RoboRally is the only good thing to ever come out of the Wizards of the Coast makers of Magic: The Gathering of your Money, the product which has single handedly destroyed gaming conventions. What's amazing is that (assuming no one is taking credit for anyone else's work) the two products were created by the same person. I'm guessing that on a Star Wars style force-o-meter Richard Garfield shows up as neutral in the same way that Dagobah does -- lots of good and lots of evil, each masking the other.

With that out of the way I can begin to praise RoboRally. It's a novel board game where the players program their pieces ('bots) five turns at a time. Once everyone has written their program (consisting of five playing cards (nothing high tech here, folks)) they all run simultaneously and push, shoot, and race each other. Added to the fun are mines, lasers, pits, ramps, conveyor belts, scramblers, bombs, gears, tractor beams, radio contols, flame clouds, teleporters, portals, oilslicks, flame bursts, water, ledges, randomizers, chop-shops, one-way walls, radiation . . .

The basic game is a great one, and if you get a few of the expansion sets you've got a game that will never fail to please. If I weren't lazier than you I'd hunt up some good RoboRally links for this space; needless to say there are many.

A while ago I put together a web site wholly devoted to RoboRally. It can be found here.