade cards. Yeah, your laser creates a portal on a flat surface. 

Jason  29:36  
Yeah, Okay, so how about you? If you had to grade the gameplay? How would this go? 

Brian  29:41  
Oh, that's difficult for me. Because again, it's like, I know this is one of your favorite games. It's one that I'm happy to play, but it's not one that I'm super enthusiac. Yeah, it's not what I'm gonna get off the shelf. So if it just my own pure grade, I'm gonna have to give it a B, B- because it's not going to be one that's going to be a go to.

Jason  29:57  
Okay, and obviously, you can probably guess I'm gonna give it an A or an A+, just because I think it is a blast to play, especially if you can get four or five people so that the robots are all running into each other a lot. We played it first with just two people. And it's, it's okay with two people. But you don't get that much interaction, when you have four or five, and you're all running into each other and shooting each other, it becomes a lot more fun, at least from my definition of fun. 

Brian  30:19  
And we've done some of those games with more people. Luckily, it's not just the two of us, we do get to test these games out with a larger player count. And so we do kind of know what that's like as well. So you would recommend it clearly?

Jason  30:31  
I would clearly recommend this. I love this game. And I actually really liked the rules upgrade. So I think they did a lot of good improvements for it. And I think I now prefer the newest version over the one I originally bought just because it's a little bit slicker and smoother. And the good news is that most of the pieces, especially the boards are actually still compatible, you just slap the board down, maybe figure out how to put a few of the new, the new elements on what stickers are just print off little things you can just place on as temporary tokens or something. But otherwise, it's still completely compatible.

Brian  31:02  
I don't think we talked about this last time, what's the price point on this.

Jason  31:05  
So when I got this, the MSRP was $50. Obviously, you can get it for less at Big box stuff for Amazon, we always encourage people to support your local game stores, which are probably selling it at full price. So I just consider that to be the tax for keeping my friendly local game store in business. But I would rather pay a little bit extra and make sure it's going in the pocket of someone who is here and local and who loves board games then to, Well, let's be blunt, Amazon technically has humans running it. But mostly it's run by an AI.

Brian  31:33  
So we don't want to support robots?

Jason  31:36  
They're doing just fine on their own. I can go to my local game store and Amazon will not care.

Brian  31:42  
$50 actually doesn't seem that bad for a game that you're gonna get this much replay out of. And with that this was sort of intrinsic resources available so many ways to support it. So many different ways to play it if you want to hack it if you like it $50 seems like a good value.

Jason  31:56  
Yeah, you get a few replays out of it. It's definitely worth it. And there's definitely a very devoted fan base that you can find on the internet with all sorts of stuff. All right. Well, I think that's where we're going to wrap it up. Thank you very much everyone for listening. Until next time, have fun, have good games, and we will see you next time. See ya. This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2024. listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose as long as credit is given to Gaming with Science. This podcast is produced with the support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe