Fortress AT Reviews Puzzle Strike Upgrade and Yomi Cursed Cards

Fortress AT reviews the Yomi cursed cards, and more importantly the Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack here. I'm glad the PS upgrade went over so well, on the components and on the gameplay!

All of these [new] chips are very much appreciated, but the new shields and playmats are straight up extremely cool.--Ken B

Thanks Ken B.! And special thanks to 8-bit artist BT for doing the cool art on the player shields/screens, and to evilgorodo for artistic inspiration on the playmats. And to the sirlin.net community for playtesting the gameplay of the upgrade pack.

The Yomi cursed cards are available now, though the Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack ships at the beginning of November, with pre-orders open now.

Flash Duel--Adding Perks When You Can

Though we spent quite a while on tuning the core gameplay of the new Flash Duel, I want to talk about the idea of adding extra "perks" when possible to a product. Things that are within reach to do, and that give a lot of benefit for the amount of effort involved. Here are two that came up during development.

Portable Version?

The first edition of Flash Duel had a deluxe and a regular version. The regular version was just cards in a tuckbox with no extra components. A lot of people told me how they really, really like how portable that version was. Flash Duel is a fast game, so it's the kind of thing you could play with a few minutes here or there, and that lends itself to being in a small box like that.

The second edition has only one SKU though, meaning just one product. It's more efficient to manufacture and distribute that way, but it's also that I wanted to do a good rulebook and make sure everyone who has the game has that rulebook. It won't fit in a tiny box. But people really liked that portable version...can we put it *inside* the second edition bigger box, maybe?

There are 60 character ability cards in the second edition (20 characters x 3 abilities each). You'll need 25 numbered cards to play the 1v1 mode. So to put a portable version inside the main version, we'll just need to add 5 cards that you can use as the "track" (instead of using the bigger nicer board that also comes in the box) and we'll need to add a tuckbox to hold those 90 cards. I thought it was worth it to design those 5 track cards and the tuckbox, because it adds a pretty cool feature to the whole thing: the portable version included in every box.

I also made sure on the manufacturing side that when you first get the game, all the cards needed for the portable version are inside that inner tuckbox already. That way you understand what it's for and what goes in it if you want to slip just that smaller box in your pocket.

Playing Two Games At Once?

Let's say you open up the second edition box and use the portable version to play a game of 1v1. Is there enough left over stuff that two of your friends can play a second, parallel game of 1v1? They could use the real game board instead of the 5 track cards in the portable version. With 20 characters to choose from, your friends would have 18 more left. There are enough pawns for all 4 of you in the box. So really the only thing your two friends will need is enough numbered cards to actually play. They'll need 25 numbered cards, but are there enough left over for them?

The Raid on Deathstrike Dragon game mode (more on that in a later post!) requires more than 25 numbered cards to play. During most of development, it required a total of 45 numbered cards. That means we were just 5 shy of having enough to play two simultaneous 1v1 games. It seemed that the Dragon mode was getting time-out a bit too much (when all the cards have been drawn), so adding 5 more cards to solve that would also let us include enough cards to get those two simultaneous games of 1v1 going. I think the coolness of that is totally worth adding another 5 cards to the manufacturing. So you really can play two simultaneous games of 1v1 with just what comes in the box.

In your own projects, see if you can find things with good bang for the buck, like the perks I mentioned here. Sometimes you'll realize you already have 95% of a feature if you're thinking about what would be cool for your players/users/clients.

One Week Sale on Amazon

All my games are on sale on Amazon right now (for US customers), for the coming week only. Amazon actually suspends all seller accounts automatically during the holidays unless they sell a certain amount now. So I could use the help and you can use the discounts!

• Yomi Complete -- $89.99 ($10 off)
• Yomi: Grave & Jaina -- $19.99 ($5 off)
• Yomi: Midori & Setsuki -- $19.99 ($5 off)
• Yomi: Rook & DeGrey -- $19.99 ($5 off)
• Yomi: Valerie & Geiger -- $19.99 ($5 off)
• Yomi: Lum & Argagarg -- $19.99 ($5 off)
• Puzzle Strike -- $49.99 ($10 off)
• Flash Duel 1st Edition -- $14.99 ($1 off)

If you do happen to buy any of these on Amazon this week, please make sure they are from Sirlin Games. Thanks!

Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack, Part 3

I covered the non-gameplay components and the new chips in the Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack here and here, and now it's time for the character chips. There's a complete set of 30 character chips in the Upgrade Pack, even though not all of them have changed. I thought this would be helpful for those who want to play mirror matches with the chips in the base set, such as Setsuki vs. Setsuki.

Let's start by talking about why any of the character chips are different at all. Shouldn't we not really mess with what's already been done? I think there's a value in letting things be for a while. Game balance doesn't have to be perfect, and can't be perfect, and there's a cost to changing balance stuff around. We have to consider the logistical difficulty of getting new chips into your hands, the possible confusion that might surround such an update, that any changes in gameplay in this upgrade pack take weeks or months to test and would cause a delay in working on the full expansion, and so on. It would certainly have been a whole lot easier not to change any game balance of the character chips, so with so many reasons stacked against making changes, why are there changes?

The Call to Action

It's because when a problem in a game is big enough, it demands attention and fixing. Often in board and card games, the approaches to this problem are a) do nothing and b) move on to the expansion and just forget about the base set. Neither of these strike me as what to do if you truly care about a game though. Because I have a serious commitment to Puzzle Strike being a tournament-viable game, if there is any problem in the base set that threatens that, I think I have no choice but to address it. And right now, this is the best method we have.

The main problem, which took months of tournaments to really fully discover, is that Valerie is too good. For those not familiar with the challenges we face in balancing any asymmetric game, the problem *isn't* that Valerie is the best character. That is no crime, and there is always some best character. It's only a problem if a character is too far beyond the "top tier," meaning too much power-difference between that character and the rest. As time went on, Valerie proved harder and harder to beat, dominating tournaments to the point that many players were losing interest in even competing. It's somewhat unusual that it took so long to discover the problem, and it lies in a false choice with her Burst of Speed chip:

For a while, there was an interesting tension between using the chip early (small benefit that snowballs over time) or late (big turn that might just win outright). In the end, tournament players found that playing it at the first opportunity--and usually using that extra turn to buy a Combine--was too good of a play to pass up. It's boring and really powerful. Interestingly, you might not even care about this in your games, because it was mostly a problem amongst the expert players and only after they played quite a bit. That said, if the game is degenerating at the expert level, some fix is required, so a new Valerie was the #1 goal here. Many versions of her were tried, but here's the final change. Burst of Speed is replaced with Three Colors:

Note that Three Colors is a move of hers from Yomi, and it's a series of three paintbrush swipes, each a different color. In a fighting game, it would function similarly to Fei Long's Rekkaken punches. In Puzzle Strike though, it allows her to chain together three actions...if you have a diverse enough deck to take advantage of it! During playtesting of this chip, the most encouraging thing about it was that the very best players called it a nerf (and of course it is, she was too powerful before) but some average players saw it as a buff! That's because they were not playing Valerie in a boring way before, they were trying lots of different strategies with different kinds of puzzle chips, and this new chip enables even more diverse strategies. So boringness is nerfed and fun is buffed, so to speak.

While addressing Valerie was the top priority, there were two other goals as well: address the

Click to read more ...

Introducing Flash Duel 2nd Edition

Flash Duel 2nd Edition is such an unusually large leap over the first version that I think I should explain how that came to happen. It started out simply enough, but it ended up as a business experiment of sorts.

The original plan was to just release an expansion to the game with 10 new characters. After that, there'd be a second expansion that added the ability to play with more than just two players. One problem with this plan is that I have since upgraded the manufacturing of my other games, and I do much higher quantities now to make that possible. It wouldn't make much sense to print thousands of copies of the expansion if there aren't even thousands of the original in existence. So what was really needed is a remake of the original that uses better manufacturing (the original version's cards were sometimes blurry...) and that can exist in high enough quanity to even be part of the retail distribution chain.

