Puzzle Strike and Dominion
Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 3:48PM Sometimes people ask me about the differences between Puzzle Strike and Dominion, so I'll put it all in one place for reference. Even though Dominion inspired Puzzle Strike, the games are quite different. Puzzle Strike fixes what, in my opinion, are numerous problems with Dominion. Now, before you get all bent out of shape, you are free to enjoy and love Dominion. I'm not stopping you or telling you that you didn't have fun playing it. I'm just saying there are several things I consider problems and that I thought I could turn all those things around with improvements on many fronts.
Form Factor
Both games involve a lot of shuffling, and I do mean a lot. Some people are really bad at shuffling and that slows the game down quite a bit. Even those who are good at it can feel bogged down. Changing the form factor to chips that you shake up in a bag makes this easier and faster. Some people tell me this is the most important difference between the two games, but I disagree. I think it's actually the least important difference of anything in this post.
Characters (aka Variable Player Powers)
Playing a symmetric game just feels flat and boring after having experienced so many asymmetric games. Street Fighter with only one character? Starcraft with only one race? Magic: the Gathering where we all start with the same deck? Yes, I'm aware that *during* a game, things can diverge even in a symmetric game, but really that's miles away from a true asymmetric experience. If a given pool of cards has a best strategy, then everyone should be going for that strategy. With different characters (who each have different gameplay), everyone has different strategies even within the same pool of chips.
It's also worth noting that there are more unique character abilities in Puzzle Strike than there are different chips in the bank! Or Kingdom cards in a Dominion set! The point is, there are a lot of them and they greatly expand the replayability. In a 2-player match of the base set, there are 45 different possible character matchups (or 55 if you count mirror matches). And 210 matchups in a 4-player game. Multiply that by the millions of starting conditions from the bank chips, and it's a crazy amount of gamespace to explore. And when Puzzle Strike Shadows is out, that goes to 190 matchups for 2p (or 210 with mirror matchups) and 4,845 matchups in 4p.
By contrast, Dominion has 0 characters (meaning no variable player powers) and zero different character matchups. Or you could say 1 character and 1 matchup, I guess. Now, balancing 45 (or 210) matchups is a hell of a lot harder than balancing 1 matchup, but we had months of tournaments to do so and I think the balance turned out great. Exploring the dozens of character matchups is one of the greatest features of the game.
Faster Start
In Puzzle Strike, you start with three character chips in your deck, while in Dominion, you start with three cards that do literally nothing during gameplay. I like getting to the fun stuff faster, and starting with 3 actions instead of 3 blanks really helps.
Interactivity!
Puzzle Strike increases the interactivity a ton over Dominion. I've heard some call that a negative, but that's very strange to me. The point of a competitive game (or even a social game) is to interact, so playing mostly 4-player solitaire would seem to be a drawback. The crash mechanic in Puzzle Strike means you're always interacting with the player in front of you and the player behind. The attack chips are extremely powerful (they had to be in order to be worth buying, given how the game system works), and they mostly affect all players. In other words, they interact with all players. That makes blue defensive chips that much more relevant, as they interact with opponents' attack chips.
I've also heard a few strange comments that Puzzle Strike is "vicious " game. I have to disagree there, too. I think some are confusing legitimate interaction with viciousness. The video game Puzzle Fighter also involves interactivity of sending gems to each other, but that isn't really vicious either. If you want vicious, see Intrigue, and be prepared to lose your friends (note: that's not Dominion: Intrigue, it's unrelated to both Dominion or Puzzle Strike). In Intrigue, you make deals with your friends and then are forced by the nature of the game to lie and break those deals. In Puzzle Strike, you merely send gems to each other, and attack and defend, but you don't even gang up on anyone, and you don't shatter their hopes and dreams, either.
Comebacks
The comeback mechanic in the video game Puzzle Fighter is interesting and rare in games. Not that comeback mechanics in general are rare, but the particular greed-inducing way it works in Puzzle Fighter is great, and I wrote about it here. Puzzle Strike captures that with the "height bonus" rule. By sitting closer to the lose-condition, you draw more chips and are better able to attack and defend because of that. Giving the opponent gems is good (it puts them closer to losing) but also bad (it gives them more drawing power if they don't lose). This tension makes for interesting games where people are on-edge until the very end.
