Just a reminder that Puzzle Strike Shadows as well as Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition are up on Kickstarter right now. Let's delve into the design in excruciating detail!

Casual versus(??) Hardcore

"Casual" and "hardcore" can be a false dichotomy. Which one is World of Warcraft, for example? It's pretty casual friendly, and yet it's not at all casual to the hardcore raiders that spend literally more hours than a full time job at the game. Likewise, Puzzle Strike is pretty casual friendly, having kid characters, a pink box, and fairly easy rules. I'd like to talk about the casual side of Puzzle Strike in another post, and the several ways we're really turning up the casual appeal even more in the future.

But for now, I want to tell you purely about the hardcore side--about Puzzle Strike as a serious, competitive, tournament game. Make no mistake, one of the missions of the game is:

"For Puzzle Strike to be the best competitive deckbuilding game there is."

Ok great mission and all, but how do we accomplish that mission? Let me tell you all that's gone into making that happen, and the challenges we've faced along the way. Here's the criteria that have always been at the heart of the project:

• Asymmetric design
• Player interaction
• Getting to the meat of the game quickly
• Strategically interesting dynamics
• Exciting moments built into the system
• Balance of "viable options during gameplay"
• Fairness of the asymmetric choices

Asymmetric design

In Puzzle Strike, you start by choosing a character. Each character has different abilities, and allows for different gameplay, and appeals to different player personalities. I've been involved in competitive scenes for games for a long time and the excitement added by having a cast of characters to choose from is enormous. The 2-player version of the base set alone has 55 different character matchups, while the expansion brings that to 210 different matchups. There are so many nuances to knowing how to play all these matchups differently, that symmetric games feel flat by comparison. Even apart from the big gameplay advantages of asymmetric games, there's a boost to the player community by having so much to debate and explore. Different characters also allow different players to find their personal playstyle in at least one of the many options.

Though your opinion may differ, to me, a symmetric game would be a non-starter here, as in not eligible to even consider as the best deckbuilding game for pure competition.

Player interaction

There's a reason to have games with low player interaction. Maybe you'd rather all play a mostly solitaire game without having the "harshness" of directly competing. Even in games with low direct interaction, there can be indirect forms of interaction. That said, this is not a great recipe for a real competitive game. The more player interaction there is, the more opportunity there is to display the kind of skill that should matter in a competitive game. A game with literally zero player interaction would still require skills of course, and those would probably be the skills of optimization. It's just that a race of several non-interactive players optimizing is a missed opportunity when instead we could have a game of very high interaction, allowing for maneuvers and counter-maneuvers.

I've heard the terms "contested" and "uncontested" skills used, here. Uncontested skills are the kinds your opponent can't do