Starcraft's Essence in Card Form?

A Puzzle Strike player named BT mentioned that he thought Puzzle Strike captures what Starcraft is about better / more elegantly than the Starcraft board game. I thought it was an interesting statement, so I'll explain what he meant.

First, I should say that I have not played the Starcraft board game, but a quick look at it shows that it comes with about a thousand pieces, and looks complicated and long to play. My guess is that it tries hard to capture literally what's going on in the computer game, but that is generally a dangerous approach. Computers are good at keeping track of all sorts of numbers and resources that would be tedious (and yeah, "inelegant") in a physical game. Sorry if my impression of the board game is unfair though, I stress again that I have not played it, but BT said this is part of what he meant.

Meanwhile in Puzzle Strike, you have choices that basically amount to "expand," "tech," and "army."

Expanding

In Starcraft, you ideally would like to invest as much as possible in your economy, as a way of being weaker now but very strong later. In Puzzle Strike, this means spending your money to buy more gem chips for your deck. Gem chips basically are money, so buying them will make your economy much stronger later, but at the expense of not building "tech" or "army" now. In both games, you have to keep an eye on how much the opponent is threatening you with his army to know how much you can safely invest in your own economy.

Tech

In Starcraft, investing in tech gives you the potential to do powerful things. For example, building a Templar Archives gives you the ability to build High Templars and researching Psionic Storm gives your Templars access to that powerful spell. In Puzzle Strike, the analog is buying what players call "engine chips." These are chips that all work together to produce powerful combinations. For example, chips that give you more actions and chips that let you spend those actions drawing more chips. Building an engine in your deck is sort of like teching up in Starcraft, as it gives you access to powerful turns, but it's not the "tech" itself that wins--that's what your army is for.

Army

In Starcraft, your army is your set of attack and support units. It's your army--not your economy and not your tech buildings--that actually apply force to the enemy and win the game for you. In Puzzle Strike, your "army" is your set of purple chips, the ones capable of combining gems in your gem pile and crashing them so they leave your pile and go to your enemy's. Filling up his gem pile to 10 is how you win, so these purple chips are what allow you to directly attack the enemy and to defend against his purple assaults.

Putting it all together

It would be nice if you could just sit back and build economy, but if you take too long to build any tech or army, you're going to lose before you get to use all that money. Having just a bit of army early can let you hold off incoming attacks long enough to let your economy kick in. How much tech and when to build it is also a hard question. It's possible to completely overwhelm other players if you build a solid tech engine, but you could very well be overwhelmed by an opponent's army while you're trying to get that together.

Asymmetry, Build Orders, and Maps

In addition to the expand vs. tech. vs army concept, Puzzle Strike also has asymmetric starts (3 races in Starcraft; 10 characters in Puzzle Strike) and it has the concept of build orders and maps. A build order in Starcraft is a combination of moves that results in a certain level of expansion / tech / army and a certain composition and timing of that army. Doing a Zealot / Stalker rush is a very different build than putting up some static defense and going for air units like Void Rays. Likewise, trying to clog up everyone's deck with useless wound chips while yours stays tight and efficient is a very different "build" than a draw engine or a mono-purple rush.

In Starcraft, your choice of builds depends partly on the map you're playing on. While any given map allows for many viable builds, some builds become stronger or weaker--or even possible / not possible--on certain maps. In Puzzle Strike, the "map" is set of bank chips you can buy for your deck in the current game. There are 24 types of these chips total, but each "map" consists of a set of 10 of these, so that there are millions of possible starting conditions. Your build depends a lot on which of the millions of possible maps you're playing on.

Conclusion

Puzzle Strike certainly isn't the same game as Starcraft, and I'm sure you can easily think of differences, but BT's point is that it's striking how many core similarities there are. None of it was even intentional except for the inspiration of using 4-gems to fill a similar role to Protoss Carriers that I mentioned in this article. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the game, it's got a lot of really interesting dynamics.

• Quick game overview
• Read an article about Puzzle Strike's design
• Buying options for Puzzle Strike

Puzzle Strike Launch

This first copies of Puzzle Strike are shipping this week, though inventory is very limited at first. Here's a puzzle to commemorate the launch.

• Quick game overview
• Read an article about Puzzle Strike's design
• Buying options for Puzzle Strike

Flash Duel Deluxe Unboxing by HatchetJob

Here is proof that Flash Duel Deluxe really does exist in the UK, ha.

UK Shipping: A Reality

I am excited to announce that the UK government has approved me as an importer!

Right now, there are 20 copies of Flash Duel Deluxe in the UK, so if you're in Europe, you can order them from my site and not see the crazy shipping prices you've seen so far. In a few weeks, I'll have Flash Duel regular and more copies of Deluxe over there.

By the way, US customers can get $5 off Flash Duel Deluxe right now by ordering from either Amazon. I'm trying to switch over from one warehouse to another, so that's your opportunity to save a few bucks.

