Board Game Design Day: Puzzle Strike: A Design Diary

[Music] okay so today I'm gonna tell you about puzzle strike I'm David's urlan by the way president of sir loom games and here is puzzle strike which is a tabletop game I designed and it's it's kind of an unusual a little bit of a weird game it's sort of like the video game puzzle fighter and it's sort of like the card game Dominion and geez oh yeah okay so it's sort of like puzzle fighter and sort of like Dominion are any of you familiar with the video game puzzle fighter by chance anyone yeah a lot of you okay great so I want to tell you my thoughts on these two games and why I would ever put them together and what happens when you do and what some of my design goals were and a little bit about how the strategy of the game works and then some of the design problems that I had along the way so let's start with puzzle fighter so in this video game on your side of the screen gems will fall

and you put them together into big gems and then you break them and send them to the other side and when you fill up the other side of the screen the opponent side then you you win and that is a pretty standard thing it works the same way in other puzzle games like puzzle bobble or Tetris but in my opinion puzzle fighter really stands head and shoulders above all the other puzzle games when it comes to being a competitive game and I want to touch on some of the reasons why so one of their innovations maybe the main one are those circular gems you can see on the left side of the screen and when a red circle gem touches other red gems that is what breaks them and sends them to the other side so it's not like a match-three game where like you get three reds it would automatically break you're actually able to build up as big of a red gem as you want and you can break that when you want by touching that circle gem to it so what that does is it allows you to control the timing of your attacks as

well as how big they are that's on the offense side on the defense side when gems fall on the opponent's side of the screen they don't fall randomly they fall in a very predictable pattern and it allows your opponent to build their side in a certain way so that they don't get too wrecked by by your offense is that so those two things together that you can control the timing of your attacks and how big they are and that defense really counts and matters are sort of the basic elements that you would hope to have in a strategy game and that's good but that's not why this game is so memorable and so notable the thing that's so unusual about it is actually its comeback mechanic comeback mechanics are common and we see them in many games but I haven't seen anything like how it works in this game anywhere else so why is that well when when your side of the screen is almost full that means that you've almost lost but it also is when you're at your most powerful and that's a crazy situation to

be in because when you're almost full you're actually you're like right on the edge of winning and losing at the same time so why it why is that well partly because when your side is full you have all the ammo you know you have all these gems you could potentially send the other side and you can realistically send them because of the way the circular gems work you can kind of hide them here and there on your side of the screen so you have a lot of ammo you can realistically use it and there's another rule called the height bonus so what that says is that when gems are higher up on the screen when you break them they will send more to the opponent so in other words when you are about to lose you have the most ammo and every shell of that ammo that you fire does more damage and the effect is so powerful that it's a it's like a greed test it's like how greedy do you want to get right up close to losing just so you can be really powerful and and send a ton to the opponent there's another fun rule where if you send just

a ton to the opponent more than enough to fill their side of the screen it doesn't drop on them instantly and end the game instead it puts a number over their side of the screen and they have one more turn that they can use to to try to counteract that to break gems on their side to nullify what's going to fall and take them together what all this means that you can control your offense that there is pretty good defense that that being so close to winning and losing looks the same is that a common dynamic that happens is like I almost beat you and you know fill you up really close to the top and then you're really powerful and you almost do it to me and then I more than enough to fill your side but you have that one more turn to stay back in and and you know you dig yourself out and there's this back and forth back and forth the edge of the knife kind of gameplay where it's at any moment someone's gonna lose and it's so intense so that's it's very exciting and I

played this game a ton I've won a tournament in it in Chicago once I talked to another GDC attendee here many years ago about about some of these nuances and someone overheard me and said hey you seem like you know what you're talking about with game design and gave me a game design internship and that was my first job in the game industry was because I said some things about puzzle fighter I later went on to be lead designer of Street Fighter HD remix and puzzle fighter HD remix with Capcom so I have a long history with this game but I don't have a long history or any history with Dominion or any connection to it it's just a game out there in the world and some people said hey sterling you should really check out this card game so I checked it out and I didn't really like it what I did like is that you build your deck as you play and I think that was a natural evolution of card games it's the kind of thing I was working on too so I really

