Puzzle Strike and Flash Duel News

Puzzle Strike Sale

First up, Puzzle Strike is on sale for $10 off during December only. The combo with base game + upgrade pack is also $10 off in December. There's also some new stuff you can try in Puzzle Strike, but let me tell you about Flash Duel first.

Flash Duel Previews

Here's the first preview I've seen of the game so far. Pretty positive! He mentions that even those who have Flash Duel 1 should "nab" the 2nd Edition. Well yes, because this is an expansion with 10 new characters. It just so happens that this expansion also contains a second expansion with the Raid on Deathstrike Dragon...and a rework of the base game too...all mysteriously the same price. If anything, I might have goofed up on this $35 price point being too low. Maybe I'll have to raise that later. I just really wanted to give everyone a cheap entry point into the Fantasy Strike universe that actually had all 20 characters.

Here's another kind of preview for you. I put up the card images of the base 10 characters plus the enormous Dragon cards here. The other 10 characters will be revealed a bit later. Man, those Dragon cards are sexy.

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Ok back to Puzzle Strike. I'm testing out some stuff out for the full expansion of Puzzle Strike. You can actually try these things out right now though, with the base set. These aren't official features yet, so there might be problems, but these things probably work pretty well. Feel free to try them out and report back how it went!

New Rule: PANIC TIME

This rule increases the size of the ante as the game goes on. It will have a relatively small effect on most games played by experts, but it will have an enormous effect (to prevent overly long games) on games by new players.

In a 2-player game, the first moment there are two empty stacks in the bank, Panic Time is activated and everyone must ante 2-gems from then on. Even if bank stacks get filled back up from trashing, the game does not return to Normal Time. The first moment there are three simultaneously empty bank stacks, Danger Time is activated and everyone antes 3-gems. The first time four stacks are empty, Deadly Time is activated and everyone must ante 4-gems. Note that if you would ever ante a certain kind of gem that the bank is out of, you must ante it anyway with a stand-in gem of some sort.

For games with 3 or 4 players, the same sort of thing happens. The number of empty stacks needed to activate Panic Time is actually X, where X is the number of players left in the game. X+1, and X+2 empty stacks are when Danger Time and Deadly Time activate. This means in a 4p game, 4 empty stacks will activate Panic Time (ante 2-gems), but once one player is eliminated, there will only be 3 players left and only 3 empty stacks are needed to activate Panic Time at that point. This (combined with the standard rule for Overflow) means that once a player is eliminated, the game is likely to end very soon, so the eliminated player won't be waiting long, if at all.

Midori's Dragon Form is revised to say "Ante a (gem) 1 bigger each turn or discard this chip..."

New Mode: 2 vs. 2 Team Battle Mode!

Teammates share a (normal sized) gem pile, but do not share other resources. Each player has his own hand, bag, and discard pile as usual. If you get +arrow or +$1 or whatever, that goes to you only, not shared with your teammate. Anything that says "you" in the game means "you," so having a Hundred-Fist Frenzy on the table doesn't let your teammate activate it, only you.

Teammates share their action phase. You can each play your actions in any order, so maybe you play roundhouse (and draw from it), then your teammate plays something, then you use Roundhouse's +arrow to play something else.

Teammates share their buy phase. You can make your buys in any order.

Your attacks cannot affect your teammate, but effects that say "all opponents" do hurt both opposing players. The only exception is anything of the form "Each opponent does something to his gem pile" only affects the enemy gem pile one time not two times. (Sneak Attack, Mix-Master, Burning Vigor, and Hex of Murkwood are examples.) If a chip says "next opponent" then you can choose which of your two opponents it hits.

Blue shields operate as usual. You can blue shield a fist that affects you and you can't blue shield one that doesn't. So you can't "save" your teammate with a blue shield on an attack that would only hit him, but in practice blue shields still usually work because you'll often be affected as well. If you become immune to one of those things like Sneak Attack in the previous paragraph, your team's gem pile is safe.

When the opposing team sends gems to your gem pile, you and your teammate can each counter-crash. (I think one of you can, not both. Only one reaction per "event.")

