Once again, here to give a brief report on our just concluded Blank.'s Beginnings 2026 (BB26).
Side-note: Luke Does Robotics did a analysis of 2 of the matches even while we were still tearing down and cleaning up the venue. Factoring in the time zone difference, I really think he doesn’t sleep at all.
Just to provide the context again (for the benefit of those getting to know about this event for the 1st time) - BB is a 100% student-run event, from planning, scheduling, setting up, running the event (ref, queue marshals, livestream, etc) to cleaning up, etc. You can’t get more student-centred then this.
So it is really a by-students, for-students early season event, with 2 main objectives in mind - to kickstart the seasons for the teams, and also to provide a “safe space” to try out ideas and strategies (almost like an advanced proof of concepts).
So please be gracious and understanding if you see any robots breaking down or doing something “strange”. Typically, here in SG, we will only received the new game sets about 3 weeks to 1 month after the US teams received theirs.
I will do the reporting on the following - Tournament itself and my own views on the gameplay and robot designs.
Tournament:
Our 3rd year doing this super-duper early unofficial tournament and BB26 has certainty, slowly but surely grew in popularity (maybe because it is free for registration and we promised free lunch). We started off with only 14 teams back in 2024, and this year we had 28 teams that registered and turned away certain teams as well.
This year we included a VEXU team. Since BB26 is an unofficial tournament and they built their 15" robot before the rule change for VEXU drivetrain (previously it was capped at 55W as well), i thought it will be good to expose the V5RC students to VEXU robot and hopefully learnt something from them as well.
But as usual, as it was early in the season and there were teams that couldn’t do a Ri3D or Ri5D, etc and pulled out in the last minute. So in the end, we had 25 teams.
We had a 2-field setup, 6 qualifying matches for each team and used a 8-min match cycle.
We originally planned to have our qualifying matches down between 930am to 1230pm.
But ended up stretching to 1pm. But I do think 8min match cycle is sufficient. The delays were mainly due to some arguments over the rules and our queue marshals decided to give time for all teams to report to the field.
We didn’t expect so much defensive plays involved. And when most teams decided to play the roller and pushbot game, there were many calls on trapping and pinning, etc. And most of it happened between the rollers and the goal closest to the rollers. And one robot could transit from being pinned (at the roller) to pinning another robot (at the goal) within seconds.
Whoever doing refereeing this year will need to be well-versed in the trapping rule.
Here’s the list of award winners:
Tournament Champions: 8068E and 8059E
Tournament Finalists: SCRT and 8059X
3rd Place: 81819C and 81819E
Design Award: 8501A
Build Award: 6546C
Judges Awards: 8062A and 35768B
Gameplay and Robot Designs:
With all due respect to all the award winners, but I do think we have to take it with a big measure of “discernment”.
There were many teams that spent their time building their DR4B, 6BR4B, cascade lift, etc but didn’t get to really use them at all.
And I presumed due to the lack of time, these teams decided to focus a bit more on their lifts than the rotators.
Within the first few matches of the tournament, all teams started to realise how difficult it is to actually stack any cups or pins. And soon, they realised no point doing so much scoring of the pins (especially the yellow) when their opponents will gained all their hard work just by turning the rollers.
And soon, it ended up a roller game throughout.
I think the max height was only 4 stacks. And the winners were those teams that had an effective rotator.
But that said, teams do need to spend some time to work out their roller gameplay, eg. when to defend the rollers and when to leave it unattended to park, which roller to go for and which roller can be ignored, etc.
I do foresee the importance of having a good autonomous to stack as much as you can.
And I do think this “roller” game is only valid for early season. I am sure by September, we will see teams having better intake and faster stacking abilities. This will move the “roller” game back to the last 30sec of the match.
So a big question for teams to consider in their robot designs - do you want a high-stacker robot or a robot that stack maybe up to 4 stacks and then move around to play defence and the roller game to stress up the high-stacker?
And will end off with this link to the semi-finals and finals matches - Elims at Blank.'s Beginnings - VRC Override Early Season Tournament
And do a bit of advertising - look out for our 8059Blank. robots’ reveals soon.
Apart from our version of “herobot”, we will also be showcasing our version of DR4B (heavily adapted from one of our 8059 ITZ worlds robots).