Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack, Part 3

I covered the non-gameplay components and the new chips in the Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack here and here, and now it's time for the character chips. There's a complete set of 30 character chips in the Upgrade Pack, even though not all of them have changed. I thought this would be helpful for those who want to play mirror matches with the chips in the base set, such as Setsuki vs. Setsuki.

Let's start by talking about why any of the character chips are different at all. Shouldn't we not really mess with what's already been done? I think there's a value in letting things be for a while. Game balance doesn't have to be perfect, and can't be perfect, and there's a cost to changing balance stuff around. We have to consider the logistical difficulty of getting new chips into your hands, the possible confusion that might surround such an update, that any changes in gameplay in this upgrade pack take weeks or months to test and would cause a delay in working on the full expansion, and so on. It would certainly have been a whole lot easier not to change any game balance of the character chips, so with so many reasons stacked against making changes, why are there changes?

The Call to Action

It's because when a problem in a game is big enough, it demands attention and fixing. Often in board and card games, the approaches to this problem are a) do nothing and b) move on to the expansion and just forget about the base set. Neither of these strike me as what to do if you truly care about a game though. Because I have a serious commitment to Puzzle Strike being a tournament-viable game, if there is any problem in the base set that threatens that, I think I have no choice but to address it. And right now, this is the best method we have.

The main problem, which took months of tournaments to really fully discover, is that Valerie is too good. For those not familiar with the challenges we face in balancing any asymmetric game, the problem *isn't* that Valerie is the best character. That is no crime, and there is always some best character. It's only a problem if a character is too far beyond the "top tier," meaning too much power-difference between that character and the rest. As time went on, Valerie proved harder and harder to beat, dominating tournaments to the point that many players were losing interest in even competing. It's somewhat unusual that it took so long to discover the problem, and it lies in a false choice with her Burst of Speed chip:

For a while, there was an interesting tension between using the chip early (small benefit that snowballs over time) or late (big turn that might just win outright). In the end, tournament players found that playing it at the first opportunity--and usually using that extra turn to buy a Combine--was too good of a play to pass up. It's boring and really powerful. Interestingly, you might not even care about this in your games, because it was mostly a problem amongst the expert players and only after they played quite a bit. That said, if the game is degenerating at the expert level, some fix is required, so a new Valerie was the #1 goal here. Many versions of her were tried, but here's the final change. Burst of Speed is replaced with Three Colors:

Note that Three Colors is a move of hers from Yomi, and it's a series of three paintbrush swipes, each a different color. In a fighting game, it would function similarly to Fei Long's Rekkaken punches. In Puzzle Strike though, it allows her to chain together three actions...if you have a diverse enough deck to take advantage of it! During playtesting of this chip, the most encouraging thing about it was that the very best players called it a nerf (and of course it is, she was too powerful before) but some average players saw it as a buff! That's because they were not playing Valerie in a boring way before, they were trying lots of different strategies with different kinds of puzzle chips, and this new chip enables even more diverse strategies. So boringness is nerfed and fun is buffed, so to speak.

While addressing Valerie was the top priority, there were two other goals as well: address the

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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 

Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack, Part 2

Last time I talked about the playmats and screens in the Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack. Now for the new gameplay. There are 3 new chips, and 5 copies of each of those chips. There are also 15 blank chips, by the way.

The three new chips were pretty carefully chosen. First, the flagship chip, and the easiest one to explain:

Custom Combo is hilarious and awesome, and I hope it's self-explanatory. Do all the actions you want! You might recognize the name from the feature of Street Fighter Alpha 2 that lets you string a whole bunch of moves together really quickly.

In Puzzle Strike, you are usually action-constrained. That is, you usually have more actions available than you can actually play. It's much more true here than in Dominion becuase you start with three character chips in your deck in Puzzle Strike, so right off the bat you wish you could do it all. The hard decisions come from NOT being able to do it all, which means you have to choose which actions you'll play. But for the low, low cost of 7, you don't have to decide, you can just play it all! This chip is an orgasm of fun.

The other two chips can have a pretty big impact on how you play Puzzle Strike. The "purple chips" are the heart of the game, and you'll always be buying at least some of them (vaguely analgous to buying VP in Dominion, except more interactive). Anyway, with certain characters and certain banks, it can be a bit too hard to beat people who buy almost nothing but those purple chips. I'll talk more about that in my third post where we cover the character chips, but for now, two new chips open up the strategy space. Let's start with Combinatorics:

This is a pretty direct assault on the purple-only player, as his strategy will let you draw a ton of chips. Meanwhile, if you are building an engine (playing lots of brown chips per turn) or disruption (lots of red chips), then you'll be able to keep your Combinatorics on the table longer. So you're rewarded for playing some of the more interesting strategies while your opponent is punished for playing too one-dimensionally.

The third new chip is Dashing Strike:

Dashing Strike is sort of a magical thing with several subtle effects. In general, red chips (the attack chips) are good for disrupting your opponent, so that you pull ahead in the long run. Even when you use red chips, you still need to keep yourself from losing though. You still need a way to keep your pile height from getting critically high. Dashing Strike is a RED chip that helps you with that. Several other red chips chain into it because it has a red banner, and Dashing Strike itself chains into brown banner chips. This means having reds and browns in your deck helps, and having fewer purples than usual is ok, because Dashing Strike keeps your pile height down a bit.

There's more to it than that though. Dashing Strike increases an opponent's pile height in a way that isn't counter-crashable. This has a possibly counter-intuitive effect: it results in there being more counter-crashing. When opponents are filling up your pile in a way you can't react to with a counter-crash, it forces you to do regular crashes a bit more than you would. And those regular crashes are probably going to get counter-crashed. Note that Dashing Strike isn't adding any gems to the system (it removes one gem and adds one gem), and the counter-crashing is actually removing gems. It's also making it harder for people to build uncounterable 4-gems.