(Speaking of the video game Puzzle Fighter, I also balanced that. You can read about it here.
No Lame-Duck Endings
We're going to need some game design jargon to talk about this one. A lame duck situation in a competitive game is when you're in a situation where you will definitely lose, but the game isn't technically over yet. This is a bad feature that we'd like to remove. It happens in Dominion when there aren't enough 6 VP cards left for you to buy to win, so even if you get the last one or two, another player is so far ahead that he will win. This is futile and a waste of your time. It's actually kind of a trick to make a game with no player elimination, but to have you functionally eliminated, yet forced to keep playing. Actually, being eliminated is preferable in that situation. Further, being in a lame duck situation encourages another deadly game design buzzword: kingmaker.
Kingmaker is when you will definitely not win, yet your actions will determine which of the other players will win. This is a bad thing that we try to get rid of in a competitive game (unless it's Diplomacy or something, where the entire point of the game is politics). Anyway, Puzzle Strike avoids these problems. But how and at what tradeoff?
First, Puzzle Strike has player elimination. That means when you lose, you're out and the game keeps going with whoever is left. At first glance, that's also a bad property, but it's very much on purpose that that's how the game works. Why? First, it gets rid of lame duck, which is really no better in the first place. Second, it's actually strictly better in a 2-player game because you get all the bonuses of player elimination with zero of the drawbacks (there's no one waiting around when someone loses in 2p, the game ends at that point). Third, it allows for a more interesting win condition here, the whole business about gem piles filling up and the greed of you trying to stay kind of full but not too full. To put it another way, it enables a great gameplay system.
Fine, so what's the drawback? The drawback is that in 3p and 4p games, someone will wait to play again if they lose first. How bad is this problem? Because of the nature of the game, you don't really lose right away. It's likely that when players lose, they all lose at about the same time. Also, the overflow rule allows a powerful attack that knocks out one player to actually knock out multiple players all at once, which further lessens any waiting time. Also remember that these games are short to begin with, like 20 minutes, so you might have to suffer like 2 minutes of waiting, sometimes, instead of being stuck in some lame duck situation for even longer. And in return, you get a much more interactive and interesting win condition.
The lack of lame-duck situations also greatly reduces the kingmaker problem. All 4p free-for-all games are probably going to have some degree of kingmaker (meaning politics determining the winner rather than individual playskill at what the game is supposed to be about), but it's a question of how much can you reduce that effect. In Puzzle Strike, the kingmaker effect is tiny indeed, much smaller that you'd expect in any 4p free-for-all game. Even on the micro level of your very last turn (the turn where you lose), you can't even use your buy phase to slightly affect the availability of chips for the next player. You could in earlier versions of Puzzle Strike, but we eliminated even that (very small) kingmaker effect.
Theme
Dominion's theme is pretty incidental to the game. Puzzle Strike at least models something, in this case the back-and-forth gameplay of a puzzle video game like Puzzle Fighter, along with the comeback mechanic that makes that type of game so fun.
I hope you don't take all this the wrong way. As I said, I'm not trying to invalidate your fun. What I am trying to do is explain the reason that Puzzle Strike works the way it does, through the lens of starting with a core idea from Dominion and fixing many things that I consider problems. I hope you enjoy Puzzle Strike when it comes out in January, and you can order it here. And a reminder that you can play it for free in the early online version here.
Reader Comments (37)
It's true that the matches aren't (and yeah, can't be) perfectly balanced, but they're still quite balanced overall - probably not really more than 6-4 or so on the worse ones, I'd say.
That said, the only chip I'd say is "dominant" in general is Stolen Purples and everyone can absolutely access that at a similar level.
There are some other chips that have strong synergies with specific characters, but short of Arg/RA none are game-warpingly so, and arg is pretty gamewarping in and of himself!
