The REC Foundation and VEX Robotics are proud to introduce VEX IQ Challenge Highrise, the game for 2014-2014.
Game Video: VEX IQ Challenge Highrise - 2014-2015 VEX IQ Challenge Game - YouTube
Game Details & Documents: http://www.vexrobotics.com/wiki/Highrise
The biggest drawback I see to this game is that nothing stops a bot from taking out the opponents highrise at the 58 second mark. Looking forward to seeing how teams overcome that.
No opponents? Just teammates. 
LOL - that certainly helps. I was assuming that the Robot Skills Challenge Mode would have one robot from each team on the field.
A significant change looks to me like the introduction of a starting size limit “…Each Robot (smaller than 13”x19”x15” to start)…” I may be wrong but I don’t think there was a starting size limit in the Add-it-up game - which would explain some of the quite large bots being used at Worlds this year where it had to touch the floor of the arena within a certain size (same as in Highrise too) but could overhang this measurement. I like the idea of this, and it brings it in line with the VRC games too, assuming the robot can then expand beyond these limits once the game starts - back to reading the rules until Worlds starts again in a few hours.
On the whole I think I like the challenge set by the new game, I think the students will enjoy it!
I can see the use of a lot of six or eight bar lifts to get the height and keep the cubes as parallel as possible so as to be able to keep from knocking the cubes off of the highrises. There would be an advantage to having a different type bot on each team, one a “sweeper” type to get as many cubes as possible to the scoring side and the other a “lifter” bot to stack the cubes as high as possible.
We bought the new game at the worlds… soon we will start working on a design for the new bot. Too bad my kid is moving over to VEX, there is no VEX IQ for middle school in PR 
Tim… if you make a sweeper or a lifter only you will have trouble in the skills, my guess is that you have to build a robot that those both things.
Hmmm, you are probably right. You never know who you’ll be teamed with and specializing in one or the other could be detrimental. Food for thought, Kaverman!!
We have already give it a little thought to the sweeping part, but we still need to figure out how to get the cubes and how to make the tower without destroying it… any food for thought?
Game rule question: The rules say that if the robot is touching one of the cubes in the tower, then that cube is scored, but not counted as part of the tower. Just want to make sure that the rule only applied to the cube the robot is actually touching. My interpretation is that if a robot is pressing down on the top cube of the tower, to hold the entire tower in place, then all the other cubes would still be counted.
Since if you place a cube of another color in the tower been built, it does not count towards the tower, but the ones of the right color will count no matter if they are below or on top of the one of the wrong color will count toward the tower, my guess is that the same rule applies, the cubes you are actually touching are the ones that don’t count toward the tower all others will count.
When you say six or eight bar lifts are you talking about “stacked” 4 bar lifts, or are you talking about a 8 bar linkage like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er-ZTPyai-k
I’ll have to check on your link later. If it is what I think it is, then yes, a linkage that would be able to lift the cube and keep it parallel in plane with the floor so that you can place the cube more accurately on the stack. That way you would decrease your chance of knocking the stack over or not being able to place the cube onto the stack more accurately. What would be an ideal robot would be one that could “sweep” the cubes into a holding area, sort the cubes according to color and have an arm that would be able to lift the cubes into place quickly on the stacks. I guess if you ran out of time, at least the cubes you still had on your bot would count for score as long as you were in the scoring area. The greatest multiplier for score is cubes on a stack, but at least you’d have a score.