Sirlin on Game Design, Ep 10: Flash Duel

We discuss the development of the revised printing of Flash Duel. Flash Duel is a simple and fast card game that in high level play ended up being bogged down by lengthy calculations. We talk about the design changes that address this as well as at least one tricky balance puzzle we faced.

At the time of this post, Flash Duel is on kickstarter right now. Please support it if you can.

Special guest garcia1000 discusses how to prepare for a tournament.

Hosts: David Sirlin, Matt "Aphotix" DeMasi & Sean "MrGPhantome" Washington

Yomi Rook and DeGrey decks now available

The Rook & DeGrey decks are now available, both the physical and print-and-play version. You can get them here.

Rook the stone golem is the organizer of the Fantasy Strike tournament. He's a powerful grappler, which means he has lots of throws including his devastating (but difficult to land) four Ace super throw.

Normally in Yomi, when your opponent blocks your normal attack, you get to draw a card. But Rook's defense mastery prevents that, so you might find yourself low on cards against him and wanting to block. That plays right into his plan of throwing you though. Rook is also special in all the game in that he's the only character with no dodges at all. He also has the most hit points in the game, and he's just so powerful that he doesn't even need dodges!

While Rook runs the Fantasy Strike tournament, it was DeGrey's idea in the first place. He's a long-time friend of Rook and crusader for truth and justice. Gameplay-wise, DeGrey is Rook's opposite in that he has the craziest Dodge around: a super dodge called Ghost Riposte that returns to his hand if he's not thrown. DeGrey also hits hard—really hard—and his Pilebunker is one of the most solid hits in the game. It requires a good read to land though.

You can also play these characters in the web version at www.fantasystrike.com and the iOS version too, which is now on both iPad and iPhone. The physical versions ship worldwide from www.sirlingames.com.

Come to Fantasy Strike expo this June in San Francisco for a Yomi tournament, too!

Fantasy Strike Expo 2015

Announcement!

The third Fantasy Strike Expo will take place June 5th-7th 2015 near the San Francisco airport. It's a tournament series and casual play event showcasing the Fantasy Strike tabletop games. Come compete, watch, and make new friends with other Fantasy Strikers. There's also a chance to try out Codex, still in development. Last year's event was really fun so don't miss out.

Registration link: www.fantasystrike.com/fsx

Location: Marriot Courtyard San Francisco Airport.
1050 Bayhill Drive, San Bruno, California 94066 USA.

Discuss Fantasy Strike Expo on the forums.

Tournaments

All tournaments will take place Saturday and Sunday June 6th and 7th. Tournament finals will take place on Sunday, June 7th.

Tabletop tournaments:

• Yomi (2nd Edition)
• Pandante (2nd Edition, kickstarter link here)
• Flash Duel (revised printing, also at the kickstarter link above)

Codex

The Codex customizable card game will be playable the whole time, but especially on Friday. Codex is an RTS-themed card game that gives you a lot more flexibility of builds during a game than most other card games. Think of it like Warcraft 3 in card form.

Flowchart

Flowchart is a fighting card game that's nothing like Yomi, originally designed by Tim Fowers and adapted by David Sirlin. Try out a beta form at Fantasy Strike Expo.

Who should come?

Really anyone who enjoys these games should come, if possible. And it's not just about the games either, but rather the community of enthusiasts who create a great atmosphere.

Note that this is not just a local event. It's located right next to the San Francisco International Airport to make traveling as easy as possible. There's even a free shuttle from the airport to the hotel. Last year we had several from Canada as well as Kasumi who came all the way from Japan!

One reason to come would be if you're actually good at any of these games. You don't want to let some shmoe win do you? That said, all skill levels are welcome. Attending a tournament is usually quite a learning experience regardless of your skill or lack of it. Even if you don't enter any tournaments at all, plenty of casual play is encouraged as well. It's fun to be in an environment with like-minded people and to make new friends, so you might be interested in attending for the social aspects alone.

3-Day Passes

Keep in mind that three day passes are only available for early registration this year, which runs until April 30th. After that, only single day passes are available. Sign up now.

