Of Ricocheting Robots and Pyramids

OK, since I have been thinking about real-time, turnless games, let us look at Ricochet Robots, which I feel pretty safe saying is one of the classics of the genre.

Ricochet Robots is a speed puzzle game. One of those games where there are no turns. People just compete to solve the puzzle on the board the fastest.

You create a board out of four double-sided pieces. The boards both have both the goals on them and righty of different walls. It's not an actual maze but there are still enough walls to give the robots plenty of things to bounce off of.

There are four different colored robots, in the form of sturdy plastic pawns, that you randomly put on the board. Each turn, the goal is randomly drawn and players compete to find the shortest number of moods to make the robot that matches the color reach the goal.

Each move is moving any given robot. They move in a straight line, never a diagonal one, until they hit a wall or the side of the board for another robot. That ends the move. 

So, the game doesn't come with built in perfect solutions. Depending on the position of the robots in the gold it's chosen, different solutions will be available.

Ricochet robots was designed by Alexander Randolph, who was one of the earliest designers for modern game designs. He also gave us Ghosts and  Twixt, among other games. He was friends with said Saxon and I have heard that the two of them help organize the freelancers who designed 3M's game line. (They had a network of game designing friends)

I have also read that ricochet robots was a extensive redesign of one of his earlier games, Moonstar. Now, I have played Moonstar and so I can see the resemblance. At the same time, if he did redesign Moonstar into ricochet robots, is a serious improvement on almost every level. It's both much more intuitive and much more flexible.

But I really have to admit that I admire Ricochet Robots more than I enjoy it. It is a brilliant design, combining both a speed game with a very thought-provoking system of puzzles. It is like a party game met a brain building exercise.

But it isn't the kind of game I normally go for. I do think is one of the best of its kind but it rarely saw play and not everyone enjoyed it. So it ended up getting purged from my collection.

More recently, I discovered that Russ Williams (Hi Russ!) had made a Looney Pyramid variation on Ricochet Robots. All you needed was three monochrome stashes and a chessboard. Well, I keep a chessboard bandana in my Looney Pyramid tool kit so it took me two minutes to set up a game.

If you already know how to play Ricochet Robots, Ricochet Pyramids is beyond easy to learn. Put the chessboard down where everyone can see it. Randomly placed a small pyramid in each color as the robots. Randomly place nine towers made out of a big pyramid and a medium pyramid (one for every color combination with three colors) to serve as goals and terrain. With the remaining pyramids from the three stashes, draw one of each size to determine which robot has to reach which tower.

The real question is, does it feel anything like playing Ricochet Robots? The answer is it feels almost exactly like that.

The most significant difference, at least for me is that Ricochet Pyramids is played on an 8 x 8 board while memory serves me that Ricochet Robots is on a 16 x 16 board. The smaller board creates a  more tighter environment.

That being said, you could easily make the board bigger, even putting for checkerboards together if you felt like it. You could also add more colors in more robots and towers without changing any of the rules.

In all honesty, at least for me, the biggest question is would it be harder to get people to play this than Ricochet Robots? Let's be honest, homemade games don't have the same chrome appeal as fully manufactured games. 

But, the pyramids are awfully nice looking and chessboards can be as nice as you want them to. Really, a glass or mirror chessboard with the pyramids and you'd have something really nifty looking going on.

Ricochet Robots is a really fascinating design. However, it was not a game that I enjoyed for many of my friends enjoyed enough to keep. But, thanks to Russ, I can still experience it when I feel like it. Shucks, I probably will playing Ricochet Pyramids more than I would play Ricochet Robots.

Ricochet - not a great game but I keep it around

Ricochet or Leonardo or Picus isn't a particularly good game. However, it fits enough niches that it has stayed in my collection.

I first came across it as Ricochet so that's what I'm going to call it, although I have also played the Leonardo version as well. Frankly, the pinball theme of Ricochet probably fits it best but the theme doesn't really matter.

Regardless of its theme, Ricochet is a real time, turn-less puzzle game. Which means everyone is trying to solve the puzzle at the same time. There are other games out there that do the exact same thing, like Ricochet Robots or Set or Spot It.

The whole thing is just a deck of cards, which is why it's still in my collection. Each card, in the pinball version, shows four pinball bumpers, along with a pinball. The bumpers are red, blue, yellow and green (and contrast well enough my color blind eyes can tell them apart) and have numbers on them. The pinball is either big or small in one of the four colors.

Here's the game. Lay down five cards in a cross formation. The starting point is the center card. The color and the size of the pinball will tell you the next card in the sequence. The color tells you what bumper to look at and the size tells you if you are looking for the largest or smallest number. You then look at that card's pinball for to figure out the next card.

Every card can only be used once in a sequence and turn. There are no duplicate numbers so any given layout can have only one sequence. Whoever figures out what the last card in the sequence is wins that turn.

As I mentioned earlier, there other games that same trick of being puzzles that everyone is trying to figure out the same time. And, quite frankly, many of the ones that I have played have been better. Ricochet Robots offers up some very fascinating puzzles. Spot It is an ingenious design as well as a crowd pleaser. Jungle Speed is a raucous party. (Set, by the way, is very unfriendly to my color blind eyes and so I cannot physically put it.)

Still, it's stuck around on the shelf.

Well, the fact that it's just a deck of cards and takes up almost no storage space goes a long way to why It's still here. Ricochet Robots is a better game but a much bigger box so it ended up being purged. (There is a Looney Pyramids variation I've been meaning to try, though)

Games like Ricochet have an unusual learning curve compared to most board games. They reward reaction time and pattern recognition. And the only way to get better is raw practice. So different skill levels tend to be pretty significant. People who are better will constantly beat weaker players.

You can say that about any game. But lost a game of Go to a stronger player often teaches you something. Losing a game of Ricochet or other games like it is just practice. When they have a twist like Jungle Speed or Spot It, it adds that extra bit of fun. Still, I don't tend to play games like this. (Sorry, Ricochet Robots)

Most of the time Ricochet has come out, it has been as something for folks to do in other games with player elimination. It works well for that sort of thing, particularly since it is so relatively simple, even compared to other speed puzzles.

And, when the toddler is just a little bit older, it might be the quiet thoughtful activity to keep them occupied at restaurants or waiting rooms or the like. Make him think without getting him too excited. It might end up seeing some decent play then.