Puzzle Strike Pre-orders!

At long last, Puzzle Strike pre-orders are available here.

Hope you enjoy the new www.sirlingames.com store, by the way. There are still a couple parts that aren't fully implemented, but it's mostly there, so it's time to get rolling. The actual store functionality is fully working, but the game info and Fantasy Strike sections will change pretty soon. Anyway...

It was a long road to be able to manufacture Puzzle Strike at all. I insisted on keeping the form factor of chips, rather than cards, because it really is better to play a game that requires a fair amount of shuffling this way. It also makes it trickier to manufacture. Regardless of chips or cards, it's also tricky to manufacture *any* game in quantities of less than many, many thousands. My first attempt at indie manufacturing had the retail price at about $800. I made a major breakthrough getting it down to $200. But that's still really high, so worked with manufacturing to find ways to bring the price down more and more.

In the end, I was able to get it all the way down to $159, with another $10 off if you pre-order, making it $149. One of the ways I got the price down was to eliminate the absurd amount of labor involved with hand-applying hundreds of thousands of stickers to these chips. A machine could do it, but would require manufacturing in quantities so high that I can't even afford to do it. Instead, I'm using what's actually a kind of cutting-edge technology that allows direct printing to wood. I know it sounds funny that "print-to-wood" is some high-tech thing, but but it actually is kind of new for this type of application. What's cool is that it not only eliminates hand-labor of applying stickers, but it also means the image can be truly edge-to-edge (usually expensive and hard to achieve) and that the image is really part of the chip, rather than a sticker that might peel off.

I love the feel of the solid wood chips (that come in a very nice custom-designed wood box), but I also knew that even with more efficiency, I would not able to get that price down low enough for many. So I also started working on another version with thick chipboard chips (slightly smaller diameter than the wood chips, also using print-to-chipboard rather than stickers) and the standard kind of cardboard box that normal games come in. Most games that use chipboard have about 0.7 inch thickness, while these are thicker at 0.1 inch.

Anyway, I was able to crack the $99 price point there which was a huge breakthrough. It's still uncomfortably high though. In the end, if I follow the standard practices of retail markup, I was not really able to do any better than $99. After thinking long about it, I decided to just have terrible margins on the standard version of Puzzle Strike. I really do believe in the game, so if I can just get it to you one way or another, hopefully the word of mouth will enable a run of thousands later. The price is $74, with $5 off if you pre-order, making it $69. You get almost 350 chips, 4 cloth bags, a full color rulebook, and a custom designed box interior to keep the different types of chips organized for storage.

Artisan Design

It turns out that no matter how you slice it, it's tough to manufacture small runs of high quality parts as an independent guy. Doing my best here! Also, manufacturing too many copies up front is finically disastrous, so the first run is ridiculously small, at only 300 copies of the standard and 100 of the all-wood deluxe version. Another reason to pre-order is so you actually get a copy, without having to wait who-knows-how-long for a second run. Yet another reason is to support a struggling indie so there's enough cash to even *print* Yomi (will also come out this summer if things go well on Puzzle Strike). I don't like to beg, but if there was ever a time, now is it. I prefer that you think of this whole endeavor as something closer to buying special hand-crafted sword from a medieval artisan than buying a the 80 millionth mass-produced copy of Monopoly at Walmart. I have put years of personal care into these games, into design, balance, graphic design, package design, and now the manufacturing. I'd like to think I'm offering something special here.

Canada and Beyond

Thanks to some experience with selling Flash Duel, I'm finally getting a handle on selling to Canada. Flash Duel is now available there, as are pre-orders for Puzzle Strike. (Flash Duel Deluxe will also be available in Canada in about two weeks.) In fact, you technically could order either of those games from anywhere in the world now, but the shipping will be very expensive. In the future, I will actually store some inventory in the UK so that shipping prices are more reasonable, but we aren't quite there yet.

Anyway, I urge you to check out Puzzle Strike. The wild back-and-forth, 4-player nature of it means it a pretty good party game, even with people who don't really consider themselves gamers. Yet the depth is a lot more than it appears at first glance (much moreso than Flash Duel, actually), so "real gamers" should also enjoy it. Because it supports up to 4 players, maybe you can chip in with some friends if you need to. I recommend the wood version. ;)

Here's that link to pre-order either version of Puzzle Strike. Orders will ship as soon as they are manufactured, which I think will be in July. A few might be done by the end of June. If you order, but need to later change your shipping address, no problem just let me know. Thanks for your support!

