In FIRST STRONGHOLD challenge, Alliances compete against each other to breach their opponents’ defenses, known as outer works, and capture their tower. They score points by crossing elements of their opponents’ outer works, scoring boulders in their opponents’ tower goals, and surrounding and scaling their opponents’ tower itself.

The playing field is divided into red and blue alliance sections, separated by a neutral zone that contains boulders. Each section contains a courtyard, an area for opposing teams to shoot boulders at the castle goals, a "secret passage" that allows human players to feed boulders to their robots from the human player station, the "outer works", and the tower.