Balancing the special actions

I’m unsure how to balance the special powers or if in fact they need balancing

The basic arithmetic is simple enough. There are few enough tokens in the game, and more particularly on the board, that any action can be measured in terms of token count effects. That gives a base scalar. The primary necessity at that point simply becomes ensuring that the token effect counts for each special power are similar. That’s not hard. What I’m finding more difficult is working through the permutations of the action card deck and thence determining how many actions will be collected in the game how quickly, and if an uneven distribution of actions in the early game will be too large a swing. What is making this more difficult is that I’m quite unsure of this analytical approach is even valid for answering the question. More annoyingly, if early acquisition is in fact a real problem then it is likely that adding use-count limits to the special powers won’t fix the problem.

Gahh! I’ve seen too many otherwise interesting designs broken by simply getting the basic math wrong. This is annoying.