like that but what I didn't really like is that it's too much multiplayer solitaire it's too much like I built my deck and you build your deck and we kind of just do our things and and we compare scores at the end and that just isn't for me and so my knee-jerk reaction was like well what if it was a little more like puzzle fighter and it wasn't that I thought the ideas of Dominion combined with the ideas of Puzzle Fighter would be just the ultimate best game in the world it was more that was actually just my knee-jerk reaction I said that sort of thing all the time years earlier I worked on a third-person shooter and it was like a third-person shooter that used puzzle fighter mechanics I also worked on a shmup like a top-down shooter like Raiden DX and again now let's get some back and forth from puzzle fighter in there now neither of those games ended up being made but you can check out the game twinkle star sprites if you want to see a little bit of Woodham the direction I was going in I even had a

friend who's working on a dancing rhythm game and I was like what about a dancing rhythm game that's like puzzle fighter so I was just so I was just trying to sneak it into anything just all the time so it's no it's no surprise I was like okay there's not a lot of interaction here well it's like puzzle fighter but then I started thinking okay what would that actually be like like maybe this lines up and then I was thinking about what I consider a good competitive game or some of the elements that I want so I want a game if it's gonna be a competitive game to be highly interactive I want to interact with the opponent so that I can outplay the opponent have the opportunity to do that to predict what they're gonna do to react what they're going to do direct what they did so I think there really needs to be as much interaction as possible for it to be skill testing I also want hype exciting moments built into the game not something that's accidentally there but all that stuff I told you about puzzle fighter it's not an accident that it's so exciting it

comes directly from the rule design I personally want games that are asymmetric that means the kind where I choose a character and you choose a different character and we each have different strengths and weaknesses and now that's a that's a matchup that has a certain dynamic of how it's played and we can switch characters and have a different matchup that that's really interesting and really compelling to me so I knew I wanted that and of course nobody would want a slow boring start to their game but it goes doubly so if you're making a competitive game the kind would ever be actually played in a competition like if you're doing multiple rounds of Swiss or if there's ever gonna be commentary on it or something in streams every turn of the game really needs to pull its weight and be there for a reason so you have to be careful about having kind of simi starts to your game all the time so let me tell you a little bit about how puzzle strike the tabletop game works and then and we can refer to these various points this

is a bit of a confusing diagram but that is bear with me so in puzzle strike you start with now well each player has a zone called the gem pile and that starts empty and every turn you automatically will get one gem into your gem pile and you lose the game if you ever end with ten gems in your gem file so if nobody didn't anything then after ten terms the game would end there's a universal mechanic in the game called combine which is the upper left purple chip there what that's showing is you can combine two of your one gems into a bigger two gem there's another Universal mechanic with the purple chip and the upper right which is a crash gem and what that's showing is that you can crash a two gem to break it apart into two ones and send those to the opponent's side the diagram in the the bottom middle is just showing that if you crash a three jam it sends three to the opponent so this this concept of

bundling up gems into a big gem and crashing all of them to the opponent that is offense so what I mean by offense is that I said if if nobody does anything the game would end after ten turns but if I keep sending my gems to you I'm reducing the number of turns I'm trying to end a game quickly and fill your site up so that's offense now defense is another mechanic called counter crashing and how that works let's let's take the example that I have five gems in my gem pile and you have five and yours if I crash one gem I'm going down to four I'm sending one to you and you're gonna go up to six but if you counter crash it's saying hold on a minute before that one gem arrives in my opponent's gem pile they're gonna crash one of their own gems and send it not at me but at the incoming gem so it's like I'm firing a missile and they're shooting it down and those gems that meet in the air are removed from the system

so that's defense because it's slowing the game down adding turns to the game in this example here my opponent didn't go from five to six they actually went from five to four they got farther away from that loose condition so that's that's often sin defense and since I'm covering those I think it's important to mention kind of a third leg of the triangle which is economy and when I think of these these three concepts I think of Starcraft which is depicted in this cake so in StarCraft offense is like I build units and send them to your base right away a defense is something like if if the opponent is a Terran they might build bunkers which is static defense it doesn't move around but it's very effective against early attackers but what do you do against someone who is playing defensive that there's really no point in attacking them early because

that's you're sort of wasting your early units and you also don't need to play defensively yourself because they're not threatening you you can sort of do whatever you want so what's best to do in StarCraft just to invest in your economy and by doing that a little bit later in the game you can have so much money you can kind of do anything so economy beats defense and in in the course of a game of Starcraft there's a dance between offense defense and economy where you're kind of going back and forth between them depending on what the opponent does and that same exact sort of thing is going on in the tabletop game puzzle strike so the first item on my list was I wanted interaction with the opponent to be an important thing and so here's a way to make that the central mechanic of the game I also mentioned that I wanted hype exciting moments to not be accidental but to be designed into this and they're in puzzle strike for really the same reasons that they're in puzzle fighter when your gem pile is almost

full that means you have a whole bunch of ammo that you can potentially fire off and there's also a mechanic in the tabletop game called the height bonus doesn't work exactly the same way as the is the videogame but it's the same concept in spirit when your gem pile is almost full you can draw more cards per turn so there's that same kind of bait to be really greedy to build up a lot of gems in your side because that's gonna allow you to draw a lot of cards and maybe do a really big combo even though it's putting you close to losing the next point I said it was important to me is asymmetric games games where I play one character and you play another and it's really beyond the scope of this lecture for me to explain why that's so compelling but just in case someone needs assist at least a little bit of intuition I wanted to give the example of a Street Fighter match where on the right side we have Zangief who's a big slow wrestler and he needs to get close to you to throw you in order to do damage and Dulcie him the other

character he has limbs that can extend across the screen and he could spit fire across the screen too so he wants to keep the opponent away and these two characters have opposite goals one wants to get close and one wants to keep away that in most versions of Street Fighter that's a pretty interesting matchup and the dynamics of that matchup are different than all the other matchups so so that's cool but if you imagine another hypothetical Street Fighter game that only had one character like a like a super character that had all of the moves you would remove this dynamic from the game I mean it would be removed because there would be no such thing as one as I need to get close since you can do as much damage close anyway and there's no such thing as keeping away so you lose something by by having a symmetric game I'm gonna come back to that point but I wanted to mention the the last of my four points mentioned earlier again I will cover it more closely here that's the slow boring

start thing so in Dominion you start with these cards here the yellow ones are money and you use those to buy more cards in your deck okay fair enough the green ones here's a here's a closer look so the card on the on the right it's basically blank at the end of the game you do get points for it but when you actually play the game it doesn't do anything and that's the opposite of what I'm looking for in a competitive game I want to get used to the action right away quickly it also makes me think of StarCraft again since in the old days you started with four workers and Starcraft later on they upped it to six and nowadays it's actually twelve workers you start the game with what that does is jumpstart the game and get it to the important decisions quicker so I want to give you important decisions quickly and that ties in with me also wanting you to have different characters what a character is is like a starting condition that's different for me from you so I it was just a natural thing to

replace those those cards with okay well they're chips and puzzle strike but I'm going to say the word cards anyway but to replace them with with character cards so this is a character right here and right away you're doing interesting things with this character this diagram was actually made by my play testers and what it's showing as the concepts I've just told you about rushdown or offense defense and economy and it's a map of all the characters and puzzle strike and where they fit on that continuum it just happens to work out really well that you have an extreme rushdown character an extreme defense character and many others that are in between and that this is not a map of where you're completely locked into playing a certain way it's just a push in one direction or the or another and I was saying before how I just really like there to be different characters in general and just about any game but in this particular style of game like Dominion or Puzzle strike it's especially important I think in this style of game there's a common pool of

cards that I'm building my deck from and you're building your deck from that same pool and if we both look at this pool there's probably just a best deck that can be made and it's the probably the best deck that for me and for you and that's just if it's frustrating that that every time we play we would be confronted with this issue that what I want to do is kind of what you want to do that can be mitigated if I can interact with you a lot but it's mitigated even more if I get a push in one direction and you get a push in a different right from the start and then we're looking at the bank cards in a completely different way so now that you kind of know how it works I can tell you some of the problems I encountered along the way and the first problem was that defense was too good so when I say defense I mean that counter crash mechanic that's where I breakage em in my pile I'm gonna send it to you and you say hold on a moment you're gonna crash a gem in your pile and and nullify the

