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.

PAX Prime Thanks

Serious YomiThanks to Gabe and Tycho for holding PAX. It's so big and complex of a thing that it's hard to imagine what must go into planning and executing it all. If you guys are reading, great job, though I have one complaint you probably can't possibly do anything about. At PAX East, the layout is one enormous "room" the size of an airplane hangar or something with the video game area in the front and the tabletop games area in the back. The booths where tabletop game companies do demos are right next to the place where tournaments for those games are run, which are right next to the free play area. Because of this, at PAX East it was very easy for people who wanted to find me to find me, and it was generally easy for anyone to find anyone and to meet up and play things.

At PAX Prime though the company booths, tournament area for tabletop games, and freeplay area for tabletop games were so segmented that it was logistically very hard to deal with. The tournament area was in a different building 3 blocks away from the rest (rather than 10 feet away), so it makes it much more inconvenient to enter tournaments. When people at the tournament area asked where is the main place to buy games, giving them directions to a place 3 blocks away isn't a great thing to have to do. And trying to meet up with people in the freeplay tabletop game area is generally very difficult because there were like 6 different rooms (rather than one big space) and it's not possible to predict which rooms will have empty seats, so you can't really say "let's meet at room 210" or whatever.

Anyway, it seems like you've outgrown the entire city of Seattle! It looks like you need a new convention center that's way, way bigger than what's there. You've managed to have to have the problem of being "too popular," ha.

Thanks to everyone to attended and helped run the Sirlin Games tournaments, and to those who played my customizable card game, too. It was interesting seeing how new people reacted to it and you guys gave me generally very high quality feedback for people who were so new to the game.

I never did end up meeting the elusive Day9 but super thanks to Thom From Canada, the diamond league Terran player who had me sign his "gg" button, and then waited in line for an hour to have Day9 sign right next to it so he could tell Day9 that I would really like to talk to him, lol. Thom From Canada was also a star playtester of my customizable card game at PAX. I liked how he made a list of a few properties of the game ("things I know to be true," he said) in order to derive a few second-order statements about what must be good strategy tips. He was excited to hear that I had reasons his strategy tips might not be totally right (because it meant new information for him). And it was hilarious to see him play more and go against all his own tips. I also see why he's such a high ranking player in Starcraft. He made constant strategy mistakes while playing the card game the first couple times, creating a comedy of errors. Maybe embarrassing and funny, but I think this allowed him to very quickly learn a whole bunch of things not to do again. I wonder if there's something to that. Try all you can when you're new and accept that you'll make play mistakes. That results in lots of bad choices, but also teaches you faster than if you try to play in a very restrictive, "correct" way when you are new to a game (maybe?). In any case, big thanks to TFC. (And to the rest who played, like Claytus and Stephen Keller from the comments section of my Diablo3 post, lol.)

Oh and by the way, I won the Street Fighter HD Remix tournament again. And I met Cammy.

PAX Prime

If any of you are going to PAX Prime this year, don't miss out on the Sirlin Games tournaments. The complete schedule is here, but here are the times for my games:

Friday, 8/31, 11am: Puzzle Strike.
Saturday, 9/1, 11:00am: Flash Duel.
Saturday, 9/1,  1:30pm: Yomi.

I'll be happy to sign your copy of the games too, if you like. You can also buy them at the Game Salute booth. Look for me in the Game Salute area or in the tabletop gaming area. I can also demo my customizable card game to a select few. And I have a fun question and answer game that even non-gamers might enjoy that we could try out, if the situation arises. And a game design issue that interested parties could help with in yet another game I have in development. I'd also welcome anyone interested in trying some new 2v2 Yomi rules to ask about that, and we'll see how that goes.

If you're an artist who can draw in a similar style and level of quality to the Yomi face card art, you might stop by with some samples as well. I just might have some work for you.

I'll also be the Street Fighter HD Remix tournament Saturday evening. We'll see if I can repeat my PAX East win at PAX Prime!

EDIT: Oh, and you get bonus points if you can somehow get Day9 and I together at PAX. Even though I *wrote* one of his favorite two books, I have not been able to even contact him (not for lack of trying). Someone tell Day9 that I'd like to meet him. Thanks. :)

Addiction, Diablo 3, and Portal 2

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell talks about nicotine addiction amongst smokers. What you might not know is that nicotine's power varies quite a bit depending on the, uh, victim.

Of all the teenagers who experiment with cigarettes, only about a third ever go on to smoke regularly. Nicotine may be highly addictive, but it is only addictive in some people, some of the time. More important, it turns out that even among those who smoke regularly, there are enormous differences in the stickiness of their habit. Smoking experts used to think 90 to 95 percent of all those who smoked were regular smokers. But several years ago, the smoking questions on the federal government's national health survey were made more specific, and researchers discovered, to their astonishment, that a fifth of all smokers don't smoke every day. There are millions of Americans, in other words, who manage to smoke regularly and not be hooked—people for whom smoking is contagious but not sticky.

