Rally

If you love Capture the flag.

Rally is a real-time strategy game for the whole table, played with two pieces each and nothing else. Every player picks a colour and puts down two pieces. Your robot is your base: little round bots of your colour roll out of it, one after another. Your wedge is your rally flag: wherever you stand it, all your bots hurry over and line up in front of its point. You never steer a single unit. You just move your flag, and your bots do what's useful when they get there: • Bump into an opponent's bots, and both sides nod off and roll home for a nap • Fill up a tower until it flies your colour, and watch that part of the map turn your colour too • Carry blue crystals home, so new bots arrive faster • Grab surprise crates: speed wheels make your bots zoom, and bubbles let them shrug off a bump Some towers are workshops. Hold one and your bots come out of it too, right at the front, with the odd tough bot in a hard hat that takes two bumps to send home. Bots can't swim, so rivers and lakes send them across the bridges, and the bridges are where the big bumping crowds happen. Choose from four maps (Meadow, Two Rivers, Crossroads, and Lake with its island tower) and play each one in six worlds, each with its own music: • Meadow: sunny grass and blue streams • Winter: snow, pines and snowmen, and the water freezes so bots skate right across • Autumn: golden woods, pumpkins and tumbling leaves • Desert: a turquoise oasis among palms and cacti • Candy Land: pink frosting, chocolate rivers and wafer bridges • Moon: a starry space river, satellite dishes and shooting stars Towers let you have more bots. Crystals make them come sooner. You have one flag, so you have to choose. Everyone plays at once, so the table is always busy. Moving your base costs time: pick it up and it has to unpack again before it makes more bots. VERSUS (2–4 players): hold the most towers when the 8-minute clock runs out. In the last minute towers fall twice as fast. Whoever is behind gets their bots a little quicker, so every player has a chance until the end. CO-OP (1–4 players): team up against waves of grey rogue bots that sneak out of burrows at the edge of the map to drain your towers. Parts of the map with none of your bots or towers are hidden in cloud, so spread out to see what's coming. Survive ten waves to win. PRACTICE (1 player): a friendly coach teaches you step by step, then you take on the computer in a three-minute match, in a surprise world each time. "How to play" on the main menu walks through everything with little animated scenes. Made for kids and families: • Nothing to read to play. Pictures, numbers and colours tell you everything, and the bots cheer "Yay!" and "Wheee!" along the way. • No bot is ever destroyed. Losing a bump costs a little time, never your team. • Every colour has its own antenna shape, so colour-blind players can tell the teams apart. • Every player gets their own panel facing their side of the table, and everyone gets celebrated at the end.