Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack, Now Shipping

The Puzzle Strike Upgrade pack is now in stock, and starts shipping out to everyone today. Finally!

Here's a review of it.

Here's the Boardgamegeek.com entry.

And here's where you can buy it.

Remember that you can play Puzzle Strike online for free at www.fantasystrike.com, too! There's even an online tutorial there now.

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 ...

Free Update to Puzzle Strike print-and-play

The print-and-play version of Puzzle Strike now includes the rebalanced characters from the Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack. This free update has actually been available for a while, I just never really announced it until now.

Anyone who bought the print-and-play (or who bought something that automatically included the print-and-play) can redownload the files with the same links you had before and it will now magically contain this update. I just re-sent those download codes to everyone, so you don't even have to dig through your inbox.

EDIT: Looks like that new e-mail you all got accidentally has the wrong patch notes. Sorry about that. The files themselves really do have the updated character chips.

If you set aside Puzzle Strike for other games and never went back, I really urge you to give it another try with these rebalanced characters. I hope you find a lot more interesting dynamics this time around.

As far as I know right now, the physical copies of the upgrade pack should ship to everyone the beginning of next week. I know it's been a long wait, so thanks for patience.

Fortress AT Reviews Puzzle Strike Upgrade and Yomi Cursed Cards

Fortress AT reviews the Yomi cursed cards, and more importantly the Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack here. I'm glad the PS upgrade went over so well, on the components and on the gameplay!

All of these [new] chips are very much appreciated, but the new shields and playmats are straight up extremely cool.--Ken B

Thanks Ken B.! And special thanks to 8-bit artist BT for doing the cool art on the player shields/screens, and to evilgorodo for artistic inspiration on the playmats. And to the sirlin.net community for playtesting the gameplay of the upgrade pack.

The Yomi cursed cards are available now, though the Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack ships at the beginning of November, with pre-orders open now.

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.