Saturday, November 26, 2011 at 11:21AM There's an online Yomi tournament going on right now. Here's the link. Aphotix's excellent match commentary really makes the game come alive. Check it out!
(By the way, these games are being played at www.fantasystrike.com.)
Friday, November 18, 2011 at 1:32PM 
So there's a lot going on with Puzzle Strike. First, the Upgrade Pack is a hit, thankfully. Here's a review, and another, and another. Some players think the main point of it are the playmats and screens, which make the whole experience of playing kind of cooler. Other players think the whole point is the set of 30 character chips, rebalanced based on tournament play. Yesterday one player named vivafringe said "Puzzle Strike is finally fun." Ha, I'll choose to take that as a compliment. ;)
Next, here's a french review of Puzzle Strike.
And here's a podcast with Magic: the Gathering creator Richard Garfield and Pro Tour creator Skaff Elias. Too bad Richard fixates on the barely-used mechanic of putting a chip on top of your bag, but he seems to really like the mechanics overall, cool. And of course the asymmetry. And the part where there's a lot of player interaction.
Next, there's the full expansion in the works. You are invited and welcomed to come test it online now, before it's finalized. You can do that at www.fantasystrike.com, then click on "PLAY" and then go to Puzzle Strike. From the character select screen, use the code "shift+b" to enable the expansion characters. We're working on balancing them right now and the more help the better. If you're planning on complaining about something after release, it's better to complain now! Excuse our dust on the website, by the way. We just updated the site with several graphical enhancements, so now there's a mix of a few real parts and many placeholder parts, and clashing color schemes. I'm really excited that we'll be upgrading the website graphics again probably next week to make the matchmaking screen look a ton better.
Speaking of testing, if you're in the tinkering mood, I'll give you some changes you can try out in the base set. These aren't official errata, but they might improve your play experience if you're feeling adventurous:
Secret Move. Cost 1 instead of 3. Gives you +black arrow the turn you play it.
Thinking Ahead. "Put any chips you buy this turn on top of your bag" as opposed to just one chip.
Iron Defense. Costs 4 instead of 5. The part about "you may play the crash gem as if from your hand" works on the current turn as well as future turns.
Gems to Gemonade. Cost 4 instead of 5. Reaction effect changed to: Negate up to three gems sent to you and get +$1 for each negated gem during your next buy phase."
You can remind yourself what all these chips normally do here. (Click on "Puzzle Chips" toward the top.)
Finally, you are encouraged to hold tournaments at your local game stores, or even casual events. We'll eventually have a better way for you to report those results, but for now just let us know in the forums or post about it on our Facebook wall or something. You're also encouraged to run and participate in online tournaments for the expansion, since we need get the balance in shape.
Thanks to all the Puzzle Strikers everywhere!
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 12:40PM Flash Duel's new raid mode is cooperative, in that you team up with up to three other players to defeat the dragon. The mortals win as a team or lose as a team. There's a common problem with cooperative games that a dominant player can bark orders at everyone else and basically play the game solitaire. What to do about this?
Deathstrike Dragon tells you what to do!
The most common answer is to do nothing, and "play with different people." Another common answer is an infeasible and sloppy one: rules about how you can't share information with people on your team. Another answer is to have a secret "traitor" on the team, so you can't trust everyone's advice and you have to think for yourself. Finally, there's a very uncommon solution used by Space Alert and Wok Star where there's time pressure (meaning the game takes place in real-time, not turn-based!) and that there simply isn't time for a single person to do everyone's job. In video games, of course there's the solution that your instructions don't replace the skills of other people (hey, just get all head-shots in this FPS!) but we're talking about board games and card games here.
Let's talk about the worst solution first, the one where the game claims that you can't share information. If you're experienced with tournament rules, hopefully you immediately see the problem here. You can "give hints" but you can't say what cards you have? Like "I have a high card" might be ok, but "I have the Jack of Spades" is not? A hint is actually identical to saying the card in high level play. You give enough hints, or you encode information in the hints to make that so. You can also tap your arm or your forehead to pass information, or other such signals. The point is that there is no real way to stop this kind of stuff. In fighting games, it would be like saying "don't use a certain move *too much*" or some such fuzzy, non-discrete, unenforceable thing.
Another example of how this type of solution is sloppy and infeasible comes from the game Battlestar Galactica. In that game, each player submits a card face down to a pile that represents a team effort to complete a task, then two extra random cards are added. This allows a traitor to sneak in a card that will hurt everyone, then he or she can claim that card must have been one of the random ones when everything is revealed. Ok, sounds fine at first glance. But what about sharing information? The rulebook says this:
Skill Cards and Skill Checks: Players are prohibited from revealing the exact strength of cards in their hands. They may use vague terms such as “I can help out on this crisis a little bit,” but they may not make more specific statements such as “I am playing 5 piloting.” In addition, after a skill check is resolved, players may not identify which cards they played. The reason for these restrictions is to keep hidden information secret and to protect Cylon players from being discovered too easily.
One player who is not the traitor should announce the following strategy. "I am not the traitor, and it's in my interest to expose the traitor. If you are not the traitor it's in your interest too. If you do not do what I'm going to say in a moment, you must be the traitor. What I'm about to say benefits non-traitors and exposes traitors, so there is no reason to not to go along other than being a traitor. We'll all "hint" at the cards we're going to play, and of course hints and just saying the card are the same in high-level play. Then when the cards are later revealed, we see if every card claimed to be there really is. If anyone lied, they are the traitor. If anyone was intentionally too vague with hints, they are the traitor. (The game pushes us all asymptotically close to the taboo tactic here.) Note that it's possible that a lying traitor could get lucky and his lie matches a random card. That's no matter though because if the cards *don't* match, then we definitely know the traitor. We'll just do this every single time, preventing the traitor from ever doing anything."
