The objective of GNOME Robots is quite simple. You are surrounded by a
number of robots or other hostile adversaries. As you move about
they will move directly towards you for every move that you make.
Their goal is to kill you. Your goal is to kill all the robots on the
board by taking advantage of their vulnerabilities.
Robots are destroyed when they collide with each other, or when they
collide with the debris of some previous collision. You die if a robot
ends up right next to you.
In some of the game configurations (you can choose from
five different sets of rules), you can push the
junkheaps around to form barricades to protect you. Also, if you
are daring enough, you can Splat! the robots by pushing
junkheaps on top of them for an additional bonus.
You can also save yourself by teleporting yourself to a random location.
Unfortunately, randomly teleporting means that
you might end up being right next to a robot, so they can kill you when
they make their move. Luckily, there are also
safe teleports which will place you out of immediate danger, but
there are only a limited supply of them. You can earn
more free teleports as you go along (how you gain them depends on the
chosen game), but typically you get one for each robot that is
destroyed while you are 'waiting', up to a maximum of 10. If you don't
want to waste your saved-up safe teleports, you can choose to teleport
randomly if you think it's safe enough.
If you press the 'Wait' button (see below) you will no longer be able to
move until either all of the robots (which still move towards you) are
gone, or you are killed. Doing this is risky, but may earn you extra
safe teleports.
If you manage to reach the point where more than half of
the screen is occupied by robots, the number of robots will be
reset to the starting amount, allowing you to continue.
