Codex Design Diary: The "NPE"

In this story, one thing leads to another.

At the Game Developer's Conference, I let some of the conference associates play Codex. Link Hughes (designer on Guild Wars 2) was among them. He didn't have much time to get into it and he had to leave early, but he gave several comments about what he called the "NPE." The New Player Experience. I thought it was so stupid to have a jargony acronym for this that I have remembered it ever since. (Sorry Link, I'm not saying the concept is stupid!)

He was talking about various reasons that it's bad if a game is hard to learn. Yeah sure. There's a lot to games like Magic: the Gathering or Codex and it's kind of inherent to games of that complexity that they take some effort to learn. Codex in particular is trying to do something very different than other games of its type, too: it's trying to be a strategically interesting after years of play, even without *having* to endlessly refresh the card pool. (Sort of like how you can play Starcraft or chess for years without needing new pieces for the game to be interesting.) It's been so much effort to make the game really work how it needs to that I've been much more concerned with that than how we end up teaching it when it's done. That's not something you can even directly work on until you have it all hammered out.

Plus, every time we make any decision about the game, we're indirectly considering the new player. It's often easy to solve some design problem by adding more stuff: more rules, more words, more pieces. But that's not elegant and I always push back. At every step, I try to fight off the feature creep of more more more to keep things as elegant as they can be, given what we're working with. So the beginner benefits from all that.

Link just really went on about this NPE thing though, it was clearly very important to him. I told him how the "NPE" in Codex is that we suggest you start by playing just one hero instead of three. That this simplifies the game quite a bit. It's not just those hero cards themselves, but all the spells and units that are associated with those heroes that you don't have to worry about for your first game. It's cutting 2/3rds of the cards right off the bat, basically.

Link thought that was a good idea. He was looking for more ways to make it easier for a beginner though, or ways for them to care more about trying the simplified version rather than skipping it.

Designing The NPE

Later on, I thought about what Link said. I thought about how I've had to spend all my effort on making the game work correctly, so that's why I hadn't put that much thought into New Player Experiences other than the "only one hero" thing, which is a pretty good way to start. But...what if I really cared about this? What if we said this is super important, and we maximized for the NPE? What would it even look like? I like to do that when things like this come up, and it's basically what we did for asynchronous play a year ago. If we had to change everything around to support this new idea, what would we even do?

The good news is that

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Codex Design Diary: A Rocky Road

At some point I said "What if Codex could be played asynchronously?" That means playing your whole turn without waiting for the other player, so that you could someday play multiple games at once online, taking your turns at your leisure, whenever.

First, we discovered that cutting out instants had way less strategy impact than we expected. So many, many times there was just a convoluted correct thing to do with the stack (as you may know from Magic: the Gathering) that wasn't a real decision. The game played faster and smoother without instants or a stack, even though most playtesters were wary of that change beforehand. They ended up liking it after trying it.

But then there's combat. It was difficult to even think of a way combat could possibly work without waiting for the defender's decisions. There's also the worry that it would be bad even if it did work, but the experiment was to just see if it could even work at all, then figure out if it's bad later. I thought it would either work or not, and I didn't realize that all these months later (or has it been a year by now?) that I'd still be in limbo on that.

Version 1 of Patrol Zone

There were several ideas of how to make combat fully asynchronous, but only the concept of the "patrol zone" really came together as one that could work. You put the guys you want to block with in that zone, then somehow, they magically block attacks automatically when the opponent attacks. Yeah I glossed over exactly how, but you get the high concept.

I tried it with one playtester. He loved it, to my surprise. Then I tried it with more people. They really liked it too. This kept happening. People really latched onto this whole thing and said it felt different and interesting. Ok great, more positive than I expected. Let's go with it. Oh, and any spells that interact with the patrol zone are basically like instants, by their nature. In Magic: the Gathering they'd like "deal 2 damage to target blocking creature." So that's good.

