Faisal Ghaffar 
Quick overview
Roller Champions is an interesting blend of sports that adds elements of basketball and the Mesoamerican ball game, ulama, to the already compelling foundation of roller derby. This one-of-a-kind blend is a lot of fun, so it’s a shame that it becomes so repetitive so quickly.
In Roller Champions, players compete in three-person teams on a circular rink. Both teams compete for possession of the ball, then run as many consecutive laps as they can with it in hand before chucking it via a hoop to score some points. If your team completes a full lap before ranking, you receive one point, while two or three laps earn you 3 or 5 points.
Why is it so Interesting Game?
Roller Champions is not a difficult game to learn—roller skating is an absorptive backbone for the game, adding a sense of fantastic speed to almost every action. The mechanics of movement are the easiest to grasp, so mastering the nuances of pumping off the hillsides to soon reach ones maximum speed and working with your team members to race around the rink quickly becomes second nature. With these fundamentals under your belt, trying to approach Roller Champions’ more complex manoeuvres becomes much easier, ensuring that even the toughest moves can be mastered in just a few hours of play.
This works in Roller Champions’ favour in the early hours, bringing all players up to speed on how the game works.
Uniformity in Game
The uniformity ensures that the playing field has always been level between teams, while also allowing players to choose where they want to contact Roller Champions. You can, for example, focus solely on defence, tackling opposing players attempting to steal the ball from your team members or manning the hoop so you can jump up and block any oppositional shots. Because all players regulate the same, a strategy that works in one arena will work in all three, and because all gamers control the same, you have never had to adjust to new mechanical systems.
Drawbacks
Within Roller Champions, there is no easy way to communicate with other players. This makes it difficult to understand what your team members are going to plan in the first few minutes of a game, and even more difficult to determine when they’ve decided to change things up. Having no predefined roles sounds great on paper, however without interacting your intent to your allied forces, this format often stands in the way of your squad’s teamwork, making it difficult to play as a well-orchestrated unit. Of course, leap on a mic solves this problem, but I’ve discovered that it’s an ask that few randoms are willing to make.All of this is a pity, as there is a fun collaborative sport.
