I finally fought my way free of the Sarlacc pit long enough to do some playtesting on that Robot Drop game I keep muttering on about. And, as I suspected, the game as written was as dull as a butter knife sealed in rubber and wrapped in bubble wrap.
The biggest problems were these:
- When you can put robots into play anywhere on the board, the “move” action is pretty pointless.
- When you’ve only got one action a turn, it takes forever to make any meaningful changes to the game state.
- It also takes roughly forever to deal 20 damage to an opponent’s Home.
With that in mind, I made a few tweaks to the rules:
- Robots only come into play adjacent (diagonally or orthogonally) to their Homes.
- Players have three actions a turn.
- You only need to inflict 15 damage on a Home in order to win.
(I’m actually a bit unsure on that last one. The first couple playtests suggested 15 is the sweet spot, but the next tests howled that 15 is still too high. I might try 10.)
The second iteration felt more exciting than the first, but it’s still a little slow for my tastes. I’ve got some ideas for the next iteration that should speed things up without sacrificing too much strategy. I’ll keep you posted!