Also, effective immediately, you can now pre-order Puzzle Strike regular or Deluxe from Europe with shipping costs calculated as if from the UK as opposed to from the US. I'm not sure how many Puzzle Strikes I'll really send over there, so pre-ordering is a good idea.

I think a couple of you from Europe already pre-ordered and paid the shipping as if from the US. You can contact me (sirlin.net/contact or sirlin.net/chat), tell me what the difference is between shipping now and what you paid (go to www.sirlingames.com, add the game to your cart and you can see what shipping is now), and I will refund you the difference.

It was a lot of hassle to set this up, but it looks like it's finally going to work!

Puzzle Strike Pre-orders!

At long last, Puzzle Strike pre-orders are available here.

Hope you enjoy the new www.sirlingames.com store, by the way. There are still a couple parts that aren't fully implemented, but it's mostly there, so it's time to get rolling. The actual store functionality is fully working, but the game info and Fantasy Strike sections will change pretty soon. Anyway...

It was a long road to be able to manufacture Puzzle Strike at all. I insisted on keeping the form factor of chips, rather than cards, because it really is better to play a game that requires a fair amount of shuffling this way. It also makes it trickier to manufacture. Regardless of chips or cards, it's also tricky to manufacture *any* game in quantities of less than many, many thousands. My first attempt at indie manufacturing had the retail price at about $800. I made a major breakthrough getting it down to $200. But that's still really high, so worked with manufacturing to find ways to bring the price down more and more.

In the end, I was able to get it all the way down to $159, with another $10 off if you pre-order, making it $149. One of the ways I got the price down was to eliminate the absurd amount of labor involved with hand-applying hundreds of thousands of stickers to these chips. A machine could do it, but would require manufacturing in quantities so high that I can't even afford to do it. Instead, I'm using what's actually a kind of cutting-edge technology that allows direct printing to wood. I know it sounds funny that "print-to-wood" is some high-tech thing, but but it actually is kind of new for this type of application. What's cool is that it not only eliminates hand-labor of applying stickers, but it also means the image can be truly edge-to-edge (usually expensive and hard to achieve) and that the image is really part of the chip, rather than a sticker that might peel off.

I love the feel of the solid wood chips (that come in a very nice custom-designed wood box), but I also knew that even with more efficiency, I would not able to get that price down low enough for many. So I also started working on another version with thick chipboard chips (slightly smaller diameter than the wood chips, also using print-to-chipboard rather than stickers) and the standard kind of cardboard box that normal games come in. Most games that use chipboard have about 0.7 inch thickness, while these are thicker at 0.1 inch.

Anyway, I was able to crack the $99 price point there which was a huge breakthrough. It's still uncomfortably high though. In the end, if I follow the standard practices of retail markup, I was not really able to do any better than $99. After thinking long about it, I decided to just have terrible margins on the standard version of Puzzle Strike. I really do believe in the game, so if I can just get it to you one way or another, hopefully the word of mouth will enable a run of thousands later. The price is $74, with $5 off if you pre-order, making it $69. You get almost 350 chips, 4 cloth bags, a full color rulebook, and a custom designed box interior to keep the different types of chips organized for storage.

Artisan Design

It turns out that no matter how you slice it, it's tough to manufacture small runs of high quality parts as an independent guy. Doing my best here! Also, manufacturing too many copies up front is finically disastrous, so the first run is ridiculously small, at only 300 copies of the standard and 100 of the all-wood deluxe version. Another reason to pre-order is so you actually get a copy, without having to wait who-knows-how-long for a second run. Yet another reason is to support a struggling indie so there's enough cash to even *print* Yomi (will also come out this summer if things go well on Puzzle Strike). I don't like to beg, but if there was ever a time, now is it. I prefer that you think of this whole endeavor as something closer to buying special hand-crafted sword from a medieval artisan than buying a the 80 millionth mass-produced copy of Monopoly at Walmart. I have put years of personal care into these games, into design, balance, graphic design, package design, and now the manufacturing. I'd like to think I'm offering something special here.

Canada and Beyond

Thanks to some experience with selling Flash Duel, I'm finally getting a handle on selling to Canada. Flash Duel is now available there, as are pre-orders for Puzzle Strike. (Flash Duel Deluxe will also be available in Canada in about two weeks.) In fact, you technically could order either of those games from anywhere in the world now, but the shipping will be very expensive. In the future, I will actually store some inventory in the UK so that shipping prices are more reasonable, but we aren't quite there yet.

Anyway, I urge you to check out Puzzle Strike. The wild back-and-forth, 4-player nature of it means it a pretty good party game, even with people who don't really consider themselves gamers. Yet the depth is a lot more than it appears at first glance (much moreso than Flash Duel, actually), so "real gamers" should also enjoy it. Because it supports up to 4 players, maybe you can chip in with some friends if you need to. I recommend the wood version. ;)

Here's that link to pre-order either version of Puzzle Strike. Orders will ship as soon as they are manufactured, which I think will be in July. A few might be done by the end of June. If you order, but need to later change your shipping address, no problem just let me know. Thanks for your support!