But ... it's good that in the same pool, two different characters will want different chips. It's good that different characters support different playstyles - I'm very strong with Setsuki and pretty good with Geiger and Grave, but I'm trash with Arg. Meanwhile, there's other people who play a good Arg, or an amazing Val that I can't pull off at all. These differences mean that there are more dimensions of skill that can be explored than in a symmetric game like Dominion. SteelCoil (the other Master Puzzler) is VERY good at timing his actions to avoid reactions, but he's not so good at building an economy or engine, while I'm poor at rushdown/attack, but amazing at economy/engine - it's simply a better game when the two of us can both play to our strengths, which we can do if we select different characters, but we would be unable to do in a symmetric game - in a more symmetric game, one or the other of our skills would simply be more important, and the game would be less interesting.
Besides, if you really hate the asymmetry ... just play mirror matches! You always do have that option, after all, so the asymmetry really does make a better game, as you're able to ignore it if it would make the game seem worse for you.
To CatanHater: Yes you have it absolutely right. The situation you describe is lame duck, and your actions were logical. Your actions demonstrate the exact thing I was getting at, that lame duck is not only bad in and of itself, but also bad because it encorages kingmaker even more. It's just that your example is easier to relate to and uses concrete terms instead of buzzwords! ha.
To Ido: actually I think Sotek's answer above (while good) is too focused on Puzzle Strike. Your statement seems to be an indictment of all asymmetric games ever, because they aren't perfectly balanced. Yes they aren't perfectly balanced. We should discard the really badly balanced ones, and only be talking about pretty well balanced ones, like Starcraft, Street Fighter, (Puzzle Strike), for starters. The variation of gameplay and variation of matchups gained is frankly ENORMOUS in an asymmetric game. That there are some 6-4 matchups or something is a very small price to pay. Can you imagine throwing out all characters except Ryu in Street Fighter just to ensure 5-5 matchups? That would be a crazy move that slashes the depth of the game to just a fraction of what it is.
I think it's actually the Nirvana Fallacy at work. That's when a thing isn't perfect, so you reject it and choose a much worse thing instead. Throwing out the all caps ENORMOUS variation you get from asymmetry just to get some 6-4s back to 5-5 seems to be doing just that. Because it's not perfect, throw out huge piles of good stuff.
Thanks Sirlin. I knew you'd agree with me as soon as I read your article. Perhaps next time my friends have a game night, we'll be playing puzzle fighter instead of Catan. ;-)
Regarding the comments about the starting Estates in Dominion, I think they are a bad idea, yet far from the worst idea in the world. They are certainly a better idea than just starting with 10 copper for example. However, the randomness it provides is not well positioned, as the 5/2 split is too different (as previously noted, better or worse) than the 3/4 split, but the 3/4 split is 99.99% identical to the 4/3 split (this would be less true in a more interactive game like Puzzle Strike). In contrast, even in a mirror match of Puzzle Strike, there are 6 different ways a 3/4 or 4/3 split can be drawn, and depending on the character, these may create very different outcomes.
Diversity of openings = more variety in "correct" starting strategies = even more variety in late game, as starting picks influence later picks.
In short, even if Dominion wanted to remain similar to how it is now, it would be much better served by starting players with some sort of mix, like one Estate and two specific actions, or 7 copper and 3 actions of their choice totaling a certain amount, or any number of other options.
Mark, it's even more complex than that when you factor in the opponent's reaction chips, which may or may not be worth triggering, and turn order, which affects the information you have about the opponent's hand.
Good point, Chump, I didn't think of all the intricacies -- In fact, I also forgot about the starting crash gem, which means a 3/4 split isn't really a 3/4 split, it's either a 2 + crash/4 or a 3/3 + crash, which of course means you will often have to choose between getting the money out of the crash gem or doing some other action.
This difference between games kind of reminds me of backgammon -- in early versions of the game, players started with all their pieces of the board and had to gradually move them on, which was boring, and eventually got into interesting situations later on. Modern backgammon starts with the pieces already on the board and ready to interact with each other.
Likewise, in Dominion the start of the game involves relatively few decisions, and the complexity rises gradually as the game progresses. In Puzzle Strike, the game involves complex decisions from as early as turn one.
Another difference between Dominion and Puzzle Strike that Sirlin didn't mention, but I find to be a big improvement is abolition of the only-one buy rule. In dominion you have to buy actions that let you buy more than one card, which means in the late game, when you don't draw any of those cards (or worse, if there are none available for the specific game you are playing), you don't have very interesting choices when you draw a lot of gold - you just buy the best chip among what's available to you. In Puzzle Strike, I am often faced with a decision of what to do with something like 7 gold - would I rather have a crash and a 2-cost action; a combine with a 3-cost action or a 2-gem; a 6-cost action; a 4-gem; or some other combination.
