Another TLDR post

We played TLDR at the board game design group meeting last night. It was a solo game against three motherships. By the time that the guy ended the game, he had a robot that could defeat nearly any mothership that could exist. It was fun to watch how he built his robot (he had way more healing than I would have expected any robot to ever need, but he made serious use of it, as he also had a ton of damage providing parts).

The game took about two and a half hours, but he beat the first mothership at about two hours. He said that he had had a fun time, and that the game seemed well balanced, but he did have a few ideas:

• Make a draft for a one player game (with starting cards). (Not sure if I will do this before the end of the contest)
• Figure out how to get trade working in a one player game. (Not sure if I will do this before the end of the contest)
• Make foes that move at different speeds? (Not sure if I will do this before the end of the contest)
• The ability to repair cities might be nice (I could modify the construction worker card to do this, and it would make more sense than his current ability.)
• Remove auto-repair action - your robot can repair inside of combat, or take an action to repair. (I might do this - I will have to consider the effects of it)
• Remove normal repair action (probably I will not do this, this action is useful to people that don't go all out on repair parts)
• Battleship looks like it most be a mothership (Perhaps I need a symbol that denotes "This is a mothership")
• What order do you place your new foe columns? Do you know where on the map the alien figurine will go before you select the card? (we played yes, but I have since decided no.)
• Neural implants and Multitask drivers need to be changed (I need to do this before the contest - the last change to the tech draft really messed up these cards)
• Mothership corpses should be worth more as a corpse (1 wild corpse? I can probably do something)
• Escort ship is not an "escort". Either the card needs to be renamed, or there is a game term that needs updating. (I can easily rename the card)
• Need to be able to cycle through the tech cards faster. Perhaps as an action (this is really good, so I probably will do it.  I just have to make sure that the balance remains the same.)
• The mothership moves to which tied column? (This is already in the rules. We just had to remember what the rules stated)
• Rules need to be written out clearly and lots of hand holding has to happen for this to work for a player that doesn't know the game perfectly (This is a point well made. I need to do this.)

Now, I only have so much time before the contest ends, so I can't do all of these things right now, but the ones that shouldn't affect the balance of the game seem totally within the limits of what is reasonable.

We reached a point in the game where he was supremely confidant about his ability to defeat every possible opponent, and because of that, I told him to enter the Alien Dimension, and take the fight to the aliens. That is when he faced the final mothership and won the game. This was the first time in a game that that happened, but it worked out fairly well.

Probably the biggest thing that I still need to do it clean up the rules and make them much more easy to understand, but I am also going to fix the two cards that need work based on the new rules, and I will probably also incorporate as many of the other fixes before I am done.