Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack, Part 2

Last time I talked about the playmats and screens in the Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack. Now for the new gameplay. There are 3 new chips, and 5 copies of each of those chips. There are also 15 blank chips, by the way.

The three new chips were pretty carefully chosen. First, the flagship chip, and the easiest one to explain:

Custom Combo is hilarious and awesome, and I hope it's self-explanatory. Do all the actions you want! You might recognize the name from the feature of Street Fighter Alpha 2 that lets you string a whole bunch of moves together really quickly.

In Puzzle Strike, you are usually action-constrained. That is, you usually have more actions available than you can actually play. It's much more true here than in Dominion becuase you start with three character chips in your deck in Puzzle Strike, so right off the bat you wish you could do it all. The hard decisions come from NOT being able to do it all, which means you have to choose which actions you'll play. But for the low, low cost of 7, you don't have to decide, you can just play it all! This chip is an orgasm of fun.

The other two chips can have a pretty big impact on how you play Puzzle Strike. The "purple chips" are the heart of the game, and you'll always be buying at least some of them (vaguely analgous to buying VP in Dominion, except more interactive). Anyway, with certain characters and certain banks, it can be a bit too hard to beat people who buy almost nothing but those purple chips. I'll talk more about that in my third post where we cover the character chips, but for now, two new chips open up the strategy space. Let's start with Combinatorics:

This is a pretty direct assault on the purple-only player, as his strategy will let you draw a ton of chips. Meanwhile, if you are building an engine (playing lots of brown chips per turn) or disruption (lots of red chips), then you'll be able to keep your Combinatorics on the table longer. So you're rewarded for playing some of the more interesting strategies while your opponent is punished for playing too one-dimensionally.

The third new chip is Dashing Strike:

Dashing Strike is sort of a magical thing with several subtle effects. In general, red chips (the attack chips) are good for disrupting your opponent, so that you pull ahead in the long run. Even when you use red chips, you still need to keep yourself from losing though. You still need a way to keep your pile height from getting critically high. Dashing Strike is a RED chip that helps you with that. Several other red chips chain into it because it has a red banner, and Dashing Strike itself chains into brown banner chips. This means having reds and browns in your deck helps, and having fewer purples than usual is ok, because Dashing Strike keeps your pile height down a bit.

There's more to it than that though. Dashing Strike increases an opponent's pile height in a way that isn't counter-crashable. This has a possibly counter-intuitive effect: it results in there being more counter-crashing. When opponents are filling up your pile in a way you can't react to with a counter-crash, it forces you to do regular crashes a bit more than you would. And those regular crashes are probably going to get counter-crashed. Note that Dashing Strike isn't adding any gems to the system (it removes one gem and adds one gem), and the counter-crashing is actually removing gems. It's also making it harder for people to build uncounterable 4-gems.

It's actually a very complicated system, so maybe it's best to just lay out the bottom line of the total effect of the last paragraph: the game goes a bit longer and it gives a wider variety of strategies a chance to materialize. You basically have more breathing room to try more things, while at the same time you can make decks with fewer purples and more reds/browns. Maybe you see why I said Dashing Strike is magical and has so many nuances. It's been a big hit with playtesters, so I hope you all enjoy it, too.

So that's it for the three new chips. Two chips that open up the strategy space and one that gives you what you always wanted. Next time, we'll talk about the changes to the character chips.

Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack, Part 1

The Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack is coming, probably in October. I haven't had much time to write about design stuff these days, so I figure at least I can write about the design of my own things, so you can get a sense of what goes into development, and how we decide things. And in this case, why the product was made at all.

I'll do this in three posts. First, in this post, I'll tell you about the non-gameplay parts of the upgrade pack. In the second post I'll go over the three new chips, and in the third post I'll tell you about some revisions to the character chips. Those revisions are actually the biggest reason there even is an Upgrade Pack, but we'll get to that later. Note that the Upgrade Pack is not a full expansion to Puzzle Strike. That is also in the works and should come out next year, but the point here is to enhance the experience of the base game. Ok, so first the non-gameplay stuff: playmats and "screens."

Playmats

A lot of people asked for playmats, it was actually the #1 request from players. Playmats are fun and cool, and the Yomi playmats look amazing, so it's a no-brainer to make these. It's difficult on the manufacturing side because they are expensive to do at the quality of Yomi's mats, but it's worth it I think.