This cooperative, no-elimination way of playing 4-player Puzzle Strike hopefully opens up new doors for those interested in 4p. Maybe especially fun for a girlfriend and boyfriend to team up. ;)

Flash Duel: *Betrayal* at Raid on Deathstrike Dragon

Flash Duel's new raid mode is cooperative, in that you team up with up to three other players to defeat the dragon. The mortals win as a team or lose as a team. There's a common problem with cooperative games that a dominant player can bark orders at everyone else and basically play the game solitaire. What to do about this?

Deathstrike Dragon tells you what to do!

The most common answer is to do nothing, and "play with different people." Another common answer is an infeasible and sloppy one: rules about how you can't share information with people on your team. Another answer is to have a secret "traitor" on the team, so you can't trust everyone's advice and you have to think for yourself. Finally, there's a very uncommon solution used by Space Alert and Wok Star where there's time pressure (meaning the game takes place in real-time, not turn-based!) and that there simply isn't time for a single person to do everyone's job. In video games, of course there's the solution that your instructions don't replace the skills of other people (hey, just get all head-shots in this FPS!) but we're talking about board games and card games here.

Let's talk about the worst solution first, the one where the game claims that you can't share information. If you're experienced with tournament rules, hopefully you immediately see the problem here. You can "give hints" but you can't say what cards you have? Like "I have a high card" might be ok, but "I have the Jack of Spades" is not? A hint is actually identical to saying the card in high level play. You give enough hints, or you encode information in the hints to make that so. You can also tap your arm or your forehead to pass information, or other such signals. The point is that there is no real way to stop this kind of stuff. In fighting games, it would be like saying "don't use a certain move *too much*" or some such fuzzy, non-discrete, unenforceable thing.

Fuzzy Rules and Battlestar Galactica

Another example of how this type of solution is sloppy and infeasible comes from the game Battlestar Galactica. In that game, each player submits a card face down to a pile that represents a team effort to complete a task, then two extra random cards are added. This allows a traitor to sneak in a card that will hurt everyone, then he or she can claim that card must have been one of the random ones when everything is revealed. Ok, sounds fine at first glance. But what about sharing information? The rulebook says this:

Skill Cards and Skill Checks: Players are prohibited from revealing the exact strength of cards in their hands. They may use vague terms such as “I can help out on this crisis a little bit,” but they may not make more specific statements such as “I am playing 5 piloting.” In addition, after a skill check is resolved, players may not identify which cards they played. The reason for these restrictions is to keep hidden information secret and to protect Cylon players from being discovered too easily.

One player who is not the traitor should announce the following strategy. "I am not the traitor, and it's in my interest to expose the traitor. If you are not the traitor it's in your interest too. If you do not do what I'm going to say in a moment, you must be the traitor. What I'm about to say benefits non-traitors and exposes traitors, so there is no reason to not to go along other than being a traitor. We'll all "hint" at the cards we're going to play, and of course hints and just saying the card are the same in high-level play. Then when the cards are later revealed, we see if every card claimed to be there really is. If anyone lied, they are the traitor. If anyone was intentionally too vague with hints, they are the traitor. (The game pushes us all asymptotically close to the taboo tactic here.) Note that it's possible that a lying traitor could get lucky and his lie matches a random card. That's no matter though because if the cards *don't* match, then we definitely know the traitor. We'll just do this every single time, preventing the traitor from ever doing anything."

Is that a fun way to play? Not really. But that just highlights the problem. Playing well breaks that game because rules trying to limit communication between people who really want to communicate don't really work. Playing that way is also "against the spirit of the game," but with a squishy information sharing rule, playing against the spirit of the game is just playing well, really, and that's a problem too.

A Better Way to Handle Hidden Information?

The problem is that it's infeasible to give players an incentive to share information, then claim that they can't. A better way to handle this is to attack the problem at the incentive level. Make the players not want to share information. Either way, the goal is to make it so not every player knows everything so that players have to think for themselves rather than rely entirely on the advice of the loudest player. If we can give people some reason they don't *want* to share information, we don't have to worry so much about all the annoying stuff above.

