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"Casual" and "hardcore" can be a false dichotomy. Which one is World of Warcraft, for example? It's pretty casual friendly, and yet it's not at all casual to the hardcore raiders who spend literally more hours than a full time job at the game. Likewise, Puzzle Strike is pretty casual friendly, having kid characters, a pink box, and fairly easy rules. At the end of this post, I'll talk about the casual side of Puzzle Strike, and the several ways we're really turning up the casual appeal even more in the future, but for now, I want to tell you purely about the hardcore side – about Puzzle Strike as a serious, competitive, tournament game. Make no mistake, one of the missions of the game is:
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For Puzzle Strike to be the best competitive deck-building game there is.
Okay, great mission and all, but how do we accomplish that mission? Let me tell you all that's gone into making that happen, and the challenges we've faced along the way. Here are the criteria that have always been at the heart of the project:-----• Asymmetric design
-----• Player interaction
-----• Quick access to the meat of the game
-----• Strategically interesting dynamics
-----• Exciting moments built into the system
-----• Balance of "viable options during gameplay"
-----• Fairness of the asymmetric choices
Asymmetric design
In Puzzle Strike, you start by choosing a character. Each character has different abilities, allows for different gameplay, and appeals to different player personalities. I've been involved in competitive scenes for games for a long time and the excitement added by having a cast of characters from which to choose is enormous. The two-player version of the base set alone has 55 different character matchups, while the expansion brings that to 210 different matchups. There are so many nuances to knowing how to play all these matchups differently that symmetric games feel flat by comparison. Even apart from the big gameplay advantages of asymmetric games, there's a boost to the player community by having so much to debate and explore. Different characters also allow different players to find their personal playstyle in at least one of the many options.
Though your opinion may differ, to me a symmetric game would be a non-starter here, as in not eligible to even be considered as the best deck-building game for pure competition.
Player interaction
There's a reason to have games with low player interaction. Maybe you'd rather all play a mostly solitaire game without having the "harshness" of directly competing. Even in games with low direct interaction, there can be indirect forms of interaction. That said, this is not a great recipe for a real competitive game. The more player interaction there is, the more opportunity there is to display the kind of skill that should matter in a competitive game. A game with literally zero player interaction would still require skills, of course, and those would probably be the skills of optimization. It's just that a race of several non-interactive players optimizing is a missed opportunity when instead we could have a game of very high interaction, allowing for maneuvers and counter-maneuvers.
I've heard the terms "contested" and "uncontested" skills used, here. Uncontested skills are the kinds your opponent can't do anything about. In a video game like Street Fighter, that would be the part where you perform a difficult combo, for example. Contested skills are the kinds your opponent CAN do something about. In Street Fighter, the example would be getting at just the right range to do your move because your opponent can move his own character to affect that range. While uncontested skills can certainly exist in a good competitive game, the focus really needs to be on constested skills – at least if long-lasting tournament play is the goal.
In Puzzle Strike, the "crash" mechanism builds player interaction into the core of the game. You are trying to fill up the other guy's gem pile full of gems, and you do that by "crashing" (breaking) gems in your own pile and sending them to your opponent. He can "counter-crash" to stop those incoming gems. He might want to because doing so actually removes gems from the system, which slightly lengthens the game. Counter-crashing this way also doesn't cost an "action" so that's another reason to do it.
But there are reasons on the other side, too. Simply accepting those incoming gems and crashing on your own turn would require spending an action, but it would also yield a bit of money to buy better chips. And it would NOT remove gems from the system, so if you're in a good rushdown position, this might be a better option.
The point is that this kind of direct interaction is at the forefront of the game. Also, the red attack chips all have big effects on the game, and the blue defense chips have pretty relevant effects, too. You are often faced with decisions how about to respond to your opponent, and whether you should try to disrupt them, rush them down, or hang back and build your own economy. All the *indirect* interaction that's common in deck-building games is still there, too, of course – the part where your choices of which chips to buy depend on which chips you see your opponents buying. Luckily that's not *all* the interaction though.
