Yomi 2-packs Available

Grave & Jaina 2-packThe five different 2-packs of Yomi decks are now available for pre-order. Each pair of decks is $25, and they ship in January along with the complete first edition, and the second printing of Puzzle Strike. I stress that the complete set is a better deal, so let's talk about price, starting at the beginning.

The usual way of making a card game like Yomi is to make it collectable. Yes, the dirty word. If it were collectable, I'd be selling packs of random cards, including rare cards, and causing you to spend a ton more in order to create a full, "real" deck. Constructed decks in Magic: the Gathering cost over $300 on average because this collectability aspect inflates the price and gets in the way of you actually playing the game. I know the makers of CCGs apologize by saying it's fun to play with gimped decks as you go through the expensive collection process, but really it's a hell of a lot more fun to have a full-strength, tournament quality deck from the beginning. I like picking Protoss in Starcraft, not a gimped Protoss until I buy all the units (which come to me in random packs--still waiting on that Void Ray). The same goes here, it's great to get the complete game without the garbage.

Grave & Jaina 2-pack, from the backSo anyway, the more normal way to sell the complete set of Yomi would be to not sell it at all! To instead, sell only random packs, so that the entire set of 10 decks could come out to around $3000. Or heck, let's cut the price all the way down to $1000. You wouldn't get a rulebook, playamts (those are worth $10+ bucks each), or the beautiful packaging of the 10 deck-boxes and the big black box it all comes in. You wouldn't get that stuff because you'd really get the cards from the secondary market where they are selling you just the (uncoated, CCG quality) cards themselves, without even real packaging. Somehow, the complete Yomi set isn't $3000 or $1000 though, it's $100. So if you bought that, and threw both the awesome playmats in the trash, along with the nice box, the expanded rules, and the life counters, you'd be paying $10 per deck. Or like $8 if you don't throw the playmats in the trash. (I stress again, those mats are pretty awesome).

The 2-packs get you two different Yomi decks for a total of $25. Yes, $25 is less than $100 and the cheaper price-of-entry is certainly a reason you might want one. But if you chip in with a friend or something, the complete set is the better value. And either way, this game is so absurdly cheaper than the CCG I *could* have made it, that I hope that doesn't go unnoticed. I hope you sing the praises that this game costs $100 for the *entire thing* and not $3000 with psychological tricks of rares in random packs that has somehow become acceptable.

So here you go, the complete first edition is here, and the five 2-packs are here. The 2-packs let you try out the game for cheaper than the full set, if you're not sure about it. Of course, you also try it out for free in the early online version (www.fantasystrike.com/dev). All flavors of Yomi, as well as the second printing of Puzzle Strike, ship in January.

Japanese Players Enjoying SF HD Remix

Here's a video of Japanese Street Fighter players (including Otochun and Aniken) playing SF HD Remix. Skip to about 1:05:00 or so for when they finally get going.

They are having such a good time that it makes even more fun to watch. They all laugh (in happiness I think!) when Vega's wall dive doesn't knock down, and when someone lands a fake slide into throw with Bison. They also get excited that Ken can now do his super as a reversal.

With Daigo and Tokido both saying good things about the game, Muteki, Yuu Vega, and Jodim all playing on XBLA, and videos like this one, it seems they are pretty into it. Aniken said this (to Masa) in the comment thread about an HD Remix event there:

> Masa
I also think it would be interesting and fun to have HD at the game center
but we have to face reality, there's nothing we can do about it!

For Ken, Remix Ryu and Sagat are very difficult opponents, it's fun!♪
Looking forward to seeing you at Sunday's tourney!

Too bad the game isn't actually released in Japan, it seems like it would do really well.

Puzzle Strike and Dominion

Sometimes people ask me about the differences between Puzzle Strike and Dominion, so I'll put it all in one place for reference. Even though Dominion inspired Puzzle Strike, the games are quite different. Puzzle Strike fixes what, in my opinion, are numerous problems with Dominion. Now, before you get all bent out of shape, you are free to enjoy and love Dominion. I'm not stopping you or telling you that you didn't have fun playing it. I'm just saying there are several things I consider problems and that I thought I could turn all those things around with improvements on many fronts.

Form Factor

Both games involve a lot of shuffling, and I do mean a lot. Some people are really bad at shuffling and that slows the game down quite a bit. Even those who are good at it can feel bogged down. Changing the form factor to chips that you shake up in a bag makes this easier and faster. Some people tell me this is the most important difference between the two games, but I disagree. I think it's actually the least important difference of anything in this post.

