The theme this year is called Into Orbit. One of my favorite missions is the one called Space Travel in which you send the 3 different "payloads" down a ramp - the crew, the rover, and the supply. The robot has to put the payloads at the top of the ramp and push the lever to get them started down. I love the little astronaut mini-figs.
This year's game seems to have a lot of tall models. In the Lander Touch-Down, the robot has to push the orange bar to release the lander (the object shown on the right). The lander is supposed to end up in the orange circle in order to score, but I don't know how that's going to happen if the robot is underneath pushing the lever. I think the lander is going to bounce right off the robot and shatter into a million pieces (we're not allowed to use glue on these models).
In the Crater-Crossing mission, the robot must drive over the LEGO model to push down the bar and raise the flag. The robot is not allowed to go in from the backside and just pull down the bar. The year I worked at Marian Middle School, they had a similar game. While the Marian robot couldn't do much else, it was a whiz at driving over uneven terrain. With enough speed and big tires, this mission should be fairly easy.
There are 2 other missions that I think will be fairly easy to do. One is called Meteoroid Deflection (kind of like robot bowling). The robot has to stand behind the free line and try to roll the balls into the catcher. The other is called Escape Velocity. It's another very tall model. The robot has to strike the orange plate hard enough to make the blue spacecraft stay at the top of the tower - kind of like ringing the bell in the strength tester at the circus. Since you have to hit this pretty hard, I'm afraid the referees are going to have to rebuild the model after every match, because the robots will have smashed it to smithereens. We'll see.
