board game night: Puzzle Strike

[quarrel]

We got our gaming friend a copy of Puzzle Strike Shadows for the holidays. He'd expressed interest in the original Puzzle Strike earlier. We weren't sure if he'd picked up a copy for himself yet but were reasonably sure he didn't have this expansion — and since the expansion is playable by itself, it was win-win.

Puzzle Strike is one of many customizable "deck"-building games inspired by Dominion. I put "deck" in quotes because this game replaces the cards with cardboard discs, though the shuffling, drawing, and cycling mechanics are still there. The game is one of David Sirlin's designs. Sirlin is famous for being cocksure and opinionated about, well, pretty much everything, but mostly game design. Over the years, he's refined a rigid set of characteristics he believes make for a good competitive game:

No slippery slope.

You shouldn't become less able to do things as you get closer to losing. In fact, a little bit of the opposite effect is often an improvement.

Asymetric sides.

Sirlin is big on giving players several options for minor additional powers so the game isn't the same identical matchup every time.

No memorization.

Competitive games test plenty of things. How well you can remember everything that happened so far shouldn't be one of them.

No collectibility.

David zealously opposes anything that inserts any delay between the initial purchase of a competitive game and access to 100% of its pieces and rules, such as random component distribution and mandatory leveling.

"Yomi".

A Japanese idiom meaning "reading the opponent's mind". David is a major fan of games that revolve around intuiting what move your opponent is about to make and pre-plotting a countermove.

No early elimination.

The game ends for everyone at the same time, so no one has to sit around doing nothing while everyone else finishes.

Puzzle Strike doesn't have much yomi, but the rest is there in spades. It's an impressive improvement over Dominion's basic design in only a few major changes.

The biggest difference is that rather than buying Victory Points into your deck, you accumulate damage (effectively negative VPs) on a separate track. The game ends when someone hits 10, with the least injured player winning. The other big change is the ability to send damage to other players. Using discs instead of cards isn't a mechanical change but it is satisfying, it gives the game a distinctive feel, and the mixing bag solves the problem of shuffling a ten-card deck.

The game handles multiple players with no special rules. We played with four. I came in last. My big failing was neglecting a key strategy of bunching my wound points together so I could send out several in a single action. I don't have an excuse for that one. There were two big clues that that strategy was important, and I ignored both. I also got tripped up by the fact that the same numeric chips that mark damage on your hit track are used as currency in your hand, and the two uses are disjoint.