We need a traitor who gets his power from information. On the one hand, the more information you share, the better off your team is because you can all plan together. On the other hand, the more information you share, the more powerful you make the traitor, so you should not share everything. The moment you hold back sharing anything, we've already solved the dominant player problem.

In Flash Duel, the hidden information is the cards in everyone's hands. Remember that these cards just have a single big number on them, like a "2" or something, and that you only have hands of five cards. The traitor has a special power where he can voluntarily reveal himself and then attempt to kill off the mortals by naming the cards in their hands. If the traitor can name every card in every other mortal's hand, he kills them all. This would probably never happen in a real game though, because players will know that showing their hand cards can be deadly. What this really does is keep information sharing in check.

By the way, the revealed traitor then fights alongside the dragon, so he's not out of the game when he reveals himself.

The Betrayal Mode

Last time I wrote about the Raid on Deathstrike Dragon mode, the one without the traitor. In that one, the answer to the dominant player problem is "just try to work together and don't play solitaire." But a dominant player certainly could ruin that experience, as with almost any cooperative game. The Betrayal mode is a harder version of that raid where one of the mortals (or zero of them, but you won't know that!) is the traitor.

In playtesting, several players actually preferred the regular raid over the betrayal raid. The regular raid is a bit simpler, and if you are all getting along and cooperating anyway, there is no problem to fix. That said, I think the betrayal mode will really appeal to certain groups in that it's an extra challenge, and really different (and treacherous!) game dynamics. If you're ready to turn your Flash Duel up a notch, then try it. See which mode your group prefers, and feel free to post your experienes, questions, or hype on the boardgamegeek.

Flash Duel 2nd Edition ships in early December.

In closing, have another dragon card image:

Flash Duel: Raid on Deathstrike Dragon

Flash Duel 2nd Edition is now available for pre-order, here. There's also a new game info page here.

Since the very beginning, I planned for Flash Duel to include a "raid" mode where 2, 3, or 4 players teamed up against a 5th player who controls a powerful dragon. While Flash Duel is a pretty simple game overall, it's still a 1v1 competitive game. I wanted to give players a way to team up and have someone on their side, so that it can be an even more social experience if that's what you're looking for.

I always planned this mode to be part of the second expansion. The first expansion was to have 10 new characters and the second expansion was to include the cooperative play of the dragon raid mode. Somewhere along the way, I decided to redo the entire game and include the base and both expansions all in one though, as part of my "too much value" initiative for Flash Duel. Anyway, even though I planned to include this mode since day 1, I thought I'd explain some of the design choices that came up along the way, for your entertainment value.

Who is the Dragon?

Master Menelker is one of the Fantasy Strike expansion characters. He's actually been with us for a very long time, and he even predates Valerie and Geiger in Yomi. In the lore of Fantasy Strike, he is the most powerful combatant in the realm because he has the will to do what others won't. There is no "cheap" to Menelker, there is no taboo. He is the ultimate embodiment of Playing to Win.

Menelker and Midori trained together long ago, and each have the ability to transform into a dragon. Midori into a powerful green dragon, and Menelker into the much more powerful black Deathstrike Dragon. Menelker got this name from rumors of deathmatches (fights to the death) that he's been involved in--and, apparently won. Menelker would not engage the weak in such a challenge, as it would be outside the point of playing to win. That said, Menelker doesn't need to bother using his ultra-powerful dragon form in such matches, as he would win too easily and learn nothing. No one has defeated the humanoid Menelker, and no one man could defeat the dragon. It would take a team of fighters working together to have a chance.

The Dragon Cards

If the Deathstrike Dragon is to live up to his lore, his cards had better be pretty damned awesome. Early on, there was some talk fo the dragon player having a hand of ability cards so he could keep them secret, instead of the usual face-up abilities in Flash Duel. Even from that earliest moment, I knew it wasn't the right direction though. Hidden information like that can improve the strategy, but we have other ways of improving the strategy, too. It's important to have a bit of showmanship and to make the legend of the dragon come alive. The best way to do that is with gigantic, amazing looking cards, and those cards would be too big to reasonably hold in your hand. The dragon cards use the same one-shot flip mechanic as all other Flash Duel abilities (which is a plus for consistency in mechanics), they are just on huge cards.