But then there were problems. Several people got through multiple games of this without issue, but then someone brought up "what if you attack in this certain way, that is strategically stupid? What would happen?" And it was kind of undefined. So I guess the patrol zone rules needed some answer to that. Then someone else had a different situation like that. Damn. Also, you could attack more than one target during combat, and do you resolve each of those one at a time, or all at once? It hardly ever matters, but in some situations it does. One player said of course it's one at a time. Another said of course it's all at once. But each of those answers created problems. Also, there is something called "harassing" that defenders can do that's different from "blocking." Do harassers harass at the same time as blocks? Or slightly after? Again, it hardly ever matters, but when it does, each of those answers creates some problem.

To describe the feel of all that, it's like 95% of this system worked fine, and that's the 95% you experience in any normal kind of playing. But the other 5% around the edges that you'd almost never encounter is really deeply screwed up. I started to realize that these weren't just bugs to fix. It was more like if a program is architected all wrong. It also felt like there was a "conservation of fuckup" going on, like conservation of energy in physics. No one could see how to really solve these bad cases, just move them around to create other different bad cases.

I actually spent days on this. Just this. It was really troublesome to not even be able to progress on this game or even know if the patrol zone was workable at all. It affects the whole game so I can't even tune how all the cards work without knowing this. I can't continue playtesting. I asked myself what a solution could even possibly look like. It seemed like any solution would have to be some patchwork of exceptions that you have to know about how the patrol zone blockers operate. Even if we thought of answers, these answers would just be a mess.

I felt like my experience with game systems was helping me here by telling me this was not just a list of bugs to fix. This required some kind of big sweeping, systemic change. And it's just "too hard" for my brain, at least my conscious brain. So I tried to leverage my unconscious. Make sure this is the thing I'm grinding on. I took walks. I played Diablo on Xbox. I watched Law & Order. But really I was thinking about this, going over and over it. I would restate the problems over and over, explain them to myself, so that I very clearly knew what the problems were. Maybe something would magically solve them? I talked to a couple playtesters, going over this stuff at great length, asking for even bad ideas. They gave some. All bad. (But that's ok, sometimes bad ideas help.)

Then the lightning struck. I was actually laying in bed in the middle of the day. Waiting. I don't know why at that moment I saw the connections I hadn't seen before, but I sat up and knew I had something. You see, there's something all those fucked up cases had in common. Combat goes like this:

1) Say which guys are your attackers and WHAT they are all attacking (they can attack multiple things)
2) The opposing patrol zone guys somehow block you
3) Resolve it all

All the problem cases involved various ways of choosing WHAT you attack in step 1 that then cause the maximum amount of weirdness in step 2. One of those "bad ideas" that one playtester bounced off me involved choosing what you attack after step 2. The way she said to do that was too complicated and long, so I didn't like it. But now I think she had the right general direction of an idea. All the problems we had go away if it's this order:

1) Say which guys are your attackers
2) The opposing patrol zone guys somehow block your guys
3) whichever of your guys aren't blocked in step 2, you can now MICROMANAGE them to hit various targets
4) Resolve it all

The RTS word (micromanage) makes the flavor feel right for how the mechanics are working. Would that sell people on it? Would they think it's backwards to do combat this way? We have played this game for years now and never done it that way.

The answer is that people bought into this right away. In fact, one guy who had played for a long time said "this new thing isn't backwards. The way we've done forever is the backwards way. I always had to work out which guys of mine would end up being unblocked if I were to attack, resolve it all in my head ahead of time, then figure out the right targets to say at the beginning of combat so that it will work out right. But now I can attack, see which guys get through, then direct those guys where I want. It's simpler to think about and faster to do."

Everyone was happy. The patrol zone was solved. Except...it wasn't.