Meanings, Pictures, and Words

I got around to reading the Watchmen graphic novel, and I was thinking about how well-crafted it is. I also thought about how much it uses double meanings. On one level, super heroes themselves have dual personalities: their normal self and their super-hero self. (Though Alan Moore posits that Rorschach's dual roles switched along the way and the masked version is now the "real" him. Nite Owl has a dream that hints the same thing about himself.)

But actually the double meaning I was really referring to has to do with juxtaposing two scenes such that the dialog from one seems to comment on the situation in the other. In the first few pages, some cops investigating a murder are talking, but every other panel shows what really happened (in the past), so the cops' words have one meaning in the context of talking to each other, but a different meaning in the context of those words juxtaposed with the true events of the murder. Watchmen does this same kind of thing throughout the book. Some might call it cutesy or trying-to-hard, but I think it adds cleverness and a feeling that we, the readers, are in on something.

The TV show Dexter relies heavily on this same concept. Like a super hero, Dexter leads a dual life: one as a crime scene analyst and one as a serial killer. Often, things Dexter says to other characters have two meanings: one that applies to the situation at hand, and another meaning that only we the viewers understand, because it applies to his secret life as a killer. Dexter narrates the show, and this gives him even more opportunity for these double meanings because it allows him to say clever things that simultaneously apply to both of his lives, even when he couldn't believably say them out loud.

One quick example from the animated series Dexter: Early Cuts. Dexter watches a murderous magician's assistant on stage, about to be the subject of the saw-a-woman-in-half trick. Dexter narrates: "The magician may be the one who gets the glory, but if you ask me...Cindy's the one doing the tricks. She's still in one piece...but not for long."

Oh yeah, and if you somehow forgot to watch Season 4 of Dexter, you really, really should see it. I won't even say anything about it, but god damn. (Link to DVD and Blu-ray.)

Anyway, back to Watchmen. Consider this other kind of multiple meaning. It's a story about "what if super heroes really existed, and it was more like real life than super hero stuff?" and yet, the story itself *is* a super hero story. It's the very thing its commenting on. Even more notably, the character Dr. Manhattan's super power (well, among others) is basically the ability to see the rest of the comic book. It's a linear medium, and we experience it much like we experience life: a moment at a time. We can remember the past, but not actually experience it, and we can't see the future. But Dr. Manhattan can see and experience all of it at any time; he can basically read the whole book at once. (This insight has surely been pointed out before, but I stole it from famous game designer Clint Hocking while he was half drunk).

Here's Alan Moore himself talking about Watchmen. A spoiler in there though, so careful:

So I was thinking about all that and looking at how the panels of Watchmen are actually laid out. How different configurations convey that we are looking at quick events in slow motion, or that we are looking at a slow event over a long period of time, or that a very large panel conveys importance and grandeur, and so on. Hard to think about any of that without thinking of Scott McCloud. I hope you've read Understanding Comics by now, which incidentally, is hardly about comics. Also, here is Scott talking about that book, among other things, and he even mentions that he thought it was for other comic artists but really lots of people from other fields like it, like game designers. Ha. I think he and I would get along really well actually (if he had any clue who I was). I'm down with everything he says in this video:

Another fun fact is that I used to have a copy of Understanding Comics signed by McCloud himself. It was also signed by Will Wright. They were both on stage together doing a presentation at GDC, so I got them to sign it. Will Wright said, "Wait, you want me to sign a book that I didn't write?" I said, "Yeah because you're here, and you're Will Wright." This seemed plausible enough for him to go along with it. Unfortunately an ex-girlfriend (not ex at that time) borrowed it, and I never saw it again.