Ok, so we'll just rerelease the original game, then? Several fans of the game were disappointed with this, for various different reasons. The most obvious is that if they already owned the game, they were hoping for more. But also, some complained about parts of the rules and wanted some things to work differently. I was looking over the card art, and I wasn't quite satisfied with the lettering of the card titles, and some other graphic design elements. Also, we've developed a FAQ about how some of the abilities work, and it seemed like several should be reworded so as not to need their FAQ entries in the first place.

Next, a guy named BT (who made the awesome 8-bit art on the screens in the Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack) suggested that we color-code some of the words. I immediately saw the value of that idea because "attack" and "dashing strike" are different entities in the game, and different things trigger off them. An ability that says "when you attack" doesn't trigger if you dashing strike, and vice versa. By color coding attack to red and dashing strike to purple, it made that concept even more clear.

While I was rewording the abilities and color-coding them, I realized we needed more room for that text box at the bottom. The base game has a couple abilities that need it, and the expansion had more, so I went ahead with that change. But then it became clear that the aspect ratio of the character art fit a whole lot better when we used the chibi (kid) versions of the characters, than the original ones. I also got rid of the black border around the character cards and did edge-to-edge art instead, which makes the cards feel bigger.

Modes and More Modes

We've talked about changing some graphic design elements, card wording, art, and even some system-wide rules changes. So at this point, you can think of the project as a remake. But then some crazy ideas came up. One player suggested a 2v2 mode, and another player suggested a variant on 1v1 where you can actually *draft* whatever ability cards you want, to make your own custom character. I started developing both of these modes, possibly for an expansion. There was also the multiplayer mode I had originally panned as an expansion: the Raid on Deathstrike Dragon. In this mode, you team up with up to 4 players against a 5th player playing as a powerful dragon. (It's actually the expansion character Master Menelker in his dragon form, which is far more powerful than Midori's dragon form.)

Also, some people asked if there was a way to play the game by yourself, solo. I worked on several possible answers to that, but the one that worked best was coming up with a simple algorithm that a "bot" would use against you. It worked pretty well, so I thought this mode should go somewhere, too. This is getting to be kind of a lot of modes though, so which ones should appear in which expansions?

Too Much Value

And then the crazy idea was on the table. "What if we put the base game and both expansions--including all those modes and all 20 characters plus the dragon raid--into one box?" This goes against traditional business concepts actually, because releasing one game, then an expansion, then another expansion is just a better way to make money out of a product line. It's not a bad thing, it's just what everyone does, no big deal. But what would happen if we put it all in one box but only charged the amount that we'd normally charge for just the base game? This would be impossible with Yomi and impossible with Puzzle Strike, because there are just so many components. But it's maybe within reach for Flash Duel.

But...is it a good idea? I honestly don't know. Maybe I'd sell more if I separated these into three products, but I'd like to see what players think and what the press thinks when they get what amounts to basically "too much value" in one box. TWENTY characters means 190 matchups in 1v1, not counting mirror matches. Twenty characters in one box is kind of ridiculous, really. Plus the 21st character of the Dragon, who we'll get to in a later post. And all-told, there's actually SEVEN different game modes here. Yes, you can play the game in the same old 1v1 mode that the first edition was all about, and if anything, it's even simpler due to better wording and rules. But you can also explore a sort of shocking amount more with drafting and single-player and 2v2 and dragon raids.

So the experiment here, what I'm wondering about, is if a game has a lot more gameplay in it than you'd really expect, does that get noticed? Do reviewers talk about it, does it bring more players into the fold? I don't know, but I guess we'll find out. I'm really happy with how it turned at least, and just wait until you see this dragon raid thing.

I'm shooting for a December release, but not sure if manufacturing can hit it yet. Fingers crossed on that.

More on Flash Duel 2nd Edition later. You'll hear about new character abilities, including:

• A way to create an extra soldier on the board
• A power so strong that if you lose with it, you lose two rounds at once
• A way to keep a card secret across rounds
• A fair version of Setsuki