Version 2 of Patrol Zone

I saw a problem that no one was complaining about, but it was a big deal to me. People were playing the game, it was functioning and all, but all your guys died too much. I thought the much older version of the game before any asynchronous stuff was probably too defensive, and this new version was intentionally more offense oriented, so this wasn't entirely unexpected. The thing is, your guys died so much that it was hard to really put much of a plan together. You needed guys so desperately to block that a 1/1 for 1 became incredible. That really limits design space when we make some new cool thing and you say "yeah whatever, too bad it's not a blank 1/1 that cost 1! That's what I really want."

So why were your guys dying so much? See if you can follow this logic. You have heroes and tech buildings that you want to protect, so you put your guys in the patrol zone to protect those. If those patrol zone guys end up dying, you're actually ok with that result. They protected what they were supposed to and in the previous version's rules, the opponent had to pay 1 gold to even attack those things. So this lessened the slippery slope. But in this current version, they don't say what they attack until after their guys engage your guys in the patrol zone. They don't pay anything to do that (they only pay to micromanage after that step, if anything is unblocked). They basically pay 0 to kill your guys. Furthermore, they might just be attacking your life total and in that case you probably wouldn't want to block early game. You wish your patrol zone guys would sometimes back off rather than die if they are only protecting your life total. You NEED to have guys there though in case they attack your heroes or tech buildings.

So in short: you're forced to block when you don't want to. And when that happens, the opponent is now paying 0 for it when in previous versions they paid 1 gold. This is causing your guys to die constantly and it's causing the kind of excessive slippery slope that we fixed a long time ago, but now it's back. It's causing most abilities in the game to be useless because guys don't even live long enough to use their abilities. It's a major problem.

How the heck do we solve this? Every solution put forth was very complicated. If this is to be asynchronous (meaning you can get through your entire turn without waiting for your opponent) then you have to create a really complicated algorithm that simulates reasonable choices for blocking. Even if you do all that there's still the screwy thing about how the opponent can pay 0 at times they are really "supposed" to pay 1 gold. It was miserable and maybe this whole asynchronous thing wasn't going to work out.

I asked pretty much everyone who ever played the game what they thought. Their answer was almost universal: they wanted it to stay asynchronous and they wanted the patrol zone to work. They said I should figure out how. When I dug deeper in their answers, they fell into these camps: 1) some people wanted the game asychronous because they envisioned how good that would be for a digital version someday, 2) some people didn't plan to ever even play that version but they just liked that async made it faster to get through a turn, and they had time to play multiple games in a row. And then here was a real curve ball for me: some people said they hoped the patrol zone would say no matter digital or not, and no matter async or not. They just really really liked it. It's different and interesting they kept saying. "Please solve it," they said. Yeah, great.

There was another really frustrating period where I decided we just had to give up on the patrol zone...or maybe not...yes we do...or maybe we can think of some answer? I really needed an answer or we can't even progress on development. With one friend, I would txt him every few hours with a new Codex combat system.

"If you don't like Codex combat, wait a few minutes."--Mark Twain

We had all sorts of ideas, all of them crazy. Multiple special slots in the patrol zone that each blocked in different ways. A "battle plans" concept where you had to say what you wanted to attack the turn before doing it, so that the opponent could choose their patrol zone guys accordingly. (That one sounded like it would solve everything but turned out really bad.) This was getting so bad that I said maybe we should give up on this entire year's worth of effort to make the game asynchronous. It's just completely falling apart here.

Then as a thought exercise, I wondered "what if we allowed the patrol zone rules be as complicated as we wanted, to the point where it's insane and unshippable? What would it be like?" So I listed out what it would be like. I would summarize it this way:

1) If you attack anything except their life total: follow these fairly simple rules.
2) If you attack their life total, follow this ridiculously huge bundle of rules.

Then in frustration I yelled out "if you attack their life total, they should just choose exactly how they want to block! I don't even care if it's asynchronous anymore!!" But wait a minute. It CAN just be that way. If we already have workable rules for attacking everything else, the maybe there are two different kinds of attacking. One that follows the fairly simple rules for patrol zone blocking, and another that lets the opponent block how they want, but that *ends your turn* when you declare the attackers. It's still asynchronous that way. In the first case, you are "micromanaging" and choosing exactly how it all plays out. In the second case, you're "auto-attacking" and letting the opponent micromanage their blockers, basically. Maybe a bit complicated to have two kinds of attacking? But unlike everything mentioned so far...it seems to actually work.

