Monday, December 5, 2011 at 11:08AM Tom Vasel from the Dice Tower just posted his new Top 100 list and Yomi is #12. That's not top 100 of the YEAR but of ALL TIME. Wow, thanks Tom!
Here's the short video segment:
Great news, and thanks for playing, everyone.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 2:21PM 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.
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!
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..."
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. ;)
Saturday, November 26, 2011 at 5:07PM Today's online Yomi tournament was great to watch, thanks to Aphotix's great commentary. And congratulations to Choke Artist for winning.
Tomorrow morning at 8am Pacific Time, Aphotix will be back, casting an intense first-to-ten, iron man exhibition match. You'll be able to watch it here. (You could also go to www.fantasystrike.com to see it, but the stream will have the cool commentary.)
Also tomorrow is ChumpChange's "Short Notice Puzzle Strike Expansion Tournament." You can sign up here. We can use all the playtesting we can get, so join up and try your craziest strategies, or try your familiar good ones. Again, the tournament will be played online at www.fantasystrike.com. ChumpChange says the winners will be added to a secret list, so that's pretty exciting.
Friday, November 18, 2011 at 1:32PM 
So there's a lot going on with Puzzle Strike. First, the Upgrade Pack is a hit, thankfully. Here's a review, and another, and another. Some players think the main point of it are the playmats and screens, which make the whole experience of playing kind of cooler. Other players think the whole point is the set of 30 character chips, rebalanced based on tournament play. Yesterday one player named vivafringe said "Puzzle Strike is finally fun." Ha, I'll choose to take that as a compliment. ;)
Next, here's a french review of Puzzle Strike.
And here's a podcast with Magic: the Gathering creator Richard Garfield and Pro Tour creator Skaff Elias. Too bad Richard fixates on the barely-used mechanic of putting a chip on top of your bag, but he seems to really like the mechanics overall, cool. And of course the asymmetry. And the part where there's a lot of player interaction.
Next, there's the full expansion in the works. You are invited and welcomed to come test it online now, before it's finalized. You can do that at www.fantasystrike.com, then click on "PLAY" and then go to Puzzle Strike. From the character select screen, use the code "shift+b" to enable the expansion characters. We're working on balancing them right now and the more help the better. If you're planning on complaining about something after release, it's better to complain now! Excuse our dust on the website, by the way. We just updated the site with several graphical enhancements, so now there's a mix of a few real parts and many placeholder parts, and clashing color schemes. I'm really excited that we'll be upgrading the website graphics again probably next week to make the matchmaking screen look a ton better.
Speaking of testing, if you're in the tinkering mood, I'll give you some changes you can try out in the base set. These aren't official errata, but they might improve your play experience if you're feeling adventurous:
Secret Move. Cost 1 instead of 3. Gives you +black arrow the turn you play it.
Thinking Ahead. "Put any chips you buy this turn on top of your bag" as opposed to just one chip.
Iron Defense. Costs 4 instead of 5. The part about "you may play the crash gem as if from your hand" works on the current turn as well as future turns.
Gems to Gemonade. Cost 4 instead of 5. Reaction effect changed to: Negate up to three gems sent to you and get +$1 for each negated gem during your next buy phase."
You can remind yourself what all these chips normally do here. (Click on "Puzzle Chips" toward the top.)
Finally, you are encouraged to hold tournaments at your local game stores, or even casual events. We'll eventually have a better way for you to report those results, but for now just let us know in the forums or post about it on our Facebook wall or something. You're also encouraged to run and participate in online tournaments for the expansion, since we need get the balance in shape.
Thanks to all the Puzzle Strikers everywhere!
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 12:40PM 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.
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.
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.
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:
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