Fantasystrike.com Relaunch

The new fantasystrike.com is now live! There's several big upgrades we just did, as well as a surprise, so let's check it out.

Yomi

The production values are way up now. The playfield now looks like a side view fighting game. It has fancy life bars, sound effects, and awesome music from OC Remix. The UI in general now helps you understand what's happening more. If your throw wins combat vs a block, we show with gigantic letters and effects that your throw won. When an ability happens, we show the ability box big, in the center of the screen. At the top of the screen, there's an info box telling you what you should be doing.

Here's some before and after screenshots:

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Oh and by the way, Yomi is now in German and French, as well as English.

Puzzle Strike

We upgraded the production values a lot in Puzzle Strike as well. There's sound, OC Remix music, and a more puzzle gamey theme to the UI. Puzzle Strike is now a lot easier to watch (and to play) because we added so many elements to help you understand what's happening. When a chip goes somewhere, it's now more clear where exactly it's going. Most importantly, the visuals for the gems in your gem pile make it very clear how close you are to losing. Your gem pile also has little notches that show when the height bonus triggers that allows you to draw more chips. Here's some before and after screenshots:

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Flash Duel

This is the first release of Flash Duel online. All 20 characters plus the Dragon Raid are working. You can play 1v1, 2v2, and up to 4v1 (vs the Dragon). You can even play the Custom Clockwork mode where you build your own 4-ability character out of the abilities of several different characters. The UI is a first pass, but the game is fully functional and features 8-bit animations for all 21 characters by famous pixel artist Conor "BT" Town.

Coin System

There's a new coin system for the site. There's a free character each week in each game and you don't need any coins to play that character. You can play them as much as you want, unlimited times, for free. If you want to play other characters, you are now able to do that for free as well! Every day, you automatically get 10 free purple tokens just for logging in. That's enough to play any character in any game one time for free. This is great because it allows you to try out a new character and see if you like them without actually spending anything.

The first win of the day also gives you 10 free purple tokens, so you could then play a second time that day for free. Once in a while during gameplay, you can get a "critical hit" which gives you purple tokens, too. These purple tokens only last 24 hours though, so you might as well use them when you have them, or you'll lose them.

If you want to play more than that, you can buy gold coins. You can also use gold coins to play any character in any game on game on the site, but they don't go away after 24 hours, you can pile them up all you want. You can even give gold coins to other players as a gift.

Between the free character, all the daily free tokens, and the sheer amount of gold you can buy in a single purchase with rebates for buying in bulk, we're somewhat worried that we are being too generous to maintain a business. We'd like to try it anyway though and see what happens.

(Note that anyone who previously bought characters still owns everything they bought and can play those bought characters all they want. All gold you had from the previous system will be converted to new gold, even if you never *bought* that old gold.)

Subscriptions

There's no change at all to how subscriptions work. Just like before, you can get a monthly subscription and have access to all characters in all games as well as some other perks like more saved replay slots. What's great is that we've been able to offer more and more value for those subscriptions over time. At first, a subscription gave you access to 10 Yomi characters and 10 Puzzle Strike characters. Now, you have access to 20 Flash Duel characters (plus the Dragon and Custom Clockwork mode), as well as 20 Puzzle Strike characters and all expansion puzzle chips as well as...

Surprise: Yomi Expansion is Live Now!

Yomi now has all 10 expansion characters implemented with rules enforcement in addition to the 10 base set characters, bringing the total to 20 characters. The expansion characters do not currently have all their art on the cards, but over the next couple months we'll be filling more and more of it in. In the meantime, they are fully functional to play!

Ladder Reset

We reset the ladder for all the games and are starting a new season. Note that Yomi will have some gameplay changes during this ladder season as the beta characters get updated. We might reset it early or just leave it as an experimental season, with the following season being the more stable competitive one.

Leaderboards Page

Even the leaderboards page got a graphical overhaul too. Here's a before and after of that:

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These upgrades have been in the works for a long time, and we all thank Thelo for his awesome work on getting them implemented. I hope you enjoy! Head on over to the game area on the new site.

"The Playtesters Are Saying To Do X"

I'll give you an anecdote from Codex development, my customizable not-collectable card game. First though, a more general concept. When most playtesters are complaining that something is too weak or too strong...should you change it? You'd sure hope that they are right and that yes you should change it. That is kind of the point of having people playtest a thing in the first place, to find issues with it that you can improve. There is a danger to it though, so there's a judgment call you should be aware of.

I've heard Blizzard speak about this exact issue before, and I like the philosophy they mentioned. On the one hand, yes you want to improve the game over time. On the other hand, you actually don't achieve that by making every change everyone asks for. If you do that, you'll move some things in the wrong direction sometimes, and you'll weaken things that weren't too strong or strengthen things that weren't too weak. Another thing Blizzard has mentioned is that if you change stuff every time any balance claim is made, you end up training your players to not look very hard for counters. You train them to rely on you, the developer, as a crutch and they might not be reaching the higher level of play they should reach before making the claim in the first place. So Blizzard's point is some temperance is required: you do want to make changes, but only when they are warranted.