Testing showed right away: yes it worked. It really did fix the previous problem. People seemed to accept the auto-attack vs micromanage attack concept readily, too. It mapped to something they understood from RTS video games so it made sense to their brains. That's really good when the mechanics of how a thing "should" work line up with the flavor of how it feels.

So finally, this whole mess was solved. Except...it wasn't.

Version 3 of Patrol Zone

Kevin. The terror of Codex: Kevin. He's a playtester who got better and better at the game over time to the point that he's scary. If he finds some card that's too good, that's no problem. We can just fix that card. The problem is that Kevin was starting to uncover a systemic problem, something that was beyond the scope of adjusting any particular card. He showed that rushdown was very, very strong. We had just fixed one problem that made rushdown too good (being forced to block at times you didn't really want to), and even though that problem really was fixed, rushdown was *still* too good. Playing against Kevin was like playing playing Starcraft where the enemy's zerglings start right next to your command center or something. He was just way too successful with focusing entirely on early game and avoiding even using more mid-game and late-game tech.

So this damn combat system was broken yet again, basically. Is there no end to this??

I suggested a fix, and people seemed to think it wouldn't work. Testing has so far showed that it does work though, so I get some prediction points, ha. The fix is that the "patrol leader" (the only special slot in the patrol zone) gets +1 HP when it blocks. People had asked for a long time if the patrol leader could get some sort of bonus anyway, not for gameplay reasons, but just because they thought it felt like it should. In this case, that +1 HP on just one of your units is enough to give you a bit of breathing room against an early rush. It lets your guys live just long enough that their abilities start to matter, and surviving Kevin's rush becomes a realistic thing. You might not think such a small bonus to one thing would transform the game, but it does.

In addition to that, I buffed every unit in the entire game except the very first units you play at the start of the game. The effect of that is that when you do survive that early rush and start teching up to more powerful stuff, the jump in power is bigger. It's big enough that even Kevin needs to care about it and do it, rather than only build the equivalent of basic zerglings all day, forever. It also seems to have helped the fun factor. I personally had more fun playing this latest version of Codex than I can ever remember having before. The other day I chose to play Codex over Guilty Gear!

Conclusion?

So finally, this whole mess was solved. Or is it? Actually as of this writing, it is. I don't know what will happen next but I really hope this current system works out. All the *rest* of the stuff the game is about that makes it stand apart from other card games has been working well for a long time.

I planned on making a public print-and-play version a long time ago, but there have been way, way too many system changes that kept pushing that out. Sorry for the wait, it will still be a bit longer. You will be able to play Codex at Fantasy Strike Expo though, in June. Don't forget to sign up now.

Codex Development: Combat Evolved

I wrote before about the process of making Codex possible to play asynchronously by compressing all the decisions an opponent has to make on your turn into just one step, rather than like a thousand steps. It turned out surprisingly well. There was one detail of combat that became more confusing with that change though.

You have two units, we'll call them A and B. I attack your unit A with some of my stuff and I also attack your unit B with other stuff. Because all the opponent's decisions all occur in the same step in the asynchronous version of the game, it means you can have your unit A block to protect unit B *and* have your unit B block to protect your unit A. Then later we'll see which of those units is still around to actually block depending on the order that the attacker decided to resolve things. This particular situation made it difficult to understand how you should even block sometimes. Meaning "if I decide to do it this way, what will end up happening?" In one playtest a situation like that came up and a group of experienced players argued over the strategy for like 10 minutes about which way they should block. And one of them was factually incorrect about how it even worked. This really shouldn't be so hard.