Back to McCloud, you might as well read his comic book that launched Google Chrome, if you haven't. Tufte would be proud. If you don't know who Tufte is, it sounds like you have quite a lot of reading to do. (He is a professor of information design, focusing on the visual display of information.) Also, here's a video of Tufte talking about the interface design of the iphone. It will give you a surface-level understanding of what he's all about:

Because Scott McCloud is so great and I was thinking about the visual design of comics and graphic novels, I also started reading another of his books, Making Comics. Even though it's much more closely targeted at comics than is Understanding Comics, I still see the same sweeping concepts of design there too. For example, early on he talks about the balance between making something CLEAR and making it EXCITING. I have faced the same kind of thing in character art for my card games, in package design, card layout, data presentation, and so on. No matter how much Scott talks about comics, he can't help but talk about universal design concepts. ;)

I checked out McCloud's blog to read more about him thinking about pictures and words and I found these two videos. I can't speak to the validity or invalidity of any of the content in these videos. I mean, they seem pretty interesting and thought-provoking to me at first glance. What I mean to highlight here is the use of pictures to enhance the words. The videos are extremely opposite, one for humanities majors and the other for students of hard science. (Or should I say one for Harvard students and one for MIT students?)

Let's all have empathy:

And now for something more confusing that will hurt your brain:

I think you probably need a rest now if you really read and watched all that stuff, so I'll let you go.

Puzzle Strike Rules

As we get closer to Puzzle Strike being done, I can now show you the rulebook. For some reason, rulebooks for a lot of board games are ridiculously long and poorly formatted, so I did my very best on this one to make it look nice and be as short as possible. It's 8 pages total (longer than the 1-page rules for Yomi and Flash Duel), but only 4 of those pages are actually how to play. The other 4 are just a chip-by-chip FAQ for various rules issues you might encounter later. And the first four pages are only as long as they are because of all the graphics and visual aids.

The rulebook is not 100% finished, but it's pretty close. As of this writing, the link leads to version 4.7, but it will updated a bit more before release. Oh, and if you're having trouble viewing it in your web browser, then right click the link and download it, and view the pdf in Adobe Acrobat Reader, or better yet, in Apple Preview.

You can see the latest chip files, too. They are also at version 4.7 as of this writing, but these links will lead to whatever the latest version is at the time:

www.sirlin.net/ps/chips1
www.sirlin.net/ps/chips2 

I'm targeting a summer release here, and unlike with Flash Duel, I think I'll be able to take pre-orders this time. That is going to be pretty critical on my end actually, to even be able to afford to manufacture it, and kind of critical on your end too if you want to actually get a copy, considering the run is pretty small. More details on pre-ordering (both the regular and all-wood deluxe version) to follow in the next few weeks. Oh, and just maybe it will launch in Canada too. Still working on it, and have made some progress!

If you'd like to playtest a (not yet great) online version, stop by sirlin.net/chat and ask around for some help. For questions or comments, try the boardgamegeek.com page. Don't forget to become a "fan" there, too. ;)

Puzzle Strike Boxes

Hey everyone, I'm really looking forward to this one! What if the Fantasy Strike characters were all kids, and played a puzzle game together...and we simulated that with a card game? Except there are discs like poker chips instead of cards so you can shuffle them really easily? That's Puzzle Strike!

If you're confused, don't worry about all that, and just know that it's based around a really interesting mechanic where "almost losing" gives you more comeback power, so there's a lot of back-and-forth action right up to the end. There are also a lot of close calls where you're actually over-the-limit on how much your "gem pile" can hold before you lose, but as long as you clear enough of them out by the *end* of your turn, you're ok. Here's a prototype of the box for the standard version of Puzzle Strike: 

And here's a  prototype of the DELUXE version, with wooden box and all wooden chips:

 Here's a closeup of the back of the box, which tells you a bit more about the game:

 

Like I said, I'm really excited about this one. While Yomi is more of a tournament game, Puzzle Strike supports 2, 3, or 4 players, has an absurd number of interactions and combos, and the puzzle game mechanics make it pretty unusual and exciting to play. Plus, it has kid characters and a pink box. My testing shows this results in girlfriend-approval.

Unfortunately this one will cost more than my other two games, but I hope you'll bear with me on that. Because it supports up to 4-players, you can chip in with some friends, and I really think the unusual gameplay is worth it, not to mention that you get over 300 discs and four bags to hold them. Stay tuned for more info, or feel free to ask the various chatters in sirlin.net/chat if you're thinking about playtesting it before release.

There's also a Boardgamegeek page for it here, for further discussion.

Flash Duel: Deluxe Unboxing

I forgot to post this video a while ago. It's an excited customer opening his Flash Duel: Deluxe.