Ricochet Robots

Ricochet Robots is a board game designed by Alex Randolph and first published in Germany in 1999, in which players simultaneously search for the shortest sequence of moves that will slide one of several robot pieces, which travel in a straight line until stopped by a wall or another robot, onto a designated target square on a grid board. Rather than taking turns, every player races to solve the same puzzle at once, calling out the number of moves in their proposed solution as soon as they find one, and whoever claims to have found the shortest solution must then demonstrate it correctly to score; a wrong demonstration hands the turn to the next-shortest claimed solution. The game's board is typically assembled from four modular double-sided quadrant tiles that can be combined in different orientations to create a large number of distinct layouts, and it won the Deutscher Spiele Preis in the year of its release for its unusually direct real-time puzzle-solving format within an otherwise turn-based hobby game category.