PAX Prime Thanks

Serious YomiThanks to Gabe and Tycho for holding PAX. It's so big and complex of a thing that it's hard to imagine what must go into planning and executing it all. If you guys are reading, great job, though I have one complaint you probably can't possibly do anything about. At PAX East, the layout is one enormous "room" the size of an airplane hangar or something with the video game area in the front and the tabletop games area in the back. The booths where tabletop game companies do demos are right next to the place where tournaments for those games are run, which are right next to the free play area. Because of this, at PAX East it was very easy for people who wanted to find me to find me, and it was generally easy for anyone to find anyone and to meet up and play things.

At PAX Prime though the company booths, tournament area for tabletop games, and freeplay area for tabletop games were so segmented that it was logistically very hard to deal with. The tournament area was in a different building 3 blocks away from the rest (rather than 10 feet away), so it makes it much more inconvenient to enter tournaments. When people at the tournament area asked where is the main place to buy games, giving them directions to a place 3 blocks away isn't a great thing to have to do. And trying to meet up with people in the freeplay tabletop game area is generally very difficult because there were like 6 different rooms (rather than one big space) and it's not possible to predict which rooms will have empty seats, so you can't really say "let's meet at room 210" or whatever.

Anyway, it seems like you've outgrown the entire city of Seattle! It looks like you need a new convention center that's way, way bigger than what's there. You've managed to have to have the problem of being "too popular," ha.

Thanks to everyone to attended and helped run the Sirlin Games tournaments, and to those who played my customizable card game, too. It was interesting seeing how new people reacted to it and you guys gave me generally very high quality feedback for people who were so new to the game.

I never did end up meeting the elusive Day9 but super thanks to Thom From Canada, the diamond league Terran player who had me sign his "gg" button, and then waited in line for an hour to have Day9 sign right next to it so he could tell Day9 that I would really like to talk to him, lol. Thom From Canada was also a star playtester of my customizable card game at PAX. I liked how he made a list of a few properties of the game ("things I know to be true," he said) in order to derive a few second-order statements about what must be good strategy tips. He was excited to hear that I had reasons his strategy tips might not be totally right (because it meant new information for him). And it was hilarious to see him play more and go against all his own tips. I also see why he's such a high ranking player in Starcraft. He made constant strategy mistakes while playing the card game the first couple times, creating a comedy of errors. Maybe embarrassing and funny, but I think this allowed him to very quickly learn a whole bunch of things not to do again. I wonder if there's something to that. Try all you can when you're new and accept that you'll make play mistakes. That results in lots of bad choices, but also teaches you faster than if you try to play in a very restrictive, "correct" way when you are new to a game (maybe?). In any case, big thanks to TFC. (And to the rest who played, like Claytus and Stephen Keller from the comments section of my Diablo3 post, lol.)

Oh and by the way, I won the Street Fighter HD Remix tournament again. And I met Cammy.

SCG4 Update

It's been over a year since I said anything about "Sirlin Card Game #4," the customizable but not-collectable game that I've been kicking around for over a decade now. Over the last year it's solidified quite a bit and gotten a lot of polish, too. If you happen to be going to PAX Prime this year, you can find me at the Game Salute booth to maybe get a chance to play it.

I thought I'd share a bit about a design problem that I kind of accidentally stumbled into an answer for. That's how things happen sometimes. First, the things that have explicitly been goals all along:

1) Make a game that would be interesting to play for 10+ years without any new cards being released.
2) No mana-screw.
3) Inject some "characters" into the game.

I won't say much about points 2 or 3. Regarding "no mana-screw," hopefully it doesn't take much explanation to see why you wouldn't want to randomly be locked out of even *playing* in a supposed strategy game. Point 3 is a matter of preference, and I just think it feels better to have characters and personalities to connect with in a game. This one was hard to figure out, but the current implementation really adds to actual gameplay as well as feel, so it worked out well.