Maybe we should fix that? I mean if it's that confusing to an expert then something seems to have gone wrong somewhere. There is no simple fix to it though. Stuff like saying "if I attack unit A, then unit A just can't block to protect another unit" doesn't work. It might be possible to change the way combat works entirely though, such that this situation can't come up, or maybe change it so that if it does come up, the way to resolve it much simpler.

Any Changes Needed?

"Is this worth fixing?" was a real question here. There's nothing mechanically wrong, though maybe we should do something about it anyway. This was just the beginning of unravelling of a lot of rules though. The very prospect of changing anything about how combat works made me think of other questions, too.

"Do games take too long?" This is another judgment call. How long is too long? And more to the point, what if usually game length is ok but sometimes it's too long? Like 20% of the time? Or 10%? It's not so straightforward but several times I've thought "this game took too long to finish I think." There seem to be two main reasons for this: 1) combat situations are sometimes so complicated to plan for that it takes players a really long time to decide what they should do and work through all the possibilities and 2) by nature of how the combat system works, defense is pretty good. Sometimes it just takes a while to really be able to punch through someone's defense.

And then another possible issue is that it's pretty great that all the opponent's decisions are now concentrated into just one step during your turn, but should we have really figured out some way to make it 0 steps? As in, just take your entire turn without having to wait for the opponent? One way to fix that confusing combat situation I mentioned before is to go up to TWO waits for opponent decisions per turn, but maybe that's wrong direction? Is it ok if we did that, or should it stay at just one wait period for the opponent during your own turn, or should that go all the way down to zero to be fully asynchronous?

So now there's four issues on the table:

1) Combat has one situation that can come up that is especially confusing.
2) Combat often causes analysis paralysis.
3) The way combat works inherently favors defense, and possibly a bit too much.
4) Maybe combat should remove the step where you wait for the opponent to make decisions to make the game fully asynchronous. 

No one complained about *any* of these things though. (The last one will only matter for online versions someday). Everyone who plays the game seems to really like it as it is. So which, if any of these things are worth caring about? None? All? Just one? It's not clear at all how to address any of those things even if we did care. And it seems unlikely to be able to address all of them. Probably some tradeoffs will make it so that fixing one of those problems would just make a different one of the problems worse. Who knows.

Some Ideas

The last time I tried to make Codex more asynchronous, the first step was "just let it be totally terrible, try it, and see if that sparks any ideas. If not, we can just revert it all to what it was before." That worked well, so I tried that technique again here. It was pretty difficult to think of any system that could address all those points, but at least some things line up. If blocking could somehow happen "automatically" then that means it would probably end up faster, probably end up less confusing, and probably end up with defense being a bit weaker.

After thinking through a new system for about a week, I had something to try, at least. When I tried it against a friend, immediately on turn 1 it was terrible. I had thought through many examples of how it would go mid-game, but I hadn't really thought about turn 1 when you don't have much in play.

So we abandoned that idea and improvised a variation of it. What if you had a "patrol zone" and any units or heroes you put there would automatically block? It turns out that many possible ways to handle "automatically block" involve really complicated rules, so how about the attacker gets to choose exactly how the blockers block? That makes  defense hugely weaker, so to make up for it somewhat, after each attacker is blocked by one patroller, if there are any remaining patrollers then they get to "harass" and deal their damage for free without getting hit back.

It turns out, this actually worked fairly well. You don't decide the specifics of how your guys will block, but you do decide which guys will block at all and which are "in the back row" protected by your patrollers. This worked well sometimes, though were several frustrating situations that came up where the opponent choosing blockers in the most favorable way was just too favorable. Sometimes it was fine though. All attempts to make this more fair to the defending player made it much, much more complicated though. As soon as you try to make up some algorithm about exactly how these blocks happen, there are just tons of loopholes and special cases you have to take into account, and it sucks.