One thing I just noticed though, while talking about that, was the fact that dominion has names for their money (copper, silver, gold), while Puzzle Strike does not. It's kind of boring to talk about 1-gems, 2-gems, 3-gems, and 4-gems. Sirlin, did you ever consider making the money in your game have names? (maybe named after actual gems)
CatanHater: The problem with the offer you proposed is that both choices make the person currently most likely to win even more likely to win. There's no way he's going to give you four resource cards so as to avoid having you crown him, that doesn't make sense. If the other players decided to give you four cards each, the current leader stays ahead and now his competition is even further behind.
Nah, Catanhater, I think you didn't act in a good way at all.
You should play to win. You should be able to encourage other players to trade more with you because you are in last, and to develop your position from there. Even if you don't win, you might learn something about recovering from bad positions, and you'll get better at the game. What you did was abandon the agreed objectives (we're all trying to win this game), and replace them with your own (If I don't think I can win, I won't let anyone else play).
Sure, you CAN offer all your cards to the leader, guarenteeing you last and him first. It hurts your position in game, and stops the other players enjoying the game. If you were playing to win you wouldn't do this. If you were playing so that you and your friends had fun you wouldn't do this.
I don't think Tris understands what CatanHater even tried to do. Tris said that offering all his stuff to the leader is not "playing to win." Yeah that isn' the playing to win part. That is what makes it an ultimatum that FORCES the other players to accept his other option. Really, they have no choice but to accept his other option, or they will lose pretty much immediately.
His other option got him lots of resources, way more than he could get in a usual way. That is certainly playing to win. That this ruins the fun is *the entire point*. He's illustrating that lame duck situations are extremely bad for games and encourage kingmaker plays, and suiciding just to get it over with.
Back on topic, maybe now you see why getting rid of the majority of lame duck situations and kingmaker and having a more interesting win condition at the same time is a more than worthwhile trade for having player elimination in Puzzle Fighter. Especially when the overflow rule can end the game simultaneously for all players anyway, and the short game length means we're only talking about a few minutes of wait anyway (or zero minutes of wait for 2p games).
I've found that the main purpose of Estates is to provide a strategy where you trash them early, but at the cost of having fewer VP in your deck.
We only play "San Diego style" where all players get the same number of turns, to mitigate the "first player wins 50% of the time in a 4 player game" - I also endorse the required 4/3 opening, to avoid the "5-2 either wins 100% of the time, or looses 100% depending on the setup."
I already said that, and I'll say it again because nobody responded - I think the before-last paragraph about the theme is quite wrong. "Puzzle Strike at least models something" - and dominion don't? Dominion models kingdom building. And in dominion I know exactly what each card is supposed to represent, even the treasure cards which reprsent income streams or mines. In puzzle strike I'm really not sure what the "really annoying" or "draw three" are supposed to represent in a puzzle game context.
Nice article in general.
Ido: I find Dominion's theme weak and pasted on, kind of irrelevant to what's going on. Maybe you are better able to imagine it as kingdom building than me. Puzzle Strike's mechanics reflect the theme in that combine, crash, height bonus, gem piles, etc are modeling how a certain type of game actually works. Puzzle Fighter characters attack each other as they fight, and "attacks" represent that usually. That Puzzle Strike has some self-aware jokey chips like Draw Three and Really Annoying doesn't really change the situation though. (It just means there are some self-aware jokey chips thrown in, too).
The theme isn't really the theme unless it relates to how you play. The way you play in Dominion is to make your deck better, so you can make your deck better, so you can make your deck better, so you can buy a bunch of victory points -- if I was building a kingdom, when would I stop buying useful things are start buying victory points? I don't know - certainly not if I thought that three stacks were about to run out - what does that even mean?
In Puzzle Strike I try to make my deck better so I can overwhelm my opponent with gems -- maybe not as straightforward and well represented of a theme as Street Fighter, but pretty good for such an abstract genre (deckbuilding games).
