Barrier Battle, A Hypothetical Game

I made a hypothetical new game, because I was bored and I felt like it. Here it is:

It’s called barrier battle, because it has a barrier down the middle. @Got_a_Screw_Loose came up with the perfectly reasonable name.

The way you play barrier battle is by shooting disks to the other side of the field, or by putting disks on your alliance colored posts.

Winning autonomous is worth 20 points.
A disk on your opponents near zone (the 2 tiles closest to the barrier) is worth 1 point.
A disk on your opponents far zone (the farthest tiles from the barrier) is worth 4 points.
A disk on your alliance colored post is worth 5 points.

Robots start on their alliance’s side of the field. Robots are not allowed to touch the tiles on the other side (if they somehow managed to get through the barrier, which is unlikely). Robots start with 1 preload each, and each alliance has 8 disks that can be introduced as match loads during driver control. There is a possession limit of 6 disks. There are no rules against descoring. There is no expansion limit either. Additionally, only 6 disks may be scored on each post, any extra disks are not worth anything.


disks are 4" diameter cylinders, with 1.5" holes in the middle. There is a .5" deep groove running through the middle of the side of the disks. They are made of plastic, weighing only 0.2 lbs.

The posts are 1" diameter pvc pipes, 3 ft tall above the tiles.
The barrier is a pvc pipe and polycarbonate structure, rising 2 ft above the tiles. disks cannot be forced though any cracks in the barrier, there just isn’t a physical way for that to occur.

All other normal game rules apply.

Reasons why I think this would be an excellent game:

  • the disks are a very unique game piece, we’ve never had to both stack and shoot the same pieces, and we’ve never had to shoot any non-spherical pieces.
  • the variety of scoring options (dumping over the wall into the near zone, shooting over the wall into the far zone, placing onto the posts) would encourage a variety of successful robot designs, unlike tower takeover.
  • the field is very simple, setting up the field would not take too long, and there aren’t any annoying pieces (flashbacks to the tp net)
  • field reset is quick and easy.
  • watching 2 opposing disks collide in midair would be awesome.
  • Taran’s disk dropping drone would be fun to watch. Until his teammate accidentally hits it out of the sky

the only bad thing about this game would be skills. To solve this, in skills, the 2 polycarb panels closest to the center of the field would be removed, to allow the robot to cross to The other side of the field. this way there would be plenty for a robot to do in skills. Points could be scored for either alliance.

I made this post not only to showcase a cool idea for a game, but to invite you all to use this as an opportunity to practice quickly coming up with designs for the real game reveal on april 25th. I would love to hear the types of robots you all would build. Pretend this is the real game, what is your design going to be?

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I’m including the CAD files for the field, if anyone’s interested. I got the field perimeter, tiles, and the post bases from the tower takeover field CAD. the rest of the pieces I made myself.
BarrierBattleFieldCAD.zip (1.5 MB)

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Dude I love this. 10/10 would play this game. It’s like IQ Ringmaster and Crossover had a baby and mutated into VRC.

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How do you do so much so fast? If you’re bored I’d absolutely love your assistance with something :slight_smile:

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Yah I just came up with a design that is like the star struck robots instead it has a box that has roller that pick up the game pieces. I might be extremely hard to pick them up though.

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You could use a type of needle intake if you prioritize scoring on the posts. Maybe that would get teams an opportunity to use pneumatics.

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Its not the disk game we wanted, its the disk game we needed!

Jokes aside, I seriously like this Starstruck-like spinoff as a game. IMO, this has some serious potential in being a great game.

Only major thing that bothers me is that there isn’t really an “end-game” action you have to do. Its one of the things that made games like Tower Takeover boring after a couple of matches. Its always just the same things going on. One possible end-game could be something like NBN where alliances could lift each other to score more points. Anything could really work to increase tension near the end of the match.

All in all, great job designing this!

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I’m nostalgic right now…

But you know that there would be a team with a DR4b. There always is

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if next season’s game is as exciting as this I’m joining a vexu team

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Some super expanding bot would be really op. It would be really really hard to make, but if it could be done, then it would be ridiculously good. You could bar off the posts from your opponents and block them from dumping stuff over

What’s the size limit? I think a 20x20x20 would be v interesting. Even 24x24x24. Imagine how big they would be

18x18x18 for vrc.
15x15x15 and 24x24x24 for vexu

I was thinking that too but after you get all of those rings on the posts then you are basically done

I was thinking more along the lines of 24x24x24 for vrc and just enormous robots for VEXU

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why would we need enormous robots though?

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The question isn’t why we would need big bots, it’s why we wouldn’t. Also, I like big bots and I cannot lie. I had to, I’m sorry for y’all’s mental states.

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Descoring is a thing. I would only expect to see teams filling posts in auton or towards the end of the match if this were the game.

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Ah yes. Finally, a game where flywheel on lift can be meta

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I think this game needs an endgame. I don’t want to reuse any old endgames though, any ideas?

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Maybe make it so ur not allowed to go to the other side until there’s like 10 seconds left then u can get like 20+ points if u get to the opposite side

Or a score multiplier; maybe +25% of ur current score for every robot on the other side. That way teams with bad robots can’t make a robot dedicated to just getting to the other side and have to actually score points

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