So I tried coming at it from a different angle. Instead of trying to really fix these problems, how about just a small step toward fixing them? Then we can see how that goes. That step was to let you say that one of your patrolling guys is a "patrol leader." That patrol leader always automatically blocks the attacker with the highest attack power (or the attacker chooses if it's a tie). I was very surprised how much difference this made. It wasn't a small step, it was a huge step. It felt like an actual working system. The ability to choose which of your guys patrol at all AND which will block their most threatening thing makes the automated blocking system function a lot better than I would have ever guessed.

There was also another implication I hadn't thought of until playing this experimental, fully asynchronous version. Each turn in Codex, there's a step where you modify your deck a bit. In live play, if it really is asynchronous (so you don't make any decisions during your opponent's turn), then their turn is the natural time for you do that step where you modify your deck. That way no one is waiting on you to do that and it actually flows very well. We weren't able to it that way before because during the opponent's turn, in the old days the opponent is constantly having to ask if you want to respond to this or that, so it wasn't a good time for you to do the deck-modifying step.

Testing the New Version

Anyway, I updated about 1/3rd of the cards in the game to function correctly in this new fully asynchronous version. Playtesters liked it so much that they said the whole game should be converted to this. It's faster to play, easier to understand, and still had the parts of the game they liked. One person said it was like a more concentrated version, in that it was delivering a similar kind of fun as before, but in less time. Another player said he had no idea why any of these changes were made because he wasn't around for any discussions, but that just playing the newer version with no context, it was "far more accessible." He liked it a lot, so I have since converted all cards in the game to work with this new combat system, held another playtest with even more players, and they liked it too.

Conclusion

There is currently no work on an online version of Codex (maybe a kickstarter for it someday?) but when it eventually does exist, the ability to play like 10 simultaneous, asynchronous games of it is going to be pretty awesome. And the current players who are trying the live version and not even thinking about online stuff have so far all approved it due to faster play time and less confusion. I actually like that offense is a bit better now so we don't get locked up board states where no one can do anything for a while.

Codex has been through several major system changes, and each time it seems to have emerged a bit more streamlined and with various new and good properties. Hopefully all these experiments will have been worth it once you can finally play it too. Lots of art development is going on right now, so it's getting there.

Asynchronous Games and Codex

Asynchronous play means that your opponent doesn't have to be around at the same time you are. You can take your turn, then later on your opponent will take his turn at his leisure. This is increasingly more important now that mobile games are a bigger and bigger phenomenon. You can take your turn in some game while waiting at a bus stop or whatever even though you wouldn't be able to play an entire (synchronous) game in that same situation. So it's not just a "feature" when a game can be played in this way, it's transformative in that it allows you to play games in different real-life situations than you otherwise could. It also means you can play 10 different sessions of the game against 10 different people, all taking their turns here and there at bus stops or other free moments here and there. Synchronous games can't do that.

Although I play some simple asynchronous word games, when it comes to "real" games I generally scoff at asynchronous stuff. People ask if Puzzle Strike or Yomi could support such a thing and they pretty much can't because they are both so INTERACTIVE. I tend to put as much interactivity into my games as I can: the more the better, and the less the worse. The games that most lend themselves to asynchronous play are the ones with so little interactivity that you can do a whole bunch of stuff on your turn and the opponent can't even react. That said, allowing asynchronous play is still a huge win in convenience and maybe these days people don't want a "better" and more interactive game, maybe they want a game they can actually get around to playing. Often, that means an asynchronous one. (And does asynchronous really have to mean worse anyway? See below.)

Codex

One day I thought, "Can my card game Codex be altered to support asynchronous play?" It's actually ludicrous to consider. The opponent can react about 9,000 times per turn to stuff you can do. It would be like playing MtG asynchronously, where the number of back and forths waiting to see if they other person does anything is so large that you'd give up on it before getting through a single turn, probably. That said, it would be such a big win if it were possible…somehow.

