First Thoughts on Sack Attack

• The game should have been called Bridge Battle's Revenge.
• I think the GDC named it Sack Attack to rid the robotics world of the memories of Stack Attack. 
• I hope those sacks are durable, and their contents are easily cleaned up
• If they are though, I think "sacks" are a brilliant gamepiece. Unorthodox yet doable, and doable in a vast number of ways. Good size too. They should "stack" pretty easily in robots. 
• 98, non alliance specific, unorthodox game pieces, some of which are shiny and give extra points. Hello, year of continuous intake improvement. Excite!
• Glad to see the anti-wallbot "trapping" rule, but I don't think they went far enough. The field has one heck of a choke point in the middle. 
• My first thought is that allowing descoring, and making it so easy, is a huge mistake. Descoring quickly and efficiently in round up was an interesting engineering challenge. Descoring in this game is as simple as building RakeBot, or in the case of the high goal, StickBot.
• A lot of inexperienced teams are going to try to build claw bots. While I'm sure an elite few will emerge, I don't know how claws will fair by and large in this game. 
• We're going to see a lot of eight wheel drives and tank treads this year. People are going to discover in a hurry that the sacks are just as much an element of terrain as they are a game piece. If I was playing, I'd totally build my VEX tristar wheels just to try them out. 
• The manual referring to Polycarb as "non shattering plastic." Perfection. Watch out, sacred pneumatic components, you have a challenger for favorite phrase in a robotics competition manual.
• I have mixed thoughts about how human-autonomous interaction was brought back. On the one hand, I would have preferred to see all but the "forgot to turn on the robot" rule gone. But I'm glad that the game looks to be less influencable from the alliance squares. I'm also glad that programming skills interaction has been reduced, though I'm not yet sure the GDC went far enough there. 
• This is going to be either a really good year, or a really bad year for autonomous. It's bad in that the trough is an easy target for an autonomous robot. It may be good if the dynamics of the sacks throw off drivetrains just enough to force them to use advanced corrective techniques. Of course, that might just make it bad again...
• This is a game of volume. Volume pickup, and volume scoring. Large goals, relatively small gamepieces. 
• Unless...The "game breaker" that jumps out at me would be a "super stacker" on the high goal, executed at the end of the match. 
• The troughs are at the perfect height. High enough to be a challenge to score in, and not restrict robot design too much. But just low enough to force something very, very creative to reach the high goal, and cross under the troughs. 
• The endgame seems to be designed to force a split second choice between going for it or a last second big play. I'm betting that 95% of the time in high level play, the last second big play will be the right move. 
• I think this game will be exciting to watch. I think it will be easier than some recent games, though still nowhere near as easy as I'd like, to keep track of the score. 
• However, I am afraid that offensive powerhouses are going to get shut down by descorers. Again, for a game to work with descoring, it must be substantially harder to descore than to score. That doesn't seem to be the case here. 
• I don't see one, but I hope that someone finds a way to effectively "lock up" gamepieces, much like green eggs did in 2011. 
• I like the small bot, big bot dynamic of the college variant. I wish there was more to encourage differences in their design though...the obvious strategy seems to be score, score more, and keep scoring, faster than they can descore you. 

Overall, I guess the minuses outweigh the pluses for me. But I'm sure tons of teams all around the world will have a blast proving my reservations wrong.