Characters (aka Variable Player Powers)

Playing a symmetric game just feels flat and boring after having experienced so many asymmetric games. Street Fighter with only one character? Starcraft with only one race? Magic: the Gathering where we all start with the same deck? Yes, I'm aware that *during* a game, things can diverge even in a symmetric game, but really that's miles away from a true asymmetric experience. If a given pool of cards has a best strategy, then everyone should be going for that strategy. With different characters (who each have different gameplay), everyone has different strategies even within the same pool of chips.

It's also worth noting that there are more unique character abilities in Puzzle Strike than there are different chips in the bank! Or Kingdom cards in a Dominion set! The point is, there are a lot of them and they greatly expand the replayability. In a 2-player match, there are 45 different possible character matchups (or 55 if you count mirror matches). And 210 matchups in a 4-player game. Multiply that by the millions of starting conditions from the bank chips, and it's a crazy amount of gamespace to explore.

By contrast, Dominion has 0 characters (meaning no variable player powers) and zero different character matchups. Or you could say 1 character and 1 matchup, I guess. Now, balancing 45 (or 210) matchups is a hell of a lot harder than balancing 1 matchup, but we had months of tournaments to do so and I think the balance turned out great. Exploring the dozens of character matchups is one of the greatest features of the game.

Faster Start

In Puzzle Strike, you start with three character chips in your deck, while in Dominion, you start with three cards that do literally nothing during gameplay. I like getting to the fun stuff faster, and starting with 3 actions instead of 3 blanks really helps.

Interactivity!

Puzzle Strike increases the interactivity a ton over

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Yomi and Puzzle Strike (2nd Printing) Pre-orders

At long last, you can finally pre-order Yomi and the 2nd printing of Puzzle Strike. Both the games will be available in January. This is the first release ever of Yomi after 6 years of development. I already released Puzzle Strike, but this new version will finally allow the game to be available in large quantities and at a lower price (with cheaper shipping in the US, also).

I made a couple videos that show the components of the games. I don't go into the awesomeness of the gameplay in these videos, so you'll just have to take my word that they both have pretty awesome and balanced gameplay. Or you can play the early-in-development online versions for free at fantasystrike.com/dev and see for yourself. (Players there will be happy to teach you, I'm sure.)

Here's a video showing what's in the Yomi box:

And here's one showing what's inside the Puzzle Strike box:

This is the culmination of years of work of design, balancing, tournament playtesting, art creation, packaging design, and exacting manufacturing preparation. When I saw the finished product and how well it turned out, I was supposed to feel excited, but really I just felt relief. Now it's your turn to get excited though.

I hope you enjoy Yomi and Puzzle Strike.

Football Helmet Clown Shoes Guy

I was doing some consulting on a small game that I can't really talk about, but there's a lot of customization in the game. I was discussing with a friend (the mysterious Mr. G. Phantome) how we were going to balance this thing. He imagined a future player who works really hard to make his guy into a samurai. He has the samurai helmet and armor pieces, and a decent plasma sword and everything. And then he meets...

Football Helmet Clown Shoes Robot. The terror of the metagame, this guy destroys the samurai guy. Why? Because even though the samurai looks cool, he basically sucks. The mishmash, discordant eyesore of Football Helmet Clown Shoes guy is just way more powerful. We imagined that the forums are full of outraged players, complaining about this, but they don't really grasp the game system. They keep calling for the football helmet to be nerfed, but they don't understand that the clown shoes are what really powers the build, in fact, it's really just the left shoe.

A new player starts playing and asks what pieces he should be looking for. The experienced players tell him "Dude, you want Football Helmet and Clown Shoes, for sure." The sad new guy asks if he has any other choice. "Caveman is barely viable," says the expert. "Flower hands can win too, but loses to everything else so good luck with that."

The point of all this is just that a customizeable system can have aesthetics at odds with balance or power. You have to look out that for the problem that actual experience the player will have with the game is encountering absurdly bad-looking characters. Imagine a fighting game, for example, where one guy is wearing some ugly safari outfit and the other has a huge hat that covers half his character and some enormous robe that covers the rest, so you can hardly tell who anyone even is. Yeah it's fun to customize, but some careful art direction is in order.

Magic: the Gathering

Later, for reasons unrelated to the above, I was scrolling through some images of Magic: the Gathering cards. By chance, I happend to come across the card Donate. I asked Mr. G. Phantome if he knew about how Donate (a seemingly terrible card that gives the opponent one of your cards) was actually part of one of the most powerful and dominant decks ever. He said he was not aware. So then I showed him Illusions of Grandeur, the other part of the combo. I told him to just LOOK at the cards, not even really read what they do, but

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