The game is getting quite old, but it runs well on Windows XP. It does have some occasional glitches and it crashes on my PC about once every dozen combat rounds, but I’ve never lost a robot design or anything. I just have to fight a battle again.

The computer’s artificial intelligence (AI) for your computer-controlled opponents is fairly weak except for one particular robot, Emergency. Older kids and grown-ups will find good attack patterns that work over and over again against all the bots. This doesn’t take too much away from the game, but it is an oddity. The one tough bot, Emergency, is quite a challenge and shows what the game could have been. There are some hacks available on the web that will add more difficult AI for the other bots, but we haven’t tried them yet.

The multiplayer mode is difficult to keep working. We’ve had a lot of times where we just could never get connected multiplayer. Even if we get connected, the game often lags or loses connection. It’s bad enough that we rarely even try to run multiplayer any more.

The design and construction of the robots is the real winner in the game. The designer starts by drawing out the shape of the robot. Then components are added, usually starting with motors and wheels followed by weapons and batteries. Then the whole thing has to be wired up to work with the remote control system.

There are several types of motors, wheels, batteries, and different linking parts. Each has a tradeoff like weight versus power or strength. The different motors draw different amounts of electrical power so working out what type of batteries and how many of them is also a factor.

The weapons include ram plates, spikes, circular saw blades, hammers and axes. There are also pneumatic actuators powered by compressed air so a weapon can quickly thrust, if you have room for the air tank.

There are THREE different weight classes in the game which is how bots are categorized. Cost isn’t considered so you have an unlimited budget. In each weight class you face a different set of computer controlled robots, with different strengths and weaknesses.

It’s a great game for robot enthusiasts and even has some educational value.

EPGY has consistently exceeded our expectations with each of our experiences with them.

Directly from EPGY program:

Stanford’s online high school adds grades seven, eight and nine

The Education Program for Gifted Youth at Stanford University will be adding three additional grades to its online high school.

Created in 2006 to meet the specific needs of gifted students, the EPGY Online High School (OHS) will add the seventh, eighth and ninth grades for fall 2009. Applications are currently being accepted, and classes for these grades will begin this fall. Full details are available at http://epgy.stanford.edu/ohs.

“The addition of these lower grades is particularly important, since this is where the frustration for these students so often begins,” said Cathie Wlaschin of the Malone Family Foundation, which provided an original gift of $3.3 million to launch the high school three years ago, and through the support of which the new grades are being added. The foundation provides scholarship endowments to select U.S. independent secondary schools to fund the education of gifted students with financial need. Through a separate program, the foundation also supports research on gifted education.

In the past three years, the EPGY Online High School has been fully accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges and approved as an online provider by the University of California. Enrollment has grown from 30 students to 135, with students coming from 20 states and nine countries. Seventeen students will be graduating this year, with five entering Stanford University in the fall.

“It had always been our intention to be a full six-year school,” said Patrick Suppes, director and faculty adviser of EPGY and a philosophy professor emeritus at Stanford. “With students of this caliber, it is essential that they be identified early and put to work. The sooner they are fully engaged academically, the better off they will be.”

The goal of the game is to move a given object into the goal, a designated box. The object starts in a workspace where you build your contraption.

There are just so many different possible solutions that we’ve had great fun comparing ours. It is very important not to look ahead. After you’ve solved a puzzle, you will have the opportunity to view many different solutions from other users and rate them! This is much less frustrating than working the problems, and has proven to be quite humbling.

This is a great experiential site if you’ve been working with building Lego machines and although this is a completely 2-D activity, much can be learned about the gears, force, gravity, tension, friction, structure, and creative problem solving.

This game is addictive. Consider yourself warned.

http://www.addictinggames.com/fantasticcontraption.html

Once you master those basic landmarks, Skymaps.com has full printable star charts.