The reason people want them is to help mark where to put the chips for your "gem pile." That's your stack of chips that represents your side of the screen filling up in Puzzle Fighter or Tetris or whatever. This gets to the design question of what these mats should actually look like. The Yomi mats intentionally do not separate the game zones. They just have beautiful art with some life counters to one side. For Puzzle Strike though, I think people really want the mats to mark the various game zones to help keep track of what's going on. So here you go:

The mats mark your gem pile, your discard pile, and your "ongoing" zone, for chips like Midori's Dragon Form that stay out on the table. The mats also have a reminder of the turn phases (Ante, Action, Buy, Cleanup) and the very, very helpful section that tells you how many chips you draw each turn at each possible size of your gem pile. Having that right in front of you, especially for new players, is a blessing.

For the background image, I thought it helped the overall feel of the game if we show a mockup of what the video game screen would sort of look like. So you can see a character's stage back there, and the UI elements that separate the zones are styled like they would be in a video game. There's even a place for your "next piece" to fall from the top. (That's just for fun!) Special thanks to Boardgamegeek.com member evilgordo whose mockups laid the groundwork for the best way to present the different game zones on the playmats.

Puzzle Strike is a 4-player game, so there are 4 playmats in the upgrade pack.

Screens

Only a few people asked for this next thing, but I figured hey, why not! Sometimes in Puzzle Strike, you can draw kind of a lot of chips. Some people have asked for a way to hold chips other than in their hands. Usually this isn't even a big deal because you pretty much throw down your money chips and play most of your hand to the table, but maybe you have small hands, or maybe you drew a whole lot of chips this turn.

A few people suggested Scrabble racks as a way to hold chips. It turns out to be a better idea in your head than in practice though. Fiddling around with getting chips onto a rack, and just the right number of them is just too much trouble. It's a lot faster and easier if you can throw down your chips on the table behind a barricade of some sort that keeps them secret. You may have seen a similar "screen" as this in the game Revolution by Steve Jackson Games.

So the function of the screen is to let you put your chips on the table while still keeping them secret. But what about the look of it? It could really be anything, so I thought it was a great opportunity to inject some fun and flavor. There are four different screens, each one is a different color. The fronts have a nice texture and the Puzzle Strike logo, while the backs each illustrate a different game rule in a silly 8-bit way.(!)

I was sort of thinking about Scott McCloud when making these. He wrote the awesome book Understanding Comics (which in my opinion is not even really about comics). He also created this comic book for Google when they launched Google Chrome. Anyway, showing a diagram or pictoral situation is a helpful way to teach because it's more interesting than reading some dreary text. These screens illustrate the rule of blue shields being reactions to red fists, as well as three different situations involving crashing and counter-crashing. Those are the key concepts of the game, after all.

For the 8-bit art of these four scenes, I was able to get the amazing Conor "BT" Town. He's painted entire houses, so doing these little scenes was probably just a trifle for him, but his skill really comes through and they turned out great. Seriously though special thanks to BT, who is a member of the fighting game community and a talented 8-bit artist.

Next time we'll cover the new gameplay in the Upgrade Pack, and the time after that we'll cover the rebalanced characters. Whether to fix balance problems or not has a been a big topic lately, so stay tuned.

Double-Sided MTG Cards

The Magic: the Gathering world is flipping out over the new double-sided card mechanic.

I admire that they are trying to do something new and splashy, but this just seems so full of problems. You can't shuffle a deck that has a card with no back, so you'll have to either use opaque sleeves and actually take the card out of the sleeve during gameplay when you need to flip it, or you'll have to use the "checklist" card in place of the real card when it's in a hidden zone like your hand or deck. The checklist card looks like a joke to me, I thought it was maybe April Fools when someone linked it.

It's also pretty problematic in draft if you open a pack and decide to take a double sided card. Everyone can see that, and also everyone now has reason to scrutinize you as you look through your possible draft picks, just to look for this.

There's a lot of confusing interactions too. Imagine your double-sided guy interacting with this, this, or this. And in case you're wondering how double-sided cards work when things copy them, here's a quick explanation for you:

If a double-faced card becomes a copy of something else, the copied values will overwrite its characteristics for as long as the copy effect lasts, even if the double-faced card transforms. If a double-faced card that's copying something else is instructed to transform, it will do so, because the physical card has two faces, but its characteristics will still be those of whatever it's copying. This is true even if the object it's copying is one face of a double-faced card.