Gladwell goes on to call these sometimes-smokers "chippers." While chippers never feel the need to go beyond a certain level of their drug, true addicts escalate their drug usage over time. I was surprised when I first read that, as I would have imagined that everyone would be caught on the slippery slope toward needing more and more of a drug, but apparently not.

You might ask what separates chippers from more hardcore addicts. In Gladwell's summary of the situation, he says "probably genetic factors." One piece of support for this is a (kind of scary) study where mice were given toxic levels of nicotine. At some point, it's poisonous enough to cause a seizure. Is that point about the same in all mice? Turns out, it's not. While some mice had seizures at X amount of nicotine, other mice could tolerate two or three times that amount. There seems to be a genetic difference here. Further, that range of "toxic to some, but others can tolerate two or three times as much" is the same range for alcohol.

I've never personally been interested in smoking (or drinking alcohol, for that matter), but I drink coffee. It's something I originally did for practical reasons when I needed a bit of a boost to do some work, even though I didn't want the coffee at all, but now I certainly have some sort of chemical addition to it. That said, it's only at the level of a "chipper." I have basically never had more than one coffee in a day, while I know others who have escalated to four, five, six cups, etc.

Oh, and another thing about those mice. The experimenters wondered whether there was a correlation between how much nicotine a mice could tolerate (a genetic factor) and how much nicotine the mouse would *voluntarily* consume (behavioral factor). It turns out the correlation was almost perfect, and that the more a given mouse could tolerate, the more it voluntarily consumed. So I'm willing to be my own personal choice of having some coffee, but not nearly as much as some other people I know, is just my luck of the draw with genetics.

Wanting vs Liking

If you only read one thing in this post, this should be it: "wanting" and "liking" are governed by different circuits in the brain, based on different chemicals. (The wanting-circuit uses dopamine while the liking-circuit uses opioids.) It's actually super important for you to know that wanting and liking are so different in our brains. Things that you want are not necessarily things you will like. This illuminates how bad of an idea it is to expend huge amounts of effort to attain things that you will ultimately not like. The most obvious one here is money. Mountains of research say that

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SCG4 Update

It's been over a year since I said anything about "Sirlin Card Game #4," the customizable but not-collectable game that I've been kicking around for over a decade now. Over the last year it's solidified quite a bit and gotten a lot of polish, too. If you happen to be going to PAX Prime this year, you can find me at the Game Salute booth to maybe get a chance to play it.

I thought I'd share a bit about a design problem that I kind of accidentally stumbled into an answer for. That's how things happen sometimes. First, the things that have explicitly been goals all along:

1) Make a game that would be interesting to play for 10+ years without any new cards being released.
2) No mana-screw.
3) Inject some "characters" into the game.

I won't say much about points 2 or 3. Regarding "no mana-screw," hopefully it doesn't take much explanation to see why you wouldn't want to randomly be locked out of even *playing* in a supposed strategy game. Point 3 is a matter of preference, and I just think it feels better to have characters and personalities to connect with in a game. This one was hard to figure out, but the current implementation really adds to actual gameplay as well as feel, so it worked out well.

It's #1 that's the real big one. If we can't rely on new cards every 3 months, it means the game actually has to hold up past that point on its own merits. If we can't rely on the metagame constantly changing, it means the game itself will need to have enough depth to support years of play at a very high level. In order to make that possible, the codenamed SCG4 gives you access to a much larger set of effects than you'd normally have during a game of any other customizable card game. More than you can use in any single game session, on purpose. And furthermore, much finer control over when you draw those effects. These two things together mean that you have much more *versatility* in how you play any given game. You can pursue pretty different strategies even without changing decks, and you can change which strategy you are pursuing during the course of a game--in response to how your opponent is changing his strategy.

Customizing Out the Fun

So that's all just great, isn't it. But a while ago, I forget how long, maybe a year or year-and-half ago there was a problem in the back of mind with this. The decks I was building for playtests were fun and all, but I was looking for that fun. I generally included about three different sets of strategies in these decks, and that was very good for gameplay. But what if a player who was playing to win built a much more boring and shallow deck? What if someone made a deck with only 1 strategy, but it was 20% more effective than any of my individual 3 strategies would be? We could debate which is actually a smarter idea, but if there is any chance that the more boring and shallow version is more capable of winning, that's going to really suck for the game.

Before going on, we should take a look at the more general problem that exists in all CCGs: unfair matchups are not only common, but often considered a good idea. If you can develop some deck that has really strong matchups vs several decks, but really weak matches vs only a few, you did a great job as a deckbuilder. You might win the tournament even, but you will have possibly played all unfair matchups, one way or another. For a more concrete example, a friend of mine told me about a Magic tournament he entered where he expected the (red) Goblins deck to be *most* of the field. He built a super hate deck directly against Goblins that included 12 maindeck protection from red cards, just for starters. He gave little thought to beating non-Goblins decks, though probably he had a sideboard to help as much as he could against those.

