What Happens at FRC Kickoff (and How to Prepare)

FRC Kickoff is the single-day event on a Saturday in early January when FIRST reveals the brand-new game for the season, and every team on the planet starts from zero at the exact same moment. You watch the game-reveal video, read the newly released game manual, and then have roughly six weeks to design, build, wire, and program a robot to play it.

That's the whole thing in two sentences. But Kickoff is also the most exciting and most disorienting day of the FRC year, so here's what actually happens, hour by hour, and how to walk in ready instead of overwhelmed.

When Kickoff happens

Kickoff lands on a Saturday in early January almost every year. Kickoff 2027 will follow the same pattern, in early January 2027, just like every season before it. The game-reveal broadcast goes live in the morning US time and streams globally on the official FIRST channels (YouTube and Twitch), so teams everywhere see the game at the same instant. There's no early access, no leaks that hold up, and no way to prepare for the specific game beforehand. That fresh-start-for-everyone design is the entire point of FRC.

Some regions still host in-person Kickoff gatherings where nearby teams watch the reveal together and pick up physical kit materials. Plenty of teams just watch the stream from their own shop. Both are fine. What matters is that you're together as a team when the game drops, because the hours right after the reveal are when the season's direction gets set.

What actually gets revealed

Three things arrive at Kickoff, and they arrive fast.

The game animation

The broadcast opens with a two-to-three-minute animated video that shows the new field and demonstrates how the game is scored. This is the fun part everyone screenshots and reacts to. It gives you the vibe of the game (climbing, shooting, stacking, whatever it is that year) but it is not the rulebook. Do not design a robot off the animation alone. Every season, teams get burned by assuming something works the way the cartoon made it look.

The game manual

The moment the reveal ends, FIRST publishes the game manual, a dense PDF that is the actual source of truth for the season. This is where the real work starts. The manual is organized into sections covering the game overview, the arena and field elements, robot construction rules, the detailed game rules and scoring, the inspection checklist, and the tournament structure. It's long, often well over a hundred pages, and it uses precise, lawyer-like language for a reason: the exact wording of a rule decides what's legal and how points are scored.

One thing rookies miss: the manual is a living document. FIRST releases weekly Team Updates throughout build season that correct, clarify, and sometimes change rules. A rule you designed around in week one can be amended in week three, so someone on your team needs to read every Team Update as it comes out.

The field drawings and CAD

Alongside the manual, FIRST releases the official field drawings and CAD models of the field elements. These give you real dimensions: how tall the goal is, how wide the gaps are, how heavy the game pieces are, what the field surface is. This is the data your design has to respect. If your mechanism needs to reach 6 feet 6 inches, you find that number here, not by eyeballing the animation.

What's in the Kit of Parts (and what isn't)

Alongside the game, FIRST makes the season's Kit of Parts available: not one big box anymore, but a mix of a physical control-system kit, FIRST Choice credits for an online store of donated parts, and Product Donation Vouchers from sponsors like REV and CTRE. Rookie teams get a fuller kit meant to get a basic robot driving; veterans get a lighter one focused on that year's control-system updates.

For Kickoff day itself, only two things about the kit really matter. It's a starting point, not a shopping list — most competitive robots are mostly bought or fabricated on top of it. And FIRST usually publishes an "Everybody Can Play" KitBot shortly after Kickoff: a simple, proven robot that scores in that year's game, and a genuinely smart plan for a rookie or resource-limited team, because a reliable simple robot beats an ambitious broken one every time. For the full breakdown of what's in the kit and how the credits and vouchers work, see our lesson on registering a new team and the Kit of Parts.

What your team should actually do on Kickoff day

The reveal wraps up within about an hour. The temptation is to immediately start sketching a robot. Resist that. The best teams spend Kickoff day understanding the game, not designing for it. A rough playbook:

1. Watch the reveal together, then watch it again while pausing to note every scoring action.
2. Read the manual as a group. Split it up if you have to, but everyone should read the game rules and scoring section carefully. Assign one person to become the "rules expert" who owns the manual and every Team Update for the rest of the season.
3. Rank the ways to score. List every task in the game and estimate how many points each is worth and how hard it looks. This is your first cut at strategy.
4. Do a field walkthrough using the drawings and CAD, so you understand real distances and heights.
5. Talk strategy before geometry. Decide what you want the robot to do (which two or three scoring objectives) before anyone draws a single bracket. The classic mistake is designing a cool mechanism and then discovering it chases low-value points.

Notice that scoring analysis shows up on day one. Kickoff is where scouting and strategy thinking begins, not something you bolt on at your first event. If you want to get sharper at reading a game and picking priorities, our scouting and strategy guides walk through how good teams turn a fresh game into a plan.

Most teams do not finalize a design on Kickoff day, and that's correct. Day one is for shared understanding. The design converges over the following week as you prototype.

How to prepare before Kickoff

Here's the part that separates smooth seasons from chaotic ones: the most important Kickoff prep happens in November and December, before you know anything about the game.

• Get your tools and shop ready. You do not want to spend build season hunting for a drill or waiting on a tool order. Sort your workspace, inventory your stock, and make sure your fabrication basics (cutting aluminum, drilling, tapping) are working.
• Update your software toolchain. The new season's WPILib release typically becomes available right around Kickoff, along with updated vendor libraries (vendordeps) from REV and CTRE for their motor controllers. Install the new WPILib version and confirm your programmers can build and deploy a blank project before the game drops. Losing the first week to a broken toolchain is a real and avoidable failure. Our lesson on installing WPILib and the FRC game tools walks through it from scratch.
• Train your electrical and wiring people. A large share of robot failures at events are electrical, and Kickoff is too late to learn crimping and CAN-bus basics. Get people comfortable with the control system in the offseason. Start with our Electrical and Wiring guides.
• Learn the vocabulary. If terms like autonomous, teleop, roboRIO, alliance, or district are fuzzy, skim our glossary so the manual and the broadcast make sense.
• Follow a learning path as a team. Rather than everyone studying random topics, put new members on a structured track. Our learning paths sequence the fundamentals per department so your whole team walks into Kickoff able to contribute.

The teams that stumble in the first two weeks of build season are almost always the ones that spent those weeks learning basics instead of building. Do the learning now.

After Kickoff: the six weeks that follow

Kickoff kicks off (yes) the build season, which runs about six weeks from that Saturday until teams head to their first competition. Since FIRST removed the old "stop build day" and robot-bagging requirement, teams now have continuous access to their robot right up until events, so how you pace those weeks is on you. The broad arc is familiar: prototype and lock strategy first, then design and fabricate, then wire and program on real hardware, and spend the final week making the robot reliable rather than adding features. Then competition season runs roughly from February into April at Regional or District events, with the top teams advancing toward the FIRST Championship. For the full week-by-week plan, and where those six weeks sit in the larger FRC calendar, see our lesson on the annual season from Kickoff to Championship.

The mindset that matters most

Kickoff feels like a starting gun, and it is, but the goal on day one is not to win the race in the first hour. It's to understand the game deeply and make calm, honest decisions about what your team can actually build in six weeks. The community is genuinely helpful here. Watch how veteran teams break down the game on Chief Delphi in the days after Kickoff, and lean on the experienced teams near you.

Prepare in the offseason, read the manual like it's law, prioritize scoring before styling a mechanism, and keep the robot as simple as your competitive goals allow. Do that, and Kickoff goes from overwhelming to the best day of your year. When you're ready to train your team for the next one, start with the free department guides on LearnFRC.