incoming gem from the very first time we ever play tested this it worked exactly as it was supposed to in the early and mid-game and that's when you need it to work because if it didn't work then you know you'd be dead by the time you got to the late game so that's fine the problem is what happens when players use this same mechanic and lean on it heavily in the late game and what we found is that it was slow and hard to kill people and could be stalemate at times and it was just generally frustrating that it wasn't anything like what I was going for you know it started with this story of how edge of the knife back and forth it is and it wasn't really coming true because of this late-game problem and then I thought okay well what can we do about this it's not too hard to change some nuances of how that rule works and make it a little less powerful but when we made it even the tiniest bit less powerful it failed to work during the early and mid game and then everything

was just all rushed down so now I'm stuck because I need to make it less powerful but I can't make it any less powerful at all there's no setting that actually does what's supposed to do and when I get stuck I thought about Starcraft why is this not a problem in StarCraft so in the early game you can build bunkers that's your defense in the mid game you could build more bunkers and add some siege tanks add some turrets get a very solid defense but why is it that star crap does not have this problem of being like boring and stale median taking a long time it usually doesn't the answer is because they have very powerful late-game units and my favorite is the carriers from the Protoss race and so you build a fleet of carriers you can just kind of take out anything and with that in mind it really helped me realize what we needed to do in puzzle strike you need to be able to build up to something that just smashes through defense and the main thing that you build in the game are the gems combining them from one gem to to gem to three gem

to four gem which is the biggest so we should make the four gem big and fancy and special and look different and have a special rule that says when you crash a four gem at someone it is uncountable it simply ignores the defense rule the rest of the game and as soon as I did that it worked immediately and it went back to edge of your seat back and forth back and forth so that was a success and it's in the shipped game the second problem I had though is that offense was too good okay so to even explain what I mean by this I've got to tell you about something called mono purple so mono purple it every time you play puzzle strike you're building a deck you're building your deck from a set of cards that always contains these purple ones and then there's a bunch of other non purple ones that change every time so if you are playing in a mono purple way what it means is you kind of ignore the rest of

the game and you only just build these build a deck of these it's kind of a degenerate strategy and if you talk to some people they will say that the first version of puzzle strike was was broken and was just all mono purple that's all you should do that is that is not true but I'll tell you what it's true there are real problems one problem is that if a new player uses this kind of naive strategy it takes quite a bit to beat it which is kind of uncomfortable you know you'd hope that a simple strategy wouldn't be too hard to beat but you really do kind of have to know what you're doing to beat it so that's a negative but what about the experts if you look at games between the best players is that all they're doing and the answer is no it's back to this you saw Dex on every point of this spectrum and it looked pretty healthy the problem is that when they were using a rush down strategy a lot of the times that meant

they were going mono purple you know not when they're doing econ or defense but I said okay that that's not good because that means like a third or almost a third of our strategy space is this thing where you ignore most of the game like we can't have that the game had already shipped at this point and my players I disagreed and said they actually really liked how it was but I complained more and more and said I really didn't like that you know it's too hard for beginners and like should experts really be doing that a third of the time and we were trying to make an expansion which had new characters and new cards to build your deck from and my player said ok we'll just be really smart about it when we make the new characters and we make new cards we have it in mind the whole time that we want to kind of counteract this tendency for some people to just buy the purple chips so that's what we did who worked on that and here's how that went so making cards for this game I don't know exactly why but it is the hardest

design thing I've ever encountered on any game that I've worked on or consulted on and it's it's something about how the systems are so intertwined that like if you do any card that gives money or actions or whatever it has ripple effects that have all sorts of unintended consequences and it's just really hard to make anything at all I mean I can deal with that but just saying it's hard but there's a second thing that is absolutely back-breaking it's much worse than that first thing so I would come up with an idea for a new car to the expansion and players with my play testers who knew what they were doing they'd say oh you you can't have that nobody would put that card in their deck they would just mono purple instead and I would shake my fist and I'd buff it and then give him a new version they'd say still the mono purple thing and then buff it again and they'd say okay now you'll use it but it's actually broken like you could just instantly win the game with this and and it happened