Often when I hear playtesters wanting a change, I take the opposite side and give the reasons why a change shouldn't be made. That kind of pushback creates a least *some* barrier to too many changes happen. If they were right in the first place, they shouldn't have too much trouble explaining why the points I made weren't good enough, or weren't as important as their points, or whatever and that's fine. If they can make a good case that took some counter-points into account, probably the change would be good. Incidentally, with some people this is a totally straightforward and emotionless discussion, while with others it gets into drama. I have found I could make like ten times the progress by having 10 side discussions with the level-headed testers in the time I could have 1 discussion with the open group that includes...all types of people. So there's another thing to keep in mind. It's good to include more people for more viewpoints and to discover more problems, but it's also good to be efficient with fewer.

Back on point, I'd like to give some examples of playtest situations that were kind of unusual. Like I said, usually if a lot of people think there's a problem with something, there is. But knowing a few of the unusual counter-examples might help you identify if you are experiencing just such a counter-example when balancing whatever game you might be working on. So here's those unusual cases:

Tafari In Kongai

Tafari is a character in the Kongai virtual card game I designed for kongregate.com. He was intentionally a controversial, game-warping character. His ability is unique in all the game in that he prevents other characters from switching out against him. Characters switching in and out is a core mechanic of the game, so it's a huge deal that he disables this. It screams "broken" the first moment you hear about it. Tafari's other moves were designed with this in mind though, so he doesn't have any kind of reliable, explosive damage potential. He is kind of..."ok." Against some characters he has advantage, agaist others he's not even that great. But wow does he feel unfair at first.

The first wave of comments was that he was absurdly unfair. I kind of had to ignore that though because I expected that based on his "feel." When new players started playing the game, they usually claimed he was unfair too. What about experienced players who had a chance to play as him and against him for a while? Even then, they ranked him top tier for a while, but eventually he slipped to 2nd tier at best. He only ever had slight adjustments that had more to do with fixing bugs on how many times poison darts proc'd. His ability is just so crazy *feeling*, that people made wrong balance claims for quite a while. In the end, he was ok as-is.

Stolen Purples In Puzzle Strike

This is almost the same story. I even had Tafari in mind when I created Stolen Purples. This chip is game warping in that you play Puzzle Strike differently if it's in the bank than if it's not. At cost 4, many said it was just way too good. Was it? Usually when a lot playtesters said a chip was the wrong cost, they were right. But Stolen Purples had that same feature going as Tafari: the very idea you can steal purple chips from people *feels* so powerful that it can be hard to be objective about it. I didn't want to change it. After a while, one playtester said something pretty interesting. It was something like "I think we all subconsciously think that red chips (Stolen Purples is red) are supposed to suck, so we're thrown off by this one being good enough to buy. Probably some red chips need so much teeth that they legitimately compete with purple chips for you buy, and they give even more reason to care about having blues to protect yourself." Indeed.

While Stolen Purples is game-warping, it didn't really end up being too powerful, despite a ton of claims in the old days. It's merely "really really good."

Setsuki in Yomi

During Yomi's development, many people said Setsuki was too weak. Was she? There was a big problem in getting to the bottom of that. With other characters, when a big group of players said a character was weak, there was not much reason to question it. Just figure out where to add more power. With Setsuki though, the problem was that everyone was terrible at playing her. She plays in a strange way that's different from other characters. She often wants to make plays that would be bad with anyone else, but for her they will refill her hand. She wants to "waste" cards at just the right times to trigger her hand refill. She also has some nuances to her Bag of Tricks ability that you have to be aware of.

So of the set of people who said she was bad, *most* of that set were playing her badly and that tells us little, if anything. Then one very good playtester made the same claim. I explained to him the concept that everyone says she's bad because they don't get it, so I asked him if he was at that level of understanding, or if he knew all that, was totally good at her, and was making a "level 2" claim. He said he would get back to me.

Later he came back and said he had now reached level 2. He sees why other people were wrong in the reasons for their claims she is weak, but he--knowing how to actually play her--still claims it. THAT is good feedback. I asked him if he could get another good player who played her well to agree with him, and he was able to do that. So in this case, the testers ultimately were right, but the masses were not right on how much improvement was needed. Those on level 2 said only a bit of improvement was needed (most people said huge buffs were needed), so we made those slight changes and it was enough. Great.

Prohibition in Codex

The card Prohibition also reminds me of Tafari. It's game warping, though not as much as Tafari is. It allows the player to name a number, then opponents can't play units, spells, or upgrades that cost that much. "Is Prohibition too weak or too strong" has come up at basically every playtest of Codex ever.

Initially, I thought it was too weak if anything. The opponent can play around it by playing stuff of other costs. Because of the nature of how Codex works, it's easier to play around than it would be in Magic: the Gathering. In Codex you have more fine control over which cards you draw, and you can get rid of cards you don't want (like the ones that cost whatever they named) by playing them as workers (resources). Yes, the player of Prohibition is getting some advantage by making the other player play around it, but that's kind of the point. It doesn't seem like a huge amount of advantage considering they can do so many other things.

