Hi Team, Great work today in analyzing the game and coming up with great strategy ideas. The active participation by students, mentors and parents was awesome to see. We are off to a great start. During the strategy discussions, there was some questions about the rules. Here is my understanding of the questions and the related rules to help answer them. 1) During hybrid mode, can the robots leave the Key? - according to G16, the answer is Yes. - The term "Alliance Station" can be confusing. It refers to the end of the court where our drivers are located. - The robot may not touch the carpet on our Alliance Station end of the court and so it can move around as desired on your hoop end of the court during hybrid mode. G17 mentions player must remain in assigned starting positions but this does not apply to the robots. - So the Kinect can be used to potentially guide the robot to pick up balls on the carpet due to missed shots or help guide the robot to get balls from our bridge or the center bridge and attempt shots. 2) While balancing on the bridge, can we attach ourselves to another alliance robot? - No (for now). G26 says we cannot attach to another robot. But it appears to be meant to avoid doing something bad to your opponent. We will need to get clarification on this to see if we can do it to robots in our alliance. - there are other ways to control balancing on the bridge so we can work around it. 3) Do Inbounders need to release balls through the slot if one of their alliance robots is not present to receive it? - According to G31, the answer is Yes. - Each Inbounder can hold 2 balls. The three Inbounders combined can be holding on to 6 balls without releasing them. If they have 6 in hand and a ball is scored and enters their corral, they must release one of the balls immediately through the slot or over the wall, and then quickly grab the new ball in the corral. - Basically, each alliance can hoard 6 balls at a time. That is a lot to hoard when only 18 balls are available. (ball count - 2 in each of the 6 robots and 2 on each of the 3 bridges) 4) Can a robot enter the opposing alliance's alley? - Yes. The only game rule that mentions alley is G28. It says our robot cannot touch an opponent robot that is in contact of its alley. The clarification for the violation says "*for purposeful, consequential contact *". I would interpret "consequential" to mean if you are in the their alley and an opponent robot is in contact with their alley and they bump into you, you get a foul and they get 9 points :( - So you can enter the opponents alley, but with caution. The opponent's defensive robot can score an easy 9 points by touching our robot in their alley. - I would assume an opponents robot cannot push our robot into the alley in order to force the foul. Thanks, John