Brain dump after playing the first version with actual gameplay!
New upgrade ideas:
Automatically restart boards when they are completed (toggleable, with a delay)
Increase automation speed
More boards running in parallel
Guess randomly after automation gets stuck (toggleable, with a delay)
Other things to change:
Make the automation scan over the board (visibly) instead of acting everywhere at once. Could add an upgrade to skip unchanged regions.
Standardize board sizes and mine counts, with upgrades to unlock new ones
Add dependencies between unlocks, e.g. automation speed depends on unlocking automation at all
Bigger ideas:
Switch automation over to a 'worker' model, wherein players employ multiple workers to go over the board applying rules. Each rule would have a time cost, each worker would have a speed, those combine to determine how quickly the worker moves over the board. Workers could be upgraded separately from one another.
Brain dump after playing the first version with actual gameplay!
New upgrade ideas:
Other things to change:
Bigger ideas: