In 1956, William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain won the Nobel Prize for Physics "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect". Are you all happy with that, after all anyone can build a computer but only a few could come up with the fundamental building blocks of one.
There is a board game from Wizards of the Coast called RoboRally. You "program" your robot in batchs of 5 segments with commands like "turn left", "Turn right", "back up 1 space", "forward 1", "forward 2", etc. There are all kinds of obstacles to avoid or deal with (conveyor belts, lasers, pits) and robots can "interact" by either shooting or pushing each other (granted, usually by accident). Getting an instruction wrong (left vs right say) or getting shoved one column off course can have disastrous repurcussions (call them "bugs";-). It isn't particularly deep, but it is fun and teaches the basics of planning ahead. Just avoid most of the expansions, or just use the cool boards out of them. SOme of the later rules were just silly.
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In 1956, William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain won the Nobel Prize for Physics "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect". Are you all happy with that, after all anyone can build a computer but only a few could come up with the fundamental building blocks of one.
There is a board game from Wizards of the Coast called RoboRally. You "program" your robot in batchs of 5 segments with commands like "turn left", "Turn right", "back up 1 space", "forward 1", "forward 2", etc. There are all kinds of obstacles to avoid or deal with (conveyor belts, lasers, pits) and robots can "interact" by either shooting or pushing each other (granted, usually by accident). Getting an instruction wrong (left vs right say) or getting shoved one column off course can have disastrous repurcussions (call them "bugs" ;-).
It isn't particularly deep, but it is fun and teaches the basics of planning ahead. Just avoid most of the expansions, or just use the cool boards out of them. SOme of the later rules were just silly.