Saturday, August 12, 2017

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.

1 comment:

Josh 'Dagar' Zscheile said...

Hey Seth,

first of all, have fun at GenCon! I'd love it if you took the time to write a little report.
I am also eager to read more structured rules about Automatown. I have a concept in mind about it, but I think it differs from what it really is like a lot (based on what I am reading here)
Third, Rahdo has just done a video review of a game called "Sentient" on youtube. While it does not seem to be much like Automatown, it shares the theme more or less, and maybe you can draw some inspiration from that.

Cheers,

Josh