The night shift
Play against the AI
Any seat can be a bot, at any of three levels, mixed freely with people.
The three levels
Easy
Plays a legal card.
It looks at what fits and takes one, without asking what it is worth. It will hand you a sealed box for free and it will pass up a Catering Order it was one card away from. Use it to fill a seat while you teach somebody, or to see the board develop without pressure.
Medium
Takes the points on offer.
It scores whatever it can score this turn and prefers a bigger box to a smaller one. What it does not do is look at what your next turn becomes — so it will close a Half-Dozen while opening the seam that gives you a Full Box. This is the level that feels like a person who has played twice.
Hard
Takes the points without setting you up.
Same scoring instinct, plus a look at what the placement leaves behind. It will decline a two-point seal that hands you seven, it will sit on a card that closes a box you are still feeding, and it will use a Cinnamon Roll to lock a flavour you needed. It plays the edge, not the box.
Mixing bots and people
Seats are set one at a time, so a table of four can be two people and two bots, or three people and one bot at a different level to keep the game moving. Nothing about the rules changes: bots draw from the same decks, obey the same placement rule and are caught by the same Final Lap. A bot seat is a seat, not a mode.
This is also the fastest way to learn a variant. Set Perfect Match against an Easy bot and you get to feel how much tighter the board is without also losing.
Do the bots cheat?
No. They see the board, their own tray and the public score, which is exactly what you see. They do not know your cards and they do not know the deck order. A Hard bot beats you by reading the edge, and the same read is available to you — that is the whole argument of the game.
Next: playing solo, how to beat Hard, or playing people instead.