Quick access to the meat of the game
In Puzzle Strike you start with your three character chips in your deck, so you can play those starting on the first turn. In some games, you start with basically blank cards and it takes more turns to get into the real meat of the game. This might sound like a small point, but in a tournament game, it's important to use every minute of gameplay to its full extent – or to cut that gameplay. If you want to run several games in series, it's kind of boring if the first few turns of all those games take a while to get things going, so it was a conscious decision to give players character chips they can play right away, even before the buys from the deck-building start to kick in.
Strategically interesting dynamics
Of course a game has to be actually interesting to play on a strategic level if it is to be a long-lasting competitive game. In June 2010, I wrote an article about how difficult it was to arrive at interesting dynamics that weren't degenerate. The short version is that the money system, the purple chips that manipulate the gems in your gem pile, and the delicate balance between rushdown, building econ, delaying the game, and ending the game were tough to get right. It's tough because the game system is interconnected, meaning that just about everything affects everything else. It's easier to balance a game if you have some subsystems that can be adjusted without messing up everything else, but if you do manage to get such a dense system to actually work, it means an even richer strategic playground to play in.
I also was the lead designer of Street Fighter HD Remix, and balancing that game was challenging, too. It was based on a game that had been played heavily in tournaments for 14 years, so changing anything about balance at all is a bit like threading a needle. Also, if you change anything about a character to fix a specific matchup, then it will affect all the other matchups. At first glance, it means the system is so interconnected that it's damn hard to work with. But in Street Fighter, it was actually possible to use a lot of tricks to make that balancing challenge easier. By thinking hard enough, many solutions to balance problems in a matchup could have minimal effects on all the other matchups.
One example is Dhalsim vs. Guile. If you aren't familiar with Street Fighter, Dhalsim has stretchy limbs that reach across the screen, while Guile often likes to stay back and throw his projectile called the Sonic Boom. This was a problem, a boring match. One champion tournament player suggested that barely changing the hitbox on one of Dhalsim's stretchy punches would mean the difference between it getting a clean hit against the Sonic Boom and trading hits. And that one change would really improve the gameplay of the match. Changing that hitbox had very little effect on any other match because it meant changing something on the backside of the character in a place where fighting moves don't usually interact anyway.
I'm not sure if you followed that, but the contrast is that in Puzzle Strike, there are usually no such tricks available to us. Every damn thing affects every other damn thing, which means a lot of work on the development end, but also a lot more ability of the player to affect the game with nuanced play than there would be otherwise.
Exciting moments built into the system
That last section might have sounded a bit dry. Although strategy is very important, there has to be excitement in a competitive game. Now that we understand games more than the olden days, I think we know that when making a competitive game, we want to build exciting moments into the system. I don't mean to force them artificially, but to create a game system that we know is likely to generate exciting moments.
In Puzzle Strike, there's a comeback mechanism that's modelled after the very interesting comeback mechanism in the video game Puzzle Fighter. (I was also lead designer of Puzzle Fighter HD Remix, by the way, so it's no surprise I chose this theme for Puzzle Strike!) Anyway in both games, when you have a lot of gems in your gem pile, you are closer to losing in some sense. If your side fills up to the top, you lose. In another sense, you're doing just fine though. One reason is you have more ammunition to fire back at the other player. And on top of that, both games have a "height bonus" that gives you an advantage for having a lot of gems. That means there's a push-your-luck element there, which also helps as a comeback mechanism. In Puzzle Strike, the height bonus allows you to draw more chips per turn the higher your gem pile is – so when you're close to losing, you can do even bigger combos.
