For anyone who's never tried: Building Rube Goldberg machines is insanely hard. The idea is to build a machine that looks as difficult and improbable as possible. Pieces that are destroyed or completely changed during the operation are par for the course. For each run, the entire machine needs to be reset manually. If one piece fails, you have to reset the whole thing.

The whole design process is basically fighting against yourself--how insane and ridiculous can I get and still have the thing work.

tl;dr We lost the Rube Goldberg machine contest and I'm still bitter.