It's #1 that's the real big one. If we can't rely on new cards every 3 months, it means the game actually has to hold up past that point on its own merits. If we can't rely on the metagame constantly changing, it means the game itself will need to have enough depth to support years of play at a very high level. In order to make that possible, the codenamed SCG4 gives you access to a much larger set of effects than you'd normally have during a game of any other customizable card game. More than you can use in any single game session, on purpose. And furthermore, much finer control over when you draw those effects. These two things together mean that you have much more *versatility* in how you play any given game. You can pursue pretty different strategies even without changing decks, and you can change which strategy you are pursuing during the course of a game--in response to how your opponent is changing his strategy.

Customizing Out the Fun

So that's all just great, isn't it. But a while ago, I forget how long, maybe a year or year-and-half ago there was a problem in the back of mind with this. The decks I was building for playtests were fun and all, but I was looking for that fun. I generally included about three different sets of strategies in these decks, and that was very good for gameplay. But what if a player who was playing to win built a much more boring and shallow deck? What if someone made a deck with only 1 strategy, but it was 20% more effective than any of my individual 3 strategies would be? We could debate which is actually a smarter idea, but if there is any chance that the more boring and shallow version is more capable of winning, that's going to really suck for the game.

Before going on, we should take a look at the more general problem that exists in all CCGs: unfair matchups are not only common, but often considered a good idea. If you can develop some deck that has really strong matchups vs several decks, but really weak matches vs only a few, you did a great job as a deckbuilder. You might win the tournament even, but you will have possibly played all unfair matchups, one way or another. For a more concrete example, a friend of mine told me about a Magic tournament he entered where he expected the (red) Goblins deck to be *most* of the field. He built a super hate deck directly against Goblins that included 12 maindeck protection from red cards, just for starters. He gave little thought to beating non-Goblins decks, though probably he had a sideboard to help as much as he could against those.

He told a pro player at the event that his deck was almost 10-0 vs goblins. The pro player said uh no it isn't, so they played several games. Eventually, the pro conceded that he didn't see a way that goblins could win at all, ever, vs that deck because it was just so extreme. My friend got 5th, but only due to an unlucky draw at the end. The bracket had: goblins, goblins, goblins, goblins, u/w control, and him, and he happened to face u/w control. He placed high, and he could have won the entire thing. What's most notable here is that 100% of his matches had bad gameplay. In every case, when he sat down to the table, one player or the other had overwhelming advantage.

Losing Before You Even Sit Down at the Table

Let me use the word "gameplay" to mean the part where you sit down at the table and play cards until someone loses. You could say "gameplay" also includes deckbuilding and metagame choices, but let's not, because then I'd just need some other word for when you sit down and play cards. The part where you sit down and play cards--the "gameplay"--really should be as generally fair as we can make it. I don't see it as a virtue that 8-2 or worse matchups are frequent things. It's clearly a bad property when fighting games have lots of highly unfair matchups, and it's something we work hard to fix there, rather than applaud.

But what can you DO about this? (Sideboards barely count as a good answer. They do literally nothing for game 1 of a match.) Deckbuilding is fun and captures the imagination, and that's what we're running up against here: deckbuilding is allowing unfair matchups to exist and to be common, even. If we limit deckbuilding, that sounds less fun. And so I didn't even really try to solve this problem, I just kind of gave up on it. And then something happened. Two ideas looked a lot alike, it was a clue.

When All Decks Really Interact...

In pursing that goal #1 of making the game interesting to play for years and years, we have to care a lot about your interaction with the opponent. You really need a lot more interaction than you get in most CCGs. There just has to be more to it if you're hanging your hat on the depth of gameplay of a single deck giving you YEARS of strategy space to play in. So what about cases where what you're trying to do is so different from what your opponent is trying to do that you hardly interact at all? I have joked amongst playtesters that we "force you to have fun" by making it not really possible to do that. You pretty much have to interact. And if we theorized about this or something, we might think oh that really limits what you can make! You can't make some solitaire thing that has no interaction at all. In actually playing it though, it feels the opposite of limited. Because the general game system has a lot more decisions going on than in other CCGs, "I feel so limited," doesn't come to mind, at least not to me. If anything, you have a wealth of choices and oh by the way, you can't go off in the corner and completely ignore what your opponent is doing.