It's actually a very complicated system, so maybe it's best to just lay out the bottom line of the total effect of the last paragraph: the game goes a bit longer and it gives a wider variety of strategies a chance to materialize. You basically have more breathing room to try more things, while at the same time you can make decks with fewer purples and more reds/browns. Maybe you see why I said Dashing Strike is magical and has so many nuances. It's been a big hit with playtesters, so I hope you all enjoy it, too.

So that's it for the three new chips. Two chips that open up the strategy space and one that gives you what you always wanted. Next time, we'll talk about the changes to the character chips.

Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack, Part 1

The Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack is coming, probably in October. I haven't had much time to write about design stuff these days, so I figure at least I can write about the design of my own things, so you can get a sense of what goes into development, and how we decide things. And in this case, why the product was made at all.

I'll do this in three posts. First, in this post, I'll tell you about the non-gameplay parts of the upgrade pack. In the second post I'll go over the three new chips, and in the third post I'll tell you about some revisions to the character chips. Those revisions are actually the biggest reason there even is an Upgrade Pack, but we'll get to that later. Note that the Upgrade Pack is not a full expansion to Puzzle Strike. That is also in the works and should come out next year, but the point here is to enhance the experience of the base game. Ok, so first the non-gameplay stuff: playmats and "screens."

Playmats

A lot of people asked for playmats, it was actually the #1 request from players. Playmats are fun and cool, and the Yomi playmats look amazing, so it's a no-brainer to make these. It's difficult on the manufacturing side because they are expensive to do at the quality of Yomi's mats, but it's worth it I think.

The reason people want them is to help mark where to put the chips for your "gem pile." That's your stack of chips that represents your side of the screen filling up in Puzzle Fighter or Tetris or whatever. This gets to the design question of what these mats should actually look like. The Yomi mats intentionally do not separate the game zones. They just have beautiful art with some life counters to one side. For Puzzle Strike though, I think people really want the mats to mark the various game zones to help keep track of what's going on. So here you go:

The mats mark your gem pile, your discard pile, and your "ongoing" zone, for chips like Midori's Dragon Form that stay out on the table. The mats also have a reminder of the turn phases (Ante, Action, Buy, Cleanup) and the very, very helpful section that tells you how many chips you draw each turn at each possible size of your gem pile. Having that right in front of you, especially for new players, is a blessing.

For the background image, I thought it helped the overall feel of the game if we show a mockup of what the video game screen would sort of look like. So you can see a character's stage back there, and the UI elements that separate the zones are styled like they would be in a video game. There's even a place for your "next piece" to fall from the top. (That's just for fun!) Special thanks to Boardgamegeek.com member evilgordo whose mockups laid the groundwork for the best way to present the different game zones on the playmats.

Puzzle Strike is a 4-player game, so there are 4 playmats in the upgrade pack.

Screens

Only a few people asked for this next thing, but I figured hey, why not! Sometimes in Puzzle Strike, you can draw kind of a lot of chips. Some people have asked for a way to hold chips other than in their hands. Usually this isn't even a big deal because you pretty much throw down your money chips and play most of your hand to the table, but maybe you have small hands, or maybe you drew a whole lot of chips this turn.

A few people suggested Scrabble racks as a way to hold chips. It turns out to be a better idea in your head than in practice though. Fiddling around with getting chips onto a rack, and just the right number of them is just too much trouble. It's a lot faster and easier if you can throw down your chips on the table behind a barricade of some sort that keeps them secret. You may have seen a similar "screen" as this in the game Revolution by Steve Jackson Games.

So the function of the screen is to let you put your chips on the table while still keeping them secret. But what about the look of it? It could really be anything, so I thought it was a great opportunity to inject some fun and flavor. There are four different screens, each one is a different color. The fronts have a nice texture and the Puzzle Strike logo, while the backs each illustrate a different game rule in a silly 8-bit way.(!)

I was sort of thinking about Scott McCloud when making these. He wrote the awesome book Understanding Comics (which in my opinion is not even really about comics). He also created this comic book for Google when they launched Google Chrome. Anyway, showing a diagram or pictoral situation is a helpful way to teach because it's more interesting than reading some dreary text. These screens illustrate the rule of blue shields being reactions to red fists, as well as three different situations involving crashing and counter-crashing. Those are the key concepts of the game, after all.

For the 8-bit art of these four scenes, I was able to get the amazing Conor "BT" Town. He's painted entire houses, so doing these little scenes was probably just a trifle for him, but his skill really comes through and they turned out great. Seriously though special thanks to BT, who is a member of the fighting game community and a talented 8-bit artist.

Next time we'll cover the new gameplay in the Upgrade Pack, and the time after that we'll cover the rebalanced characters. Whether to fix balance problems or not has a been a big topic lately, so stay tuned.

Yomi on G4TV Tonight

For the first time ever, the X-Play television show on G4TV is covering a card game rather than a video game. Fittingly it's Yomi! The coverage airs tonight on G4TV (on X-Play) at 6:30pm Eastern/Pacific.

As you probably know by now, Yomi captures the mind games involved in high level fighting gameplay in card form, along with several mechanics such as dragon punches, fireball traps, and even Guilty Gear's "burst." You can get it at www.sirlingames.com, find the rules at www.sirlin.net/yomi/rules, and you can play it online completely for free at www.fantasystrike.com.

Yomi won Game of the Year from The Dice Tower.

EDIT: Here's the web version of the segment.