Automatown progress

I played two more 3p games of Automatown today with the latest card set.

This game is feeling pretty smooth so far, and it's lasting about 6 rounds (which feels OK). It's clear some of the cards aren't balanced correctly, but that's to be expected at this point... for example, there's 1 card that costs 16 (highest possible), counts as 3 workers, and is worth 0 strength (vp). I had thought all those workers would get you so much value it would make up for being worth 0 strength, but I may have overvalued that.

Here are a few changes I'll be exploring based on today's games (I tried some of this already, and so far it' seems ok):

* Generic robots may get the ability "Swap x1" - so if you build a robot face down, instead of 1 strength and no ability, it'll have 1 strength and the ability to swap cubes (different color, same level). I don't THINK this will make them too good, and if it does, I can just power up the other robots a little to compensate.

* Allow skipping tiers - currently you have to take the lowest available tier, even if you'd prefer a higher one. I tried removing this restriction, and so far it seems OK. After all, the way the cards are set up, it's a little less efficient (total-value-wise) to do that, so why not let people?

* Build whenever you want - Instead of building at the end of the round, what if you could just build a robot whenever you wanted, and get the worker pawn from it right away? That could be fun and interesting, and would remove a little bookkeeping at the end of the round.

I will implement those changes in the next games I play (like at GenCon next week!) and see how it goes. I already tried the Swap on generic robots and skipping tiers, and they seemed to work alright.

I still need to post a better description and rules to this game, which I'll get around to eventually.