Another conscious design decision to increase the drama of the game is WHEN the win condition is checked. The basic idea is that if the various kinds of gems in your gem pile add up to a total of ten or more, then you lose. But you don't instantly lose; this is checked only at the end of your turn. You often go over that limit, then on your turn manage to save yourself and stay in the game. It gets really exciting when your opponent sends you way, way, way over that limit of ten, and you somehow manage to pull off an amazing turn to throw it all back at him. This isn't an accidentaly exciting moment though – it's there on purpose an example of designing excitement into the game system.
Balance of "viable options during gameplay"
In my article series about balancing multiplayer competitive games I talk about the difference between two different usages of the word "balance". Sometimes people mean balancing the set of options available during gameplay. Both symmetric and asymmetric games have to care about that. If there are several kinds of moves you can make, but all of them basically suck except one kind, then that isn't "balanced" in a sense.
Asymmetric games have to deal with that AND then also deal with making sure the different starting options (in our case, all the characters) are fair against each other. Let's talk about that first kind of balance first, though: the viable options during gameplay, regardless of there even being different characters.
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The problem is "mono-purple". That is, the strategy of ignoring most of the bank and buying only the purple chips that directly affect your gem pile. Playing in this way is kind of short circuiting the game, avoiding big swaths of it. That could be fine depending on how powerful such a strategy is. So is it powerful? Well, yes and no. Some characters in the second edition of Puzzle Strike tended dangerously close to mono-purple power, while others used more diverse strats. Then we released the Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack to address that. The situation was much improved, as more diverse strategies were viable than ever.
In developing the expansion, though, we were often faced with too small of a design space. We make an interesting character, but then the game system's reward for playing in the boring mono-purple way is a bit too much unless we take specific steps to fight that with various extra clauses on lots of chips that punish such a strategy. It also left us little design space in which to create new puzzle chips. (Those are the ones in the bank that change every game.) If a puzzle chip is too weak, people will ignore it and just buy purples – but purples are so strong that when we turn up the power of puzzle chips to compete, they often have to be so strong as to be game-breaking if they are tuned just a hair wrong. What we need is more breathing room here, more space to create chips that are of a reasonable power level compared to purple chips.
In another article, I talked about how I looked toward Starcraft for an answer to something, and their model of late-game units like Carriers that could smash early game defense sparked me to create uncounter-crashable 4-gems in Puzzle Strike. So again, I looked to Starcraft to answer our troubles here. Our trouble is that a player who buys only purples is trying to end the game as soon as possible; he is doing a six pool zergling rush, or something – but if the opponent holds off this rush, he is no better position. In Starcraft, the rushing player would have a big economic disadvantage, so there is more of a tradeoff in whether to rush. What makes matters worse is that in Puzzle Strike, it's not really even analogous to the rushing player having zerglings. Those are early game units that fade in effectiveness later. (Yeah, yeah they can be upgraded in Starcraft, but that's beside the point.) Anyway, all those purple chips in Puzzle Strike are just as good late as early, so it's like rushing for no economic disadvantage with hydralisks or mutalisks or something that you can win the game with later anyway.
This maneuver needs an economic disadvantage for the system to make strategic sense – and now it does.
The Combine chip (the basic purple chip that combines two smaller gems into one bigger one) now costs $1 of in-game money each time you play it. If you buy and play only this one chip over and over, you are rushing to end the game, but if your opponent buys just one or two to hold you off, he will be able to survive and extend the game. At that point, you will have spent several turns buying low cost chips, while his economy was not really affected, so he will have better tech going into the mid-game.
Along with this change, we also adjusted several other chips to allow for rushdown to still be possible, just in a way that requires actually using your character chips and puzzle chips from the bank. Overall, in high-level tournament play, there's a more diverse set of viable strategies now. Rushing, econ, disruption, and engine-building strats all coexist.
Fairness of the asymmetric choices
Once the game system works, we need to have a set of fair characters – that is, no character can be too good or too weak: Too good is a much worse problem because that invalidates all other characters; too weak is just minorly unfortunate because no one will play that character. After years of iteration based on tournament results, I think we're in good spot now. Twenty different characters(!) that all seem to have their uses in high level play, without any particular one of them dominating too much.
