RoboRally: A Robot Race Trivia Quiz

Answer: You need five out of nine

A RoboRally robot can take up to nine points of damage, the tenth point destroys it. At the start of your turn, you will always receive nine cards minus the amount of damage taken unless this is modified by an option card. If that leaves you with fewer than five new cards, the last cards of your previous turn remain "locked" in the appropriate program register slots, severely limiting your options.

Answer: Six squares

The fastest movement card available is the "Move 3". If this puts you on an express conveyor belt, you then get moved two more squares. While a pusher could ultimately move you a sixth square, none of the basic boards has a pusher on the same square as a conveyor (and no official board has one on an express conveyor).

The "Crash and Burn" expansion later introduced portals that can teleport a robot - with these elements, you could actually achieve an eighteen-square move all across the board.

Answer: A pusher

Pits are just that - bottomless death traps destroying everything moving into or over them. Lasers can kill a robot through damage and crushers are nasty little devices that will activate on certain segments of the turn, mercilessly destroying any robot coming to rest on their square when they do so (you can however safely move through them at any other time). The Cannery Row board is the most notorious one using crushers and one of the hardest to cross successfully.
Pushers will never directly destroy a robot although they can shove one into a pit or laser with the same net effect.

Answer: Zero points as walls do not cause damage

More often than not, walls are nasty obstacles that impede your progress, but sometimes you are thankful for them to be there as they can cut short a move if you are stuck with faster cards but need less speed. Normal walls do not damage your robot at all if you run into them, regardless of the speed.

A wall right in front or behind your robot can also occasionally come handy to essentially skip one phase of the turn by running into it (for example to avoid another racer or a phase-activated board element).

Answer: U-Turn

Since the gear will always turn you after you rotate, neither the left nor the right turn will improve your position - the right one just leaves you facing the same way as a net result and the left one would ultimately leave you facing the other pit. A backup results in instant death, but a U-Turn and the gear's motion add up to a right turn, allowing you to move off safely on the next register phase.

Answer: Seven

The rules do not impose any limits on pushing robots - the only limit is the number of other robots in the game. Since the basic game includes eight robots, you could push all seven others at once. All six basic game boards have at least one position where this move could occur.

Answer: Four

In the optimum case, the answer is four robots, all lined up in front of SpinBot with a pit behind the furthest one and the closest one already having nine damage and rotating. You would kill three robots by pushing them into the pit (using a Move 3 card), then the fourth would be eliminated once SpinBot's laser fires.

This move could for example happen on the Island board. (I actually managed a triple push-kill on that board once)

Answer: Yes

Movement cards in RoboRally have different priority values, so the choice of a low or high priority card can be the difference between another robot pushing yours or moving out of the way. With the board elements all affecting your movements, this priority order can well mean the difference between a safe move and instant destruction.

Answer: The robot always starts out as virtual

A robot being destroyed in the game loses part of its race progress by being returned to the last archive location (a checkpoint or repair site; the "Grand Prix" expansion also added the "chop shop" as an archive location type). It starts with two damage unless its player chooses to start it powered down to immediately repair and also loses one option card of the player's choice.

It however only starts virtual if there is another robot already at the archive location or more than one robot is returned to play there at the same time.

The Avalon Hill edition of the game entirely does away with the concept of virtual robots. Note that, near the end of the game, it may well be preferable to sacrifice a life (should you have a spare one left) via robot suicide compared to needing several turns to get out of a bad position, possibly even involving a powerdown to eliminate damage.

Answer: Move 2, Priority 610

Both of your robots can at best make it to the finish in two registers. However, if both of you arrive on the same phase, you want to be the second one to get there as you can only tag the finish after everything has moved and fired. You thus want to move 2 squares at the lowest available priority, the 610.

The only way TrundleBot could get to the finish in two segments would be with a "Move 3" and a "Move 2", thus by having the 610 priority card, you would guarantee to be the last (or only) player to reach the finishing square on that segment.