Another way of putting this is that there's an illusion and reality that are at odds here. If we allow you make solitaire decks, it feels like that's more choice. In reality though, it's allowing choices that hurt the quality of the game overall as an interesting strategy game that can last years. It's like wanting freedom in your country, and saying part of that freedom is to murder people indiscriminately. In that case "more freedom" is a somewhat misleading label.

Limiting Deckbuilding to Create MORE Viable Decks

Back to the whole deckbuilding thing: it's exactly the same there. What if players want "more freedom" to build decks that cause the game to overall have a lot worse strategy? Wait...why are we allowing that? Deckbuilding is fun and exciting, but it has that same illusion, unfortunately. When you have more and more cards and more and more freedom to make anything, the illusion is that you get more and more choices. But what is more common is that you get more and morely likely to degenerate into just a very few choices, or one choice. Just imagine a CCG with 550 cards that you can combine however, and how many tournament viable decks there are going to be in that game. Yomi, a fixed deck game, has 550 cards that compose 10 such decks, but you'd be lucky to have even 4 if it were customizable. And there's just no way those 4 would end up having all 4-6, 5-5, and 6-4 matchups against each other. So you'd have the illusion of way more choice, but actually end up with fewer viable choices, and more unfair matchups plaguing the few choices you have.

So I realized that when I was including three different strategies in these decks, I was really on to something. This evolved to be a more and more central part of the game. Interwoven with the "heroes" you control, and part of the back-and-forth strategy where you and your opponent can each shift around what you're doing as you play. What seemed years ago like a bad limit to place on deckbuilding has now become (accidentally?) one of the best features of all. Yeah there are limits, there are chunks of your deck that have to have certain kinds of things. So how has that turned out? Has it made me and other playtesters sad?

The answer is that it's resulted in so many viable decks that we are overwhelmed. It's possible to make over 815 different decks with all the cards that exist today, and every one of those differs by at least 33% from every other one. And here is the most incredible part of that. I don't know which of those 815 is the least powerful, but whichever one it is, I do know that it's at least as able to win (and probably a lot more able to win) than the worst character in the average fighting game. So when I say this huge number of decks, I'm not talking about useless stuff like "all lands" or "all 1/1 creatures with no way to play them." I mean those are all real decks that can do coherent things and win in the hands of a skilled player. Somehow the "limits" on deckbuilding have produced more decks than we even know what to do with--every one of them playable.

In Closing

The Yomi expansion will be the next game I release, and that's going to be a while, so the game mentioned in this post will be even a while after that. I honestly don't know how I'll pay for the hundreds of thousands of dollars of art such a game needs, but one way or another you will get to play this game. I'm determined to eventually release it because I think it's incredible and I just don't know anything like it. Probably the higher the sales of the Yomi expansion, the sooner I'll be able to finish "SCG4."

Puzzle Strike is Coming

Watch It Played just got their hands on the upcoming Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition + Shadows expansion.

Watch It Played did a really great series on Flash Duel, so I'm willing to bet the upcoming Puzzle Strike videos will really help show how the game works and demonstrate by example what's fun and strategic about it.

Thanks to everyone who supported the game on kickstarter. I think we'll be able to ship out to all of you in September as planned, though I'm always nervous about last minute-manufacturing / shipping delays. Really doing our best to hit that date. And that would mean everyone else would be able to order in October from either sirlingames.com or your local game stores (a list of participating stores at gamestorelocator.com). And while you wait, the online version is playable right now at fantasystrike.com!