Here's one of Menelker's human form cards:

And here's one of his HUGE Deathstrike Dragon cards:

Wow! Notice that the dragon doesn't obey the usual rules of card frames. He's busting out of these cards, stepping in front of the title and the

Click to read more ...

Flash Duel--Adding Perks When You Can

Though we spent quite a while on tuning the core gameplay of the new Flash Duel, I want to talk about the idea of adding extra "perks" when possible to a product. Things that are within reach to do, and that give a lot of benefit for the amount of effort involved. Here are two that came up during development.

Portable Version?

The first edition of Flash Duel had a deluxe and a regular version. The regular version was just cards in a tuckbox with no extra components. A lot of people told me how they really, really like how portable that version was. Flash Duel is a fast game, so it's the kind of thing you could play with a few minutes here or there, and that lends itself to being in a small box like that.

The second edition has only one SKU though, meaning just one product. It's more efficient to manufacture and distribute that way, but it's also that I wanted to do a good rulebook and make sure everyone who has the game has that rulebook. It won't fit in a tiny box. But people really liked that portable version...can we put it *inside* the second edition bigger box, maybe?

There are 60 character ability cards in the second edition (20 characters x 3 abilities each). You'll need 25 numbered cards to play the 1v1 mode. So to put a portable version inside the main version, we'll just need to add 5 cards that you can use as the "track" (instead of using the bigger nicer board that also comes in the box) and we'll need to add a tuckbox to hold those 90 cards. I thought it was worth it to design those 5 track cards and the tuckbox, because it adds a pretty cool feature to the whole thing: the portable version included in every box.

I also made sure on the manufacturing side that when you first get the game, all the cards needed for the portable version are inside that inner tuckbox already. That way you understand what it's for and what goes in it if you want to slip just that smaller box in your pocket.

Playing Two Games At Once?

Let's say you open up the second edition box and use the portable version to play a game of 1v1. Is there enough left over stuff that two of your friends can play a second, parallel game of 1v1? They could use the real game board instead of the 5 track cards in the portable version. With 20 characters to choose from, your friends would have 18 more left. There are enough pawns for all 4 of you in the box. So really the only thing your two friends will need is enough numbered cards to actually play. They'll need 25 numbered cards, but are there enough left over for them?

The Raid on Deathstrike Dragon game mode (more on that in a later post!) requires more than 25 numbered cards to play. During most of development, it required a total of 45 numbered cards. That means we were just 5 shy of having enough to play two simultaneous 1v1 games. It seemed that the Dragon mode was getting time-out a bit too much (when all the cards have been drawn), so adding 5 more cards to solve that would also let us include enough cards to get those two simultaneous games of 1v1 going. I think the coolness of that is totally worth adding another 5 cards to the manufacturing. So you really can play two simultaneous games of 1v1 with just what comes in the box.

In your own projects, see if you can find things with good bang for the buck, like the perks I mentioned here. Sometimes you'll realize you already have 95% of a feature if you're thinking about what would be cool for your players/users/clients.

Introducing Flash Duel 2nd Edition

Flash Duel 2nd Edition is such an unusually large leap over the first version that I think I should explain how that came to happen. It started out simply enough, but it ended up as a business experiment of sorts.

The original plan was to just release an expansion to the game with 10 new characters. After that, there'd be a second expansion that added the ability to play with more than just two players. One problem with this plan is that I have since upgraded the manufacturing of my other games, and I do much higher quantities now to make that possible. It wouldn't make much sense to print thousands of copies of the expansion if there aren't even thousands of the original in existence. So what was really needed is a remake of the original that uses better manufacturing (the original version's cards were sometimes blurry...) and that can exist in high enough quanity to even be part of the retail distribution chain.