Like Bryan and Vuther, I am curious why there is a picture of a couple in their underwear. At first I thought it was an ad, but realized it had a picture of the Puzzle Strike box in it. It is the image at the top of this blog post. Is it just the three of us who see it? What is that about?
Because puzzle strike is sexy. Duh.
Bavitz: I don't think your group is very good at playing Dominion. In reality, running out of three piles of cards is quite rare. It only really happens in games with Gardens or games where there is a lot of cursing going on, though the odd duchy race can happen. Most games, buying money is sufficiently powerful that you simply don't WANT to gunk up your deck with tons and tons of actions, and with most cards, you don't want more than a couple copies of them in your decks - and the ones you do want lots of copies of in your decks tend to accellerate you into buying victory points or gold quickly enough that you don't really end up chewing up the piles.
As for the 30% useless cards, that's rather misleading. They aren't actually useless; they help you win the game, and it leads to interesting strategic decisions, as well as additional variability (Puzzle Strike basically has you add three actions to your starting deck rather than three VP cards). Moreover, in conjunction with a number of cards (Upgrade, Remodel, Baron, Scout + Cellar-like cards) having the cards in your deck can be a boon, though that is the exception rather than the rule (and part of the reason that cards like Upgrade, Remodel, and Chapel are so powerful is their ability to turn your estates into something useful; it makes cards which trash much more attractive). Its also interesting in that trashing them is a decision which has consequences down the line. Also, Dominion's card costs are set up with the different starting conditions in mind; Puzzle Strike accomplishes the same via higher chip costs. That said, the assymetry of Puzzle Strike is certainly interesting; I'll probably end up playing it at some point.
It is also worth noting that the "useless" cards in dominion, the victory point cards, are the comeback mechanic of that game system. In dominion, typically speaking your deck is not at its best at the very end of the game but rather the turn you start purchasing Provinces and Duchies agressively. The cost of buying VP is that you slow down your deck, and it leads to an interesting situation where your deck becomes worse the closer you become to winning; thus jumping the gun on buying victory points can put you behind in the long run, but if you wait too long, you can't catch up even though they are gunking up their decks with green cards.
I am very interested in your points regarding the flaws of dominion and how you tried to solve them via Puzzle Strike. That being said, in ANY game with more than two players who are not on teams, and players can interact, kingmaking is possible. I think the biggest and best way to mitigate this is making it so kingmaking is not to your advantage - basically, the fewer situations you are in where you cannot possibly win, the less likely you are to do so, though some people will do so anyway, and it is more or less unavoidable. I do like that your system does discourage it via the catchup rules, though.
The faster start point you make is both good and bad, though, as you simultaneously can also aggravate draw assymetries. When openings are rather slow, having a bad start isn't quite as bad, but if the game ramps up almost instantly, someone can fall behind very quickly. This is particularly bad if one player is much stronger than the other; while the game will be over quickly, it is very lame for the guy who is bad.
Incidentally, regarding the only one buy rule, its not a bad rule, its just that you end up with consequences with either choice. Dominion makes buying stuff a commodity in and of itself, and gaining multiple buys is very important in some strategies, whereas with other strategies it isn't worthwhile. It opens up certain things that otherwise could not exist (gardens and cards like it) and also leads to interesting strategies. Also, buying the most expensive card is not always advantageous, and sometimes it is best to avoid spending extra buys if you can't make your deck better with them. Its more a question of what is best for the game you are trying to build. Indeed, in puzzle strike, you are OBLIGATED to purchase something, which is not the case in Dominion, though unless you have less than 3 money you will pretty much always buy something.
All this really makes me want to purchase Puzzle Strike. I'll likely do so in January, as we can always use more fun games.
I didn't notice you answered my comments since the pages here are reversed - the last page is the one with the recent comments, and that's a little confusing. Any way I wanted to respond to Sotek's comment:
"Besides, if you really hate the asymmetry ... just play mirror matches! You always do have that option, after all, so the asymmetry really does make a better game, as you're able to ignore it if it would make the game seem worse for you."
It seems that you and Sirlin got me wrong. It probably means that I wasn't clear enough. It's not that I hate asymmetrical games - I like them very much. It's just that all the talks about "tiers" and stuff always annoy me. Not every game have to be assymetrical - this is why I'll probably play both this and dominion.