Puzzle Card Randomizers

Hey here's some sample images of what the Puzzle Strike "randomizer" cards will look like:

You can use them to randomly determine which 10 puzzle chips to use for the bank each game. If we reach the next funding level, everyone who orders Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition and/or Puzzle Strike shadows through Kickstater will get a set of these cards for free. There's only one week left to get in on that. Oh, and other kickstarter bonuses that are already guaranteed: you get the game a month before anyone else...and you get a free copy of the print-and-play version if you get a physical version...and you get a free character unlock on fantasystrike.com!

If you're on the fence, catch up on what went into making Puzzle Strike, and why it's special in the genre of deckbulding games:

The Quest for a Tournament Quality Deckbuilding Game
Casual Play Matters

Special thanks to evilgordo for the graphic design of the cards. And to the hundreds of you who already pledged on kickstarter.

Puzzle Strike: Casual Play Matters

Thanks to everyone who pledged in the Puzzle Strike Kickstarter campaign so far! It's still going strong!

I recently wrote at great length how important it was to making Puzzle Strike the best game it can be for expert tournament players. While it's nice to know that the game holds up at that level of play, not everyone even cares about that. I mean, is it fun in the first place? How does it fare with more than two players?

Free-For-All Mode: 2nd Edition

In Puzzle Strike 2nd Edition, the 4-player mode has player elimination. If your gem pile fills up, you're out of the game and the other players continue. Also, you can't choose who you crash to; you must always crash to the player to your left. ("Crash" means break gems in your own gem pile and send them to another player's gem pile.)

There's a reason the 2nd Edition worked this way and a reason why the third edition doesn't. Regarding player elimination, while it's not a desirable feature really, it's better than a system with "lame duck" gameplay. That term refers to a player who has no possible way to win a game, but who is somehow still in the game. For example, in a deckbulding game where you collect victory points and where the game ends when the stack of victory point cards is empty, it's very possible for one player to be far enough behind that he cannot possibly get enough VP to win, even if he got all the remaining VP cards. Whenever you have a lame-duck player, you are inviting kingmaker. In other words, if you have a player who can't possibly win anymore, you are inviting the problem of that player making moves that will affect which *other* player will win. And beyond that, it's just a stupid feeling to be in a lame-duck situation.

Player elimination solves that problem. In Puzzle Strike 2nd Edition, if you're not out yet, you can still win. In order to reduce the downtime after you're out, the final crash that puts you over the top "overflows" and can possibly knock out other players at the same time. And besides that, the game is usually pretty fast anyway.

Then there's the other point: in Puzzle Strike 2nd Edition, you can only crash to the left, not to anyone you want. If you could crash to anyone you want, the optimal strategy is both obvious and stupid: you should form a pre-game alliance with someone, and agree to gang up on the other players to eliminate them one by one, then face off with your "partner." Any free-for-all game with targeted attacks faces this problem, and I think any thoughtful design has to do something to prevent or minimize it. Hence your inability to choose your target in the 2nd Edition.

Great, so what's the problem? The problem is that even though player elimination and forced target selection solve very real problems, a lot of people just don't like those things. Also, even though the game usually ends quickly after someone is eliminated, there are unfortunately times where it can drag on much too long.

Free-For-All Mode: 3rd Edition

With the 3rd Edition (and the Shadows expansion), I wanted to get rid of player elimination, but somehow not introduce the lame-duck problem and somehow avoid the problem of pre-game alliances too. This was actually a tough nut to crack, and I think it took over a year to really figure out.

Now, the game ends at the same time for everyone whenever *anyone's* gem pile fills up. At that point, the winner is the player with the lowest gem pile. (If there's a tie, there's a tie-breaking procedure where everyone takes another turn.) Also, you can crash gems to any player you want, and you can even counter-crash to "save" other players from losing. The dynamics that result from this are non-obvious, somewhat bizarre, and quite interesting.

First, you can't really even

Click to read more ...