[pfreivald]

I was thinking the same thing. If the runners coordinate their actions, each can pass out of their general scoring area on the edges of the tower bottleneck. Because robots cannot work together to inhibit the flow of the game, a single robot cannot block both runners.

If you block one, then who do you block on the return trip, the one with the tube or the one going to get the tube?

Defense will slow scoring down to some degree, but I don't think it will be quite as disastrous as people are saying. (I also have this vision in my head of robots passing tubes over dragonflies...)