Is that a fun way to play? Not really. But that just highlights the problem. Playing well breaks that game because rules trying to limit communication between people who really want to communicate don't really work. Playing that way is also "against the spirit of the game," but with a squishy information sharing rule, playing against the spirit of the game is just playing well, really, and that's a problem too.
The problem is that it's infeasible to give players an incentive to share information, then claim that they can't. A better way to handle this is to attack the problem at the incentive level. Make the players not want to share information. Either way, the goal is to make it so not every player knows everything so that players have to think for themselves rather than rely entirely on the advice of the loudest player. If we can give people some reason they don't *want* to share information, we don't have to worry so much about all the annoying stuff above.
We need a traitor who gets his power from information. On the one hand, the more information you share, the better off your team is because you can all plan together. On the other hand, the more information you share, the more powerful you make the traitor, so you should not share everything. The moment you hold back sharing anything, we've already solved the dominant player problem.
In Flash Duel, the hidden information is the cards in everyone's hands. Remember that these cards just have a single big number on them, like a "2" or something, and that you only have hands of five cards. The traitor has a special power where he can voluntarily reveal himself and then attempt to kill off the mortals by naming the cards in their hands. If the traitor can name every card in every other mortal's hand, he kills them all. This would probably never happen in a real game though, because players will know that showing their hand cards can be deadly. What this really does is keep information sharing in check.
By the way, the revealed traitor then fights alongside the dragon, so he's not out of the game when he reveals himself.
Last time I wrote about the Raid on Deathstrike Dragon mode, the one without the traitor. In that one, the answer to the dominant player problem is "just try to work together and don't play solitaire." But a dominant player certainly could ruin that experience, as with almost any cooperative game. The Betrayal mode is a harder version of that raid where one of the mortals (or zero of them, but you won't know that!) is the traitor.
In playtesting, several players actually preferred the regular raid over the betrayal raid. The regular raid is a bit simpler, and if you are all getting along and cooperating anyway, there is no problem to fix. That said, I think the betrayal mode will really appeal to certain groups in that it's an extra challenge, and really different (and treacherous!) game dynamics. If you're ready to turn your Flash Duel up a notch, then try it. See which mode your group prefers, and feel free to post your experienes, questions, or hype on the boardgamegeek.
Flash Duel 2nd Edition ships in early December.
In closing, have another dragon card image:
Tuesday, November 8, 2011 at 12:13PM 
The Puzzle Strike Upgrade pack is now in stock, and starts shipping out to everyone today. Finally!
Here's a review of it.
Here's the Boardgamegeek.com entry.
And here's where you can buy it.
Remember that you can play Puzzle Strike online for free at www.fantasystrike.com, too! There's even an online tutorial there now.
Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 5:23PM 
Flash Duel 2nd Edition is now available for pre-order, here. There's also a new game info page here.
Since the very beginning, I planned for Flash Duel to include a "raid" mode where 2, 3, or 4 players teamed up against a 5th player who controls a powerful dragon. While Flash Duel is a pretty simple game overall, it's still a 1v1 competitive game. I wanted to give players a way to team up and have someone on their side, so that it can be an even more social experience if that's what you're looking for.
I always planned this mode to be part of the second expansion. The first expansion was to have 10 new characters and the second expansion was to include the cooperative play of the dragon raid mode. Somewhere along the way, I decided to redo the entire game and include the base and both expansions all in one though, as part of my "too much value" initiative for Flash Duel. Anyway, even though I planned to include this mode since day 1, I thought I'd explain some of the design choices that came up along the way, for your entertainment value.
Master Menelker is one of the Fantasy Strike expansion characters. He's actually been with us for a very long time, and he even predates Valerie and Geiger in Yomi. In the lore of Fantasy Strike, he is the most powerful combatant in the realm because he has the will to do what others won't. There is no "cheap" to Menelker, there is no taboo. He is the ultimate embodiment of Playing to Win.
Menelker and Midori trained together long ago, and each have the ability to transform into a dragon. Midori into a powerful green dragon, and Menelker into the much more powerful black Deathstrike Dragon. Menelker got this name from rumors of deathmatches (fights to the death) that he's been involved in--and, apparently won. Menelker would not engage the weak in such a challenge, as it would be outside the point of playing to win. That said, Menelker doesn't need to bother using his ultra-powerful dragon form in such matches, as he would win too easily and learn nothing. No one has defeated the humanoid Menelker, and no one man could defeat the dragon. It would take a team of fighters working together to have a chance.
If the Deathstrike Dragon is to live up to his lore, his cards had better be pretty damned awesome. Early on, there was some talk fo the dragon player having a hand of ability cards so he could keep them secret, instead of the usual face-up abilities in Flash Duel. Even from that earliest moment, I knew it wasn't the right direction though. Hidden information like that can improve the strategy, but we have other ways of improving the strategy, too. It's important to have a bit of showmanship and to make the legend of the dragon come alive. The best way to do that is with gigantic, amazing looking cards, and those cards would be too big to reasonably hold in your hand. The dragon cards use the same one-shot flip mechanic as all other Flash Duel abilities (which is a plus for consistency in mechanics), they are just on huge cards.
Here's one of Menelker's human form cards:
And here's one of his HUGE Deathstrike Dragon cards:
Wow! Notice that the dragon doesn't obey the usual rules of card frames. He's busting out of these cards, stepping in front of the title and the
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