The thing that made me consider this at all is

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"The Playtesters Are Saying To Do X"

I'll give you an anecdote from Codex development, my customizable not-collectable card game. First though, a more general concept. When most playtesters are complaining that something is too weak or too strong...should you change it? You'd sure hope that they are right and that yes you should change it. That is kind of the point of having people playtest a thing in the first place, to find issues with it that you can improve. There is a danger to it though, so there's a judgment call you should be aware of.

I've heard Blizzard speak about this exact issue before, and I like the philosophy they mentioned. On the one hand, yes you want to improve the game over time. On the other hand, you actually don't achieve that by making every change everyone asks for. If you do that, you'll move some things in the wrong direction sometimes, and you'll weaken things that weren't too strong or strengthen things that weren't too weak. Another thing Blizzard has mentioned is that if you change stuff every time any balance claim is made, you end up training your players to not look very hard for counters. You train them to rely on you, the developer, as a crutch and they might not be reaching the higher level of play they should reach before making the claim in the first place. So Blizzard's point is some temperance is required: you do want to make changes, but only when they are warranted.

Often when I hear playtesters wanting a change, I take the opposite side and give the reasons why a change shouldn't be made. That kind of pushback creates a least *some* barrier to too many changes happen. If they were right in the first place, they shouldn't have too much trouble explaining why the points I made weren't good enough, or weren't as important as their points, or whatever and that's fine. If they can make a good case that took some counter-points into account, probably the change would be good. Incidentally, with some people this is a totally straightforward and emotionless discussion, while with others it gets into drama. I have found I could make like ten times the progress by having 10 side discussions with the level-headed testers in the time I could have 1 discussion with the open group that includes...all types of people. So there's another thing to keep in mind. It's good to include more people for more viewpoints and to discover more problems, but it's also good to be efficient with fewer.

Back on point, I'd like to give some examples of playtest situations that were kind of unusual. Like I said, usually if a lot of people think there's a problem with something, there is. But knowing a few of the unusual counter-examples might help you identify if you are experiencing just such a counter-example when balancing whatever game you might be working on. So here's those unusual cases:

Tafari In Kongai

Tafari is a character in the Kongai virtual card game I designed for kongregate.com. He was intentionally a controversial, game-warping character. His ability is unique in all the game in that he prevents other characters from switching out against him. Characters switching in and out is a core mechanic of the game, so it's a huge deal that he disables this. It screams "broken" the first moment you hear about it. Tafari's other moves were designed with this in mind though, so he doesn't have any kind of reliable, explosive damage potential. He is kind of..."ok." Against some characters he has advantage, agaist others he's not even that great. But wow does he feel unfair at first.

The first wave of comments was that he was absurdly unfair. I kind of had to ignore that though because I expected that based on his "feel." When new players started playing the game, they usually claimed he was unfair too. What about experienced players who had a chance to play as him and against him for a while? Even then, they ranked him top tier for a while, but eventually he slipped to 2nd tier at best. He only ever had slight adjustments that had more to do with fixing bugs on how many times poison darts proc'd. His ability is just so crazy *feeling*, that people made wrong balance claims for quite a while. In the end, he was ok as-is.

Stolen Purples In Puzzle Strike

This is almost the same story. I even had Tafari in mind when I created Stolen Purples. This chip is game warping in that you play Puzzle Strike differently if it's in the bank than if it's not. At cost 4, many said it was just way too good. Was it? Usually when a lot playtesters said a chip was the wrong cost, they were right. But Stolen Purples had that same feature going as Tafari: the very idea you can steal purple chips from people *feels* so powerful that it can be hard to be objective about it. I didn't want to change it. After a while, one playtester said something pretty interesting. It was something like "I think we all subconsciously think that red chips (Stolen Purples is red) are supposed to suck, so we're thrown off by this one being good enough to buy. Probably some red chips need so much teeth that they legitimately compete with purple chips for you buy, and they give even more reason to care about having blues to protect yourself." Indeed.

While Stolen Purples is game-warping, it didn't really end up being too powerful, despite a ton of claims in the old days. It's merely "really really good."

