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.

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.

Podcast about Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack

Here's a podcast from Myriad Games about the Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack. You can listen to a full 30 minutes of goofball antics about what they do or don't like about Puzzle Strike. Bottom line: they like quite a bit.

You can order the Upgrade Pack here, and the ship date is getting real close. It should arrive in warehouses next week and I imagine will ship out to everyone early the following week.

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.

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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