He told a pro player at the event that his deck was almost 10-0 vs goblins. The pro player said uh no it isn't, so they played several games. Eventually, the pro conceded that he didn't see a way that goblins could win at all, ever, vs that deck because it was just so extreme. My friend got 5th, but only due to an unlucky draw at the end. The bracket had: goblins, goblins, goblins, goblins, u/w control, and him, and he happened to face u/w control. He placed high, and he could have won the entire thing. What's most notable here is that 100% of his matches had bad gameplay. In every case, when he sat down to the table, one player or the other had overwhelming advantage.

Losing Before You Even Sit Down at the Table

Let me use the word "gameplay" to mean the part where you sit down at the table and play cards until someone loses. You could say "gameplay" also includes deckbuilding and metagame choices, but let's not, because then I'd just need some other word for when you sit down and play cards. The part where you sit down and play cards--the "gameplay"--really should be as generally fair as we can make it. I don't see it as a virtue that 8-2 or worse matchups are frequent things. It's clearly a bad property when fighting games have lots of highly unfair matchups, and it's something we work hard to fix there, rather than applaud.

But what can you DO about this? (Sideboards barely count as a good answer. They do literally nothing for game 1 of a match.) Deckbuilding is fun and captures the imagination, and that's what we're running up against here: deckbuilding is allowing unfair matchups to exist and to be common, even. If we limit deckbuilding, that sounds less fun. And so I didn't even really try to solve this problem, I just kind of gave up on it. And then something happened. Two ideas looked a lot alike, it was a clue.

When All Decks Really Interact...

In pursing that goal #1 of making the game interesting to play for years and years, we have to care a lot about your interaction with the opponent. You really need a lot more interaction than you get in most CCGs. There just has to be more to it if you're hanging your hat on the depth of gameplay of a single deck giving you YEARS of strategy space to play in. So what about cases where what you're trying to do is so different from what your opponent is trying to do that you hardly interact at all? I have joked amongst playtesters that we "force you to have fun" by making it not really possible to do that. You pretty much have to interact. And if we theorized about this or something, we might think oh that really limits what you can make! You can't make some solitaire thing that has no interaction at all. In actually playing it though, it feels the opposite of limited. Because the general game system has a lot more decisions going on than in other CCGs, "I feel so limited," doesn't come to mind, at least not to me. If anything, you have a wealth of choices and oh by the way, you can't go off in the corner and completely ignore what your opponent is doing.

Another way of putting this is that there's an illusion and reality that are at odds here. If we allow you make solitaire decks, it feels like that's more choice. In reality though, it's allowing choices that hurt the quality of the game overall as an interesting strategy game that can last years. It's like wanting freedom in your country, and saying part of that freedom is to murder people indiscriminately. In that case "more freedom" is a somewhat misleading label.

Limiting Deckbuilding to Create MORE Viable Decks

Back to the whole deckbuilding thing: it's exactly the same there. What if players want "more freedom" to build decks that cause the game to overall have a lot worse strategy? Wait...why are we allowing that? Deckbuilding is fun and exciting, but it has that same illusion, unfortunately. When you have more and more cards and more and more freedom to make anything, the illusion is that you get more and more choices. But what is more common is that you get more and morely likely to degenerate into just a very few choices, or one choice. Just imagine a CCG with 550 cards that you can combine however, and how many tournament viable decks there are going to be in that game. Yomi, a fixed deck game, has 550 cards that compose 10 such decks, but you'd be lucky to have even 4 if it were customizable. And there's just no way those 4 would end up having all 4-6, 5-5, and 6-4 matchups against each other. So you'd have the illusion of way more choice, but actually end up with fewer viable choices, and more unfair matchups plaguing the few choices you have.

So I realized that when I was including three different strategies in these decks, I was really on to something. This evolved to be a more and more central part of the game. Interwoven with the "heroes" you control, and part of the back-and-forth strategy where you and your opponent can each shift around what you're doing as you play. What seemed years ago like a bad limit to place on deckbuilding has now become (accidentally?) one of the best features of all. Yeah there are limits, there are chunks of your deck that have to have certain kinds of things. So how has that turned out? Has it made me and other playtesters sad?

The answer is that it's resulted in so many viable decks that we are overwhelmed. It's possible to make over 815 different decks with all the cards that exist today, and every one of those differs by at least 33% from every other one. And here is the most incredible part of that. I don't know which of those 815 is the least powerful, but whichever one it is, I do know that it's at least as able to win (and probably a lot more able to win) than the worst character in the average fighting game. So when I say this huge number of decks, I'm not talking about useless stuff like "all lands" or "all 1/1 creatures with no way to play them." I mean those are all real decks that can do coherent things and win in the hands of a skilled player. Somehow the "limits" on deckbuilding have produced more decks than we even know what to do with--every one of them playable.

In Closing

The Yomi expansion will be the next game I release, and that's going to be a while, so the game mentioned in this post will be even a while after that. I honestly don't know how I'll pay for the hundreds of thousands of dollars of art such a game needs, but one way or another you will get to play this game. I'm determined to eventually release it because I think it's incredible and I just don't know anything like it. Probably the higher the sales of the Yomi expansion, the sooner I'll be able to finish "SCG4."