Ok, so we'll just rerelease the original game, then? Several fans of the game were disappointed with this, for various different reasons. The most obvious is that if they already owned the game, they were hoping for more. But also, some complained about parts of the rules and wanted some things to work differently. I was looking over the card art, and I wasn't quite satisfied with the lettering of the card titles, and some other graphic design elements. Also, we've developed a FAQ about how some of the abilities work, and it seemed like several should be reworded so as not to need their FAQ entries in the first place.

Next, a guy named BT (who made the awesome 8-bit art on the screens in the Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack) suggested that we color-code some of the words. I immediately saw the value of that idea because "attack" and "dashing strike" are different entities in the game, and different things trigger off them. An ability that says "when you attack" doesn't trigger if you dashing strike, and vice versa. By color coding attack to red and dashing strike to purple, it made that concept even more clear.

While I was rewording the abilities and color-coding them, I realized we needed more room for that text box at the bottom. The base game has a couple abilities that need it, and the expansion had more, so I went ahead with that change. But then it became clear that the aspect ratio of the character art fit a whole lot better when we used the chibi (kid) versions of the characters, than the original ones. I also got rid of the black border around the character cards and did edge-to-edge art instead, which makes the cards feel bigger.

Modes and More Modes

We've talked about changing some graphic design elements, card wording, art, and even some system-wide rules changes. So at this point, you can think of the project as a remake. But then some crazy ideas came up. One player suggested a 2v2 mode, and another player suggested a variant on 1v1 where you can actually *draft* whatever ability cards you want, to make your own custom character. I started developing both of these modes, possibly for an expansion. There was also the multiplayer mode I had originally panned as an expansion: the Raid on Deathstrike Dragon. In this mode, you team up with up to 4 players against a 5th player playing as a powerful dragon. (It's actually the expansion character Master Menelker in his dragon form, which is far more powerful than Midori's dragon form.)

Also, some people asked if there was a way to play the game by yourself, solo. I worked on several possible answers to that, but the one that worked best was coming up with a simple algorithm that a "bot" would use against you. It worked pretty well, so I thought this mode should go somewhere, too. This is getting to be kind of a lot of modes though, so which ones should appear in which expansions?

Too Much Value

And then the crazy idea was on the table. "What if we put the base game and both expansions--including all those modes and all 20 characters plus the dragon raid--into one box?" This goes against traditional business concepts actually, because releasing one game, then an expansion, then another expansion is just a better way to make money out of a product line. It's not a bad thing, it's just what everyone does, no big deal. But what would happen if we put it all in one box but only charged the amount that we'd normally charge for just the base game? This would be impossible with Yomi and impossible with Puzzle Strike, because there are just so many components. But it's maybe within reach for Flash Duel.

But...is it a good idea? I honestly don't know. Maybe I'd sell more if I separated these into three products, but I'd like to see what players think and what the press thinks when they get what amounts to basically "too much value" in one box. TWENTY characters means 190 matchups in 1v1, not counting mirror matches. Twenty characters in one box is kind of ridiculous, really. Plus the 21st character of the Dragon, who we'll get to in a later post. And all-told, there's actually SEVEN different game modes here. Yes, you can play the game in the same old 1v1 mode that the first edition was all about, and if anything, it's even simpler due to better wording and rules. But you can also explore a sort of shocking amount more with drafting and single-player and 2v2 and dragon raids.

So the experiment here, what I'm wondering about, is if a game has a lot more gameplay in it than you'd really expect, does that get noticed? Do reviewers talk about it, does it bring more players into the fold? I don't know, but I guess we'll find out. I'm really happy with how it turned at least, and just wait until you see this dragon raid thing.

I'm shooting for a December release, but not sure if manufacturing can hit it yet. Fingers crossed on that.

More on Flash Duel 2nd Edition later. You'll hear about new character abilities, including:

• A way to create an extra soldier on the board
• A power so strong that if you lose with it, you lose two rounds at once
• A way to keep a card secret across rounds
• A fair version of Setsuki