Setsuki in Yomi

During Yomi's development, many people said Setsuki was too weak. Was she? There was a big problem in getting to the bottom of that. With other characters, when a big group of players said a character was weak, there was not much reason to question it. Just figure out where to add more power. With Setsuki though, the problem was that everyone was terrible at playing her. She plays in a strange way that's different from other characters. She often wants to make plays that would be bad with anyone else, but for her they will refill her hand. She wants to "waste" cards at just the right times to trigger her hand refill. She also has some nuances to her Bag of Tricks ability that you have to be aware of.

So of the set of people who said she was bad, *most* of that set were playing her badly and that tells us little, if anything. Then one very good playtester made the same claim. I explained to him the concept that everyone says she's bad because they don't get it, so I asked him if he was at that level of understanding, or if he knew all that, was totally good at her, and was making a "level 2" claim. He said he would get back to me.

Later he came back and said he had now reached level 2. He sees why other people were wrong in the reasons for their claims she is weak, but he--knowing how to actually play her--still claims it. THAT is good feedback. I asked him if he could get another good player who played her well to agree with him, and he was able to do that. So in this case, the testers ultimately were right, but the masses were not right on how much improvement was needed. Those on level 2 said only a bit of improvement was needed (most people said huge buffs were needed), so we made those slight changes and it was enough. Great.

Prohibition in Codex

The card Prohibition also reminds me of Tafari. It's game warping, though not as much as Tafari is. It allows the player to name a number, then opponents can't play units, spells, or upgrades that cost that much. "Is Prohibition too weak or too strong" has come up at basically every playtest of Codex ever.

Initially, I thought it was too weak if anything. The opponent can play around it by playing stuff of other costs. Because of the nature of how Codex works, it's easier to play around than it would be in Magic: the Gathering. In Codex you have more fine control over which cards you draw, and you can get rid of cards you don't want (like the ones that cost whatever they named) by playing them as workers (resources). Yes, the player of Prohibition is getting some advantage by making the other player play around it, but that's kind of the point. It doesn't seem like a huge amount of advantage considering they can do so many other things.

But if all that is right, why did this conversation come up over and over and over again? I remember one game where I said "Looks like you're in trouble. I guess you could cast Doom Grasp and be ok though. Oh...you can't because that's the cost they named with Prohibition. Well yeah tough luck." More and more stories like that came up over time. What's worse is that Prohibition is in a certain category of cards that you are able to get with 100% certainty on the first two turns. A card that can potentially shut down certain things is ok, but when you can so easily cast it so early every game it's kind of oppressive.

Yet another issue with it is that there aren't a lot of ways to remove it, and that's kind of on purpose. "Upgrade" cards are generally pretty reliable. Other types of cards are even harder to defend than you're used to in other similar card games, so it's kind of nice to have one type that isn't quite so easy to remove. Why don't ALL upgrade cards have the same problem as Prohibition then? Part of the answer is that most other upgrade cards...upgrade your own stuff. It's less important that you get rid of some buff to the other guy than get rid of a thing that's blocking your own plans. The other part of the answer is that if you do have one of the few things that can get rid of Prohibition, the other guy can name the cost of your answer to prevent you from even playing it.

So after like a thousand times of "Should something be done about Prohibition?" I have say the answer is yes. People are still somewhat split on it, but it's come up way way more times than I'd expect if it were a case like Tafari or Stolen Purples or Setsuki where simply getting better at the game was a solution. In other words, Prohibition kind of looks like it's one of those unusual exceptions, except maybe it isn't. Maybe it's just too damn powerful. Or maybe it's a bad idea to allow a game-warping effect to be so prevalent and easy to use. In any case, I revised it to be a unit so that it's much easier to kill and also to only prevent the opponent from casting units of the named cost, rather than units/spells/upgrades. I think it will now play a role more in line with any other card, and we can finally get on to other discussions. There will of course be substantially more testing.