But if all that is right, why did this conversation come up over and over and over again? I remember one game where I said "Looks like you're in trouble. I guess you could cast Doom Grasp and be ok though. Oh...you can't because that's the cost they named with Prohibition. Well yeah tough luck." More and more stories like that came up over time. What's worse is that Prohibition is in a certain category of cards that you are able to get with 100% certainty on the first two turns. A card that can potentially shut down certain things is ok, but when you can so easily cast it so early every game it's kind of oppressive.

Yet another issue with it is that there aren't a lot of ways to remove it, and that's kind of on purpose. "Upgrade" cards are generally pretty reliable. Other types of cards are even harder to defend than you're used to in other similar card games, so it's kind of nice to have one type that isn't quite so easy to remove. Why don't ALL upgrade cards have the same problem as Prohibition then? Part of the answer is that most other upgrade cards...upgrade your own stuff. It's less important that you get rid of some buff to the other guy than get rid of a thing that's blocking your own plans. The other part of the answer is that if you do have one of the few things that can get rid of Prohibition, the other guy can name the cost of your answer to prevent you from even playing it.

So after like a thousand times of "Should something be done about Prohibition?" I have say the answer is yes. People are still somewhat split on it, but it's come up way way more times than I'd expect if it were a case like Tafari or Stolen Purples or Setsuki where simply getting better at the game was a solution. In other words, Prohibition kind of looks like it's one of those unusual exceptions, except maybe it isn't. Maybe it's just too damn powerful. Or maybe it's a bad idea to allow a game-warping effect to be so prevalent and easy to use. In any case, I revised it to be a unit so that it's much easier to kill and also to only prevent the opponent from casting units of the named cost, rather than units/spells/upgrades. I think it will now play a role more in line with any other card, and we can finally get on to other discussions. There will of course be substantially more testing.

Puzzle Strike Roundup

Here's a really detailed (and positive) review of Puzzle Strike from 2D6.

Edit: And here's another review of Puzzle Strike from Victory Condition.

There have also been a ton of articles about the development beind Puzzle Strike as well as strategies to play it well over at www.fantasystrike.com. Thanks to vivafringe, rabid, skeller, and the rest of the players who contributed to this growing storehouse of knowledge. Here are some of those articles:

Puzzle Strike Matchup Strategies: Valerie & Geiger
Puzzle Strike Matchup Strategies: Grave & DeGrey
Puzzle Strike Matchup Strategies: Lum & Argagarg
Puzzle Strike Matchup Strategies: Jaina & Rook
History of Hundred-Fist Frenzy
History of Degenerate Trasher
History of Secret Move
Puzzle Strike Matchup Strategies: Midori & Setsuki
History of Midori in Puzzle Strike
Puzzle Strike Matchup Strategies: Valerie & Argagarg
Puzzle Strike Matchup Strategies: Grave & Rook
History of Zane in Puzzle Strike
History of Combine
History of Lum in Puzzle Strike
Puzzle Strike Matchup Strategies: Geiger & Lum
History of Four Minor Puzzle Strike Changes

And for some bonus, here's a recent glowing review of Yomi, as well as an article for new players about strategy. And here's a review of Flash Duel from Wired.

If you're interested in buying Puzzle Strike, Yomi, or Flash Duel for the holidays, you still have a few days left. Ordering from www.sirlingames.com by December 18th should still allow you to receive it by December 24th, if you're in the US. (It will ship anywhere in the world, just not quite that fast outside of the US.)

Enjoy this wealth of information!

All Puzzle Strike Kickstarter Orders Shipped!

As of today, Puzzle Strike (3rd Edition and Shadows) has shipped to every single kickstarter backer. We managed to meet our goal of the September ship date, which is somewhat of a rare thing for games on kickstarter, ha. If any of you have recieved your order, but not the randomizer cards, don't worry. For some orders, the cards didn't fit in the shipping box, so they were mailed out to you separately. If you have any questions about your particular order or shipping situation, you can contact Game Salute (see the info in the image above).

Thanks to everyone for the support, I'm glad we managed to get extra components (boards and screens) into Puzzle Strike, and I hope you enjoy the free randomizer cards, and online coupon for www.fantasystrike.com too.

If you missed out on the kickstarter, Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition, Shadows, as well as various extras like the 100+ page strategy guide are available here, and will ship on October 28th if you order far enough ahead of time.

Thanks again!

Puzzle Strike on Watch It Played

Watch It Played is an awesome series that shows how board games work and demonstrates playing them. The theory is that there's no need to "review" the games because it becomes self-evident if the game is for you once you understand whatever good qualities it happens to have. I have personally found it very helpful, and I was really excited when Flash Duel appeard on Watch It Played.

And now, the first few episodes for Puzzle Strike (3rd Edition) are up!

The rest of the episodes will be here.

Thanks Rodney and family!

Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition, the Shadows standalone expansion, and some other related goodies are now up for pre-order. Keep in mind that we still plan to ship to Kickstarter backers around the end of September, and that means non-kickstarter orders won't ship until about the end of October. (Also note, if your order *contains* anything that won't ship until the end of October, your whole order will ship together once it's all ready.)

And the free online version has been been up for quite some time now at fantasystrike.com, too.