I could go on forever about the balancing process of these characters, but instead I'd rather talk about the goal of even balancing them in the first place. It seems that most game publishers are interested in releasing more and more and more content, like expansions every three months. New, new, new. I'm not interested in that at all, and it actually runs counter to the goal of creating a highly-polished competitive game. Instead of adding more and more, we are zeroing in on a better and better game. Each iteration has been more polished than the last, better gameplay dynamics, and better balance. If we simply add more and more, yeah, that appeals to some players, but it doesn't actually produce something legitimately great. It means instead of fixing whatever issues older chips / cards have, we would be waiting for them to rotate out of tournament play. We'd be forsaking those earlier sets and letting them lie with whatever issues tournament play had uncovered.
I'd rather give you all the very best versions of my games that we're able to produce, at that given moment. And with years of development effort now spent on making Puzzle Strike Third Edition (plus the Shadows expansion!) the best competitive game it can be, I can truthfully say that this is the best version we've produced so far, by a big margin. I look forward to seeing the competitive scene grow, and for years of Puzzle Striking to come.
You can also play Puzzle Strike at FantasyStrike.com for free, by the way. Some players have logged THOUSANDS of games of Puzzle Strike, and there are tournaments all the time, in addition to casual play. Thanks to the entire community of players who have all contributed to refining the game into its current awesome state.
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While it's nice to know that the game holds up at that level of play for expert tournament players, not everyone even cares about that. I mean, is it fun in the first place? How does it fare with more than two players?
Free-For-All Mode: Second Edition
In Puzzle Strike Second Edition, the four-player mode has player elimination. If your gem pile fills up, you're out of the game and the other players continue. Also, you can't choose who you crash to; you must always crash to the player to your left. ("Crash" means break gems in your own gem pile and send them to another player's gem pile.)
There's a reason the second edition worked this way and a reason why the third edition doesn't. Regarding player elimination, while it's not a desirable feature really, it's better than a system with "lame duck" gameplay. That term refers to a player who has no possible way to win a game, but who is somehow still in the game. For example, in a deck-bulding game in which you collect victory points and where the game ends when the stack of victory point cards is empty, it's possible for one player to be far enough behind that he cannot possibly get enough VP to win, even if he got all the remaining VP cards. Whenever you have a lame-duck player, you are inviting kingmaker. In other words, if you have a player who can't possibly win anymore, you are inviting the problem of that player making moves that will affect which *other* player will win. And beyond that, it's just a stupid feeling to be in a lame-duck situation.
Player elimination solves that problem. In Puzzle Strike Second Edition, if you're not out yet, you can still win. In order to reduce the downtime after you're out, the final crash that puts you over the top "overflows" and can possibly knock out other players at the same time. And besides that, the game is usually pretty fast anyway.
Then there's the other point: in Puzzle Strike Second Edition you can crash only to the left, not to anyone you want. If you could crash to anyone you want, the optimal strategy is both obvious and stupid: You should form a pre-game alliance with someone, and agree to gang up on the other players to eliminate them one by one, then face off with your "partner". Any free-for-all game with targeted attacks faces this problem, and I think any thoughtful design has to do something to prevent or minimize it. Hence your inability to choose your target in the second edition.
Great, so what's the problem? The problem is that even though player elimination and forced target selection solve real problems, a lot of people just don't like those things. Also, even though the game usually ends quickly after someone is eliminated, there are unfortunately times where it can drag on much too long.
Free-For-All Mode: Third Edition
With the Third Edition (and the Shadows expansion), I wanted to get rid of player elimination, but somehow not introduce the lame-duck problem and somehow avoid the problem of pre-game alliances, too. This was actually a tough nut to crack, and I think it took over a year to really figure out.