again and again and again and again and if finally one time it was just too much it was like you know the straw that broke the camel's back and I I flipped out and I upended the tea-table and I said to the tester you will never tell me again that I can't have a thing because of this mono purple business like we can't go on like this we have this tiny thin film of design space where it's powerful enough to be better than the purple tips but not broken and we can't go on like that like the whole endeavor of let's address this piece by piece band-aid by band aid on it on each card has failed this utterly failed and we need a system-wide change they were skeptical because they kind of already liked the game but they said you know what's the change and I said I have no idea so please help and we got the whole the whole testing community to help they all submitted ideas and this went on for weeks and maybe months and I kind of

felt like Christopher Columbus saying you know there's gonna be this new world but then after a while people are they're skeptical like is there ever really gonna be land everyone involved kind of knew that a lot of these ideas sucked you know even though there's proposing them they're just trying their best to come up with some way that that addresses our problem the design space being too small we tested a whole bunch of ideas often they were too complicated or simple but didn't do what they were supposed to do and this after being stuck on us so long I was like okay well what would Starcraft do so let's think about our problem and in in my game compared to Starcraft and Starcraft you might build some zerglings and send them at the opponent's base and puzzle strike you might put some purple chips in your deck and combine Cabaye and crash kind of similar in starcraft if they counter you then you lose your zerglings but in puzzle strike if they counter you you actually get to keep all of your purple

chips because they will cycle back that's like the the in mechanic's is that the same cars are gonna cycle back to your hand later okay that's that's some cause for pause in Starcraft in order to do an effective rush you have to cut back on your economy so if they counter you they're gonna be ahead in economy and then later on that's gonna be a big deal and puzzle strike you don't really get behind in your economy when you try for this rush down you get a little bit behind in the number of actions per turn you can use but you don't really get behind an economy and that is very questionable and then on top of all that and in StarCraft even if you could keep your zerglings they're not really that relevant in the late game cuz they're not that powerful but in puzzle strike the same purple ships are really great in the late game so when you frame it like that it's completely crazy and totally out of whack it's it's it would be like you could attempt a rush down with almost no risk even if you're countered and you're you're happy with the results so

something's wrong there you need to be behind economically okay so let's look at the chips crash gem you you break a gem it sends it to the opponent also you get you get a resource you get a dollar the idea being that there's it's called gem power actually there's power inside the gem and you're releasing it by by crashing it but that's really suspicious you know that isn't that the problem can we delete that turns out we can't that's it's too long a story but it messes everything up if you delete that okay fine what about the other purple chip though so this one is when you put two two gems together I was thinking okay the matically it's the opposite so what if it took energy to put the gems together and then you release the energy when you crash it so maybe you have to pay a resource to do this and so that's that's ematic but what about the dynamics if I choose to do combine combined crash against you I'm starting to rush you down and if that cost me two dollars because of the two combines but

you could defend without spending that you're getting two dollars ahead economically and then I might rush you down really hard and do it again combined combined crash the next turn and now I'm four dollars behind that sounds like the kind of check and balance we need to wear defense can actually counter offense so here's what the change would look like it's just adding a minus $1 to it and I came up with this this idea and made this graphic and then I went to post it on the forums you know the forums that we had gone on for weeks or months trying to come up with an idea there was an HTML error that when I posted it and accidentally took up the whole screen of the forums it was just like the forum's was just this one enormous chip and the players are like wow it's so big it's so dramatic yeah I think I think I might've got some points for that so I think a lot of the players at that point realized that was it that was exactly the solution we needed there were some naysayers and

they said you can't just put a extra - one dollar on this thing it's gonna you need to redo the whole game you need to rebalance everything around it and I thought that was bogus so we tested a little bit and it turns out that about 80 or 85 percent of the cards they worked better not worse with that and it makes sense because when you take offense defense in economy and one of them was kind of like misaligned out of whack and you make him make sense to each other relatively all the work that we had done it just kind of worked better then the extra 15 percent of cards something about them like may have relied on on money especially much and so we had to adjust those but is easy to pick them out easy to identify them and fix them so we did and shipped this and as a new addition and it totally worked so the summary of all this is that puzzle strike it has a structure that's similar to to Dominion but all the dynamics are really modeled after puzzle strike and then every time I ever got

into trouble design wise I look to Starcraft for the answer so Starcraft is kind of the the secret unsung hero of the game and that's my story thank you you [Applause]