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In RoboRally (2016), a robot that falls off the board or into a pit must be rebooted immediately:

  1. Take two SPAM damage cards, and place them in your discard pile.
  2. Regardless of the current register, your programming is canceled for the round, and you may not complete remaining registers. [....]
  3. Place your robot on the reboot token that is on the same board where your robot was when it rebooted. [...]

The first suggested board has a reboot token facing a blue conveyer belt, which is a recipe for disaster if I'm interpreting the rules correctly:

Reboot token pointing to conveyer belt

In my last game, two robots were rebooted in the first register, which triggered a ridiculous loop of reboots and damage cards that sealed their fates.

Note: If multiple robots reboot on the same board in the same round or if a robot sits on the reboot token when other robots are rebooting, robots will leave the reboot space in the order they rebooted, with the next robot pushing the robot before it in the direction indicated by the arrow on the reboot token

During register 1, two robots rebooted, meaning the first one was pushed onto the blue conveyer belt. As board elements activated, the conveyer belt moved this robot to the edge of the board.

After register 2 (in which these two robots had no actions since they had discarded their programming cards), the conveyer belt carried that first robot off the board. It rebooted, taking 2 more SPAM cards and pushing the second robot off the reboot token.... onto the conveyer belt. Et cetera.

As a result, both robots had to reboot twice during this round, taking twice the damage cards and with one of them ending the round precariously placed on the conveyer belt at the edge of the board.

Is this what the rules intended?

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    Robo Rally is meant to be chaotic and in many cases, unsurvivable, given the arrangements of certain elements in certain maps, unless one has very carefully considered all consequences. This seems like "game working as expected" to me.
    – Nij
    Commented Apr 27, 2023 at 19:37
  • That was my thought, but this is literally the very first board recommended for beginners so it's something people will probably run into a lot. When we played the folks affected by it thought it was very unfair that they were basically taken out of the game (4 SPAM cards on such a short board is hard to come back from).
    – mgiuffrida
    Commented Apr 28, 2023 at 21:36
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    It's a necessary lesson learned early then, is it not?
    – Nij
    Commented Apr 28, 2023 at 22:21

1 Answer 1

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Yes, this is correct. Reboots happen immediately and prevent any further action that round. If this happens with multiple robots, it can leave them in precarious situations, and the rules have no mechanism to prevent this.

Even on a map where this doesn't happen, if the first robot to reboot simply faces backwards before being pushed off, they can spend the whole round shooting the robot that pushed them off.

However, the 2016 edition did change its rules in a way that indirectly addresses this; because damage just makes you play random cards now, it doesn't keep you out of the game. Having 4 SPAM cards isn't very different from having 2. In previous versions, you would actually explode and lose a life, potentially being eliminated. This change means that allowing things to go very wrong doesn't just remove a player from the game!

The final note is that the recommended board for a starting game is actually Dizzy Highway, which doesn't have this particular arrangement with the reboot token.

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