Now, the game ends at the same time for everyone whenever anyone's gem pile fills up. At that point, the winner is the player with the lowest gem pile. (If there's a tie, there's a tie-breaking procedure where everyone takes another turn.) Also, you can crash gems to any player you want, and you can even counter-crash to "save" other players from losing. The dynamics that result from this are non-obvious, somewhat bizarre, and quite interesting.
First, you can't really even make a pre-game alliance with someone. If you both decide to double-team another player, whichever player in this alliance has a higher gem pile total will realize he shouldn't allow that killing blow to happen, or he'll just lose. In fact, ANY time a player is about to have his or her gem pile filled to the top, that player ALWAYS has another "friend" in the game. Whichever other player doesn't have the lowest gem pile really wants to save the poor player who is about to cause the game to end. Who you're "friends" with necessarily shifts over the course of the game, depending on how poised you are to win when someone else causes the end-game condition.
I urge you to give it a try. I will say that the feedback from playtesters on this mode was pretty consistent. Almost every one of them said, "This mode sounds terrible", then they played, then they said "This is great, I'm never playing the player elimination mode again." Ha! Perhaps it would have been better marketing-wise to have a mode that played terribly but *sounded* like it would be good. I will settle for the other way around though!
2v2 Team Battle Mode
This mode is pretty self-explanatory. Have you played Two-Headed Giant in Magic: The Gathering? It's pretty much like that – and it's nice to have someone on your side when you're trying to have a good time.
Custom Clockwork Mode
In Flash Duel: Second Edition, I put in a mode where you can draft your own character by mixing and matching chips from different characters. People really liked that, so it's in the new Puzzle Strike as well. Enjoy!
Panic Time
You can never get 100% of the people to agree on anything, ever. That is, until this rule. It is the first time in human history that everyone agreed that a thing was good.
The "Panic Time" rule simulates in a puzzle game when time is running out and the pieces are falling faster. It exists to end games that are going too long. When stacks of chips in the bank run out, players have to ante 2-gems instead of 1-gems. If the game goes a bit longer, Panic Time turns to Danger Time in which they must ante 3-gems. If it goes a bit longer than that, Deadly Time activates where they must ante 4-gems – which are *un-countercrashable* in Puzzle Strike!
95% of the reason this rule exists is for new players, and 5% is for experts. Sometimes new players struggle to build a good enough deck to finish each other off. (Often they buy too many money chips because that is a good strategy in other deck-building games, but not in Puzzle Strike.) To help address that, the rulebook now gives basic advice on how to play effectively. But more than that, the Panic Time rule will kick in and help you end the game if your deck is getting too bloated to do the job effectively.
When good players play, Panic Time rarely kicks in – like I said, it's mostly for beginners – but when it does kick in during expert play, the experts are thankful. Once in a while, two experts have the opposite problem as the beginners. They each manage to build such efficient and amazing decks that they stay exactly equal and struggle to finish one another off. While this is rare, it's really stupid when it happens, and players will even skip playing the mega-powerful Master Puzzler chip in this situation because all the good chips it could get them are already gone from the bank. When experts do manage to reach this kind of deadlock (and again, that's not often), an end-the-game force from Panic Time is welcome.
Components
The Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack came with extra components: playmats and screens to hide your chips on the table. Even though these things aren't necessary, they sure help. And just as importantly, they look cool. It's just more fun when there's some extra visual appeal to a game.
The screens each teach a different game rule using amusing 8-bit character art, and if you don't like holding a bunch of chips in your hand, they offer an alternative:
The playmats are now boards in Puzzle Strike Third Edition and Puzzle Strike Shadows:
A lot of reviews said that after playing with those components, they couldn't imagine playing the game without them. Okay, fine – they come right in the box now! And also, the box is bigger so there's even more space to hold the extra components.
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If any of this sounds good to you – the intense competitive game, or the new multiplayer modes and extra components – get in on the Kickstarter project for the Puzzle Strike Shadows expansion as well as the Puzzle Strike Third Edition base set.
Thanks!
Sirlin
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