Puzzle Strike: Casual Play Matters

Thanks to everyone who pledged in the Puzzle Strike Kickstarter campaign so far! It's still going strong!

I recently wrote at great length how important it was to making Puzzle Strike the best game it can be for expert tournament players. While it's nice to know that the game holds up at that level of play, not everyone even cares about that. I mean, is it fun in the first place? How does it fare with more than two players?

Free-For-All Mode: 2nd Edition

In Puzzle Strike 2nd Edition, the 4-player mode has player elimination. If your gem pile fills up, you're out of the game and the other players continue. Also, you can't choose who you crash to; you must always crash to the player to your left. ("Crash" means break gems in your own gem pile and send them to another player's gem pile.)

There's a reason the 2nd Edition worked this way and a reason why the third edition doesn't. Regarding player elimination, while it's not a desirable feature really, it's better than a system with "lame duck" gameplay. That term refers to a player who has no possible way to win a game, but who is somehow still in the game. For example, in a deckbulding game where you collect victory points and where the game ends when the stack of victory point cards is empty, it's very possible for one player to be far enough behind that he cannot possibly get enough VP to win, even if he got all the remaining VP cards. Whenever you have a lame-duck player, you are inviting kingmaker. In other words, if you have a player who can't possibly win anymore, you are inviting the problem of that player making moves that will affect which *other* player will win. And beyond that, it's just a stupid feeling to be in a lame-duck situation.

Player elimination solves that problem. In Puzzle Strike 2nd Edition, if you're not out yet, you can still win. In order to reduce the downtime after you're out, the final crash that puts you over the top "overflows" and can possibly knock out other players at the same time. And besides that, the game is usually pretty fast anyway.

Then there's the other point: in Puzzle Strike 2nd Edition, you can only crash to the left, not to anyone you want. If you could crash to anyone you want, the optimal strategy is both obvious and stupid: you should form a pre-game alliance with someone, and agree to gang up on the other players to eliminate them one by one, then face off with your "partner." Any free-for-all game with targeted attacks faces this problem, and I think any thoughtful design has to do something to prevent or minimize it. Hence your inability to choose your target in the 2nd Edition.

Great, so what's the problem? The problem is that even though player elimination and forced target selection solve very real problems, a lot of people just don't like those things. Also, even though the game usually ends quickly after someone is eliminated, there are unfortunately times where it can drag on much too long.

Free-For-All Mode: 3rd Edition

With the 3rd Edition (and the Shadows expansion), I wanted to get rid of player elimination, but somehow not introduce the lame-duck problem and somehow avoid the problem of pre-game alliances too. This was actually a tough nut to crack, and I think it took over a year to really figure out.

Now, the game ends at the same time for everyone whenever *anyone's* gem pile fills up. At that point, the winner is the player with the lowest gem pile. (If there's a tie, there's a tie-breaking procedure where everyone takes another turn.) Also, you can crash gems to any player you want, and you can even counter-crash to "save" other players from losing. The dynamics that result from this are non-obvious, somewhat bizarre, and quite interesting.

First, you can't really even

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Golden Balls Prisoner's Dilemma

You might have seen this video going around:

Watch it first, then I will say some things...

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Puzzle Strike and the Quest for a Tournament Quality Deckbuilding Game

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

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Puzzle Strike is funded on Kickstarter!

We did it! We reached the funding goal for Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition + the Shadows expansion on kickstarter. It took less than 2 days, wow. I hope we can keep going way more though and reach the stretch goals to put some more components in the box. Thanks to everyone who supported us so far.

Also, we are now the #1 Staff pick on Kickstarter, too!

Puzzle Strike on Kickstarter!

Help bring Puzzle Strike to the people with our kickstarter project!

The standalone expansion to Puzzle Strike as well as a redesigned base set have been a long time in the making. The online version at www.fantasystrike.com has been adjusted and adjusted based on both tournament play and casual play, and I'd really like to lock it down and get the physical version totally in sync with the online version.

Puzzle Strike Shadows has 10 new characters, 24 new puzzle chips, new gameplay modes including a free-for-all mode with no player elimination (wowow!), a 2v2 Team battle mode, and a customization mode. Hopefully it will have even more components too, depending on how the stretch goals go. The base set has been retro-fitted with all that same great stuff, and the puzzle chips powered up to be more useful than ever.

Thanks in advance for supporting the kickstarter campaign, current and future Puzzle Strikers!