I almost wonder if these cards will end up banned, all of them, for some sort of logistics reason. I think a LOT of what MTG has been doing in the last couple years is really great, so this stands out as pretty wonky. It looks like the community of MTG players--people completely used to their game constantly changing--are even saying that this is just too much.

The theme and flavor of the new set looks great, at least.

What is "A Love Letter to the Community?"

Saying that SF3:3s would be better if it was better balanced has resulted in a lot of personal attacks and hatred directed toward me. Not about the stated idea, but about me personally. That's sad to see after all the support I've given fighting games over the years, from helping running tournaments to working on the games themselves. Not real encouraging, you know. There's also a really strange claim that I only want 3s to be better because I don't like the game. As hard as it is to wrap your mind around that, let's think about it.

Street Fighter Alpha2

What would a love letter to the players of Street Alpha2 look like? I really like this game. Is the reason I like it because of the balance? No, it's because of the gameplay system. Regarding the balance, there's a top tier of ken, ryu, chun li, rose and they're pretty solid all around. I mean maaaaaybe chun li's Custom Combo does a bit too much damage (or maybe it's ok), but these top characters don't really need fixing. Zangief and Sakura are just below them, within striking distance, and they happen to have an unusually interesting match against each other. Probably don't want to mess with that. It is kind of annoying that Sakura's main combo is ducking short, short, stand short, dragon punch and that it overlaps with her near-useless triple hop move that gets you killed. Probably should make that a non-overlapping input, but the fun and balance are both ok here.

And then there's Birdie. Birdie is terrible and literally the worst character in the game, worse than Dan. Yes, really. If you write a love letter to me as a fan of the game, would it involve giving me the known-bad quantity of Birdie, a character who I can't really reasonably pick, or would this "love letter" give me what I liked about the game originally AND a pickable Birdie? Well, because I love the game, I would love to have a new choice in it, so of course I'd rather have reasonable Birdie instead of worthless Birdie. I played Birdie a bit in SF Alpha1, even, and he was stronger there but not even that good. It's not to hard to adjust him back up to at least be half-decent.

Adon is another example. He doesn't have much going for him, and just making his stand roundhouse half a decent hitbox and frame stats would be at least something. One of the very few good things he has is a good low strong, and interestingly that was actually *redrawn* and made worse in SFA2 Gold. So uh, that is not a love letter. A love letter would be fixing up Birdie, Adon, and a few other things with some of the worst characters. As I outlined above, there isn't really a problem with the first and second tiers.

Puzzle Fighter

I love Puzzle Fighter! Is the reason I love it because of

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Starcraft as a Spectator Sport

I enjoyed this article mostly because it explains there's at least *somewhere* in the US where interest in a mental sport overtook the interest in a physical sport--in a place usually known for caring about physical sports, no less. A bar.

The article also mentions "information asymmetry" (something we usually refer to as double-blind info around here) is a big part of the game's entertainment. That means each players knows something that the other doesn't. I very much agree that that's a source of great entertainment and you can see that exact same concept in my games Kongai and Yomi. And the reason I hit upon using that as a design tool is that it happens in fighting games too, it's just that the time-scale of the double-blind decisions is much shorter--just a fraction of a second. But that uncertainty of often having to make your move when you aren't exactly sure what the other guy did at just that moment is where a lot of the excitement of fighting games come from. StarCraft's double blind moments are much more prolonged, so there's longer to think about them and build suspense. Does he know the other guy is amassing a huge force just outside his base? When will he realize it??

That said, fighting games are practically made for spectating. You can see all the action on one screen (a wonderful property!), the matches are fast, fortunes change, and comebacks happen. Not having to cut from screen to screen like you do in a FPS or RTS makes for a smooth spectating experience. Furthermore, it's easy to "read" what's going on (a guy punched another guy several times and his lifebar went down) compared to all the unseen effects going on in WoW Arenas or Guild Wars. I've tried to spectate several type of games, but fighting games and RTS games have been the most watchable to me.

Maybe we'll see both genres (and other mental games, too) rise in prominence as spectator activities.