Upgraded Components for Pandante and Flash Duel Kickstarter

I’m going to make a change to the Pandante stretch goals that benefits all our backers.

Pandante is such a great game that I want to put out the best version I possibly can components-wise, no matter what funding level we reach. Even if we only raise a portion of what’s needed to fully fund this print run, I’m willing to pay for the component upgrades that I think Pandante and Flash Duel should have. I’m hoping that eventually positive word of mouth about the games will make that a worthwhile choice.

Golden Panda Coin. This coin is so hype! When you feel it in your hands, it has a coolness factor that makes you want to win it in the game. I didn’t know what the quality of the coin would be when we first started out, but now that I have physical samples and I can see how great it is, we just have to have it even if it costs me a lot.

Also, it's huge. One player thought it should be called a gold medal, rather than a coin!

• Pandante deluxe will have the 2” metal coin, no stretch goal for it, you just get it.
• The $25 Pandante expansion will also have the same metal coin.

There’s also Flash Duel. I’m pretty happy about the adjustments to the core system we’ve done. Removing the last-hits mechanic makes it simpler to explain and more focused on the back and forth part of the game that you’d hope was the emphasis anyway. Balance is in a better state now too. I want to follow that up with another component upgrade:

Flash Duel will contain 21 character standups, rather than pawns. No stretch goal, you just get it.

And there’s more. I want to thank all our kickstarter backers, I’m so grateful for their support. So I want to include the 3 extra Pandante casino cards for all kickstarter backers (not part of the retail products) at all levels. That means if you get the deluxe version, standard version, or the expansion, you’ll get these 3 extra casino cards. The extra cards are a bit crazier than the rest of the casinos, so I bet you’ll enjoy that.

Your Help

Would you like to help spread the joy of Pandante? I know a lot of you have the print-and-play version—hundreds of people downloaded it for free last weekend—so if you happen to play it, post your thoughts somewhere before the campaign ends. It could be on Boardgamegeek, or anywhere else. Let us know if you do!

Here’s some great examples so far:

• A video review of Pandante
• A review on BGG of Pandante
• A review on Reddit of Pandante

Also, can you tweet some funny images (or clever text) about Pandas to #LyingPandas or #Pandante? I actually don’t know if that would help at all, but it would be fun and I was looking forward to laughing at some of them. ;)

Summary

Here’s the bottom line summary:

• Pandante deluxe will have the 2” metal Panda Coin
• Pandante expansion will have it too
• Flash Duel will have 21 character standups rather than pawns
• All pledge levels (of $25 or more) get the 3 extra Pandante casino cards, for backers only (not part of the retail product later)
• You post your thoughts on the game somewhere, or tweet to #LyingPandas or #Pandante

Thanks for your support everyone! (Pandante and Flash Duel kickstarter link.)

Pandante Casino Cards, Part 2

Pandante has a fun new feature called "casino cards" which I covered before, here. Casino cards let you visit a new casino in the Pandalands each gambit, each changing the rules in some way.

Here's three of them:

Bunny Hop Hotel. At this casino, you hop right to the action. There's only one betting phase, rather than three. You see all the community cards, bet, do abilities, then showdown. It's a nice change of pace in that it's so fast!

Hard Times Mill. It really feels like hard times at the Hard Times Mill. At other casinos, it's common to see bets on hands as high as rainbow straight or four of a kind. Yet here, it's exciting if someone bets even three of a kind. Pandas come over and watch if they even hear about a hand like that. A full house is some kind of epic, crazy thing here. Gameplay-wise, this lets you explore the lower ranked hands a lot more. Flavor-wise, being so starved to make a decent hand makes you appreciate how good you have it at other casinos.

Quince's Palace. Quince is the Chief Magistrate of Flagstone, known for his magnanimous straight talking. (Note: he actually relies on lies and deception to the point that you can't even tell what is real and what is not. In Yomi, he can play two combat cards, one of which is an illusion.) At Quince's Palace, there are TWO rows of community cards (are they both real?). There are so many possibilities for hands here that it's kind of mind-bending at times. Sometimes you can't even tell what your opponents are going for, which captures essence of Quince really well.

These casino cards and more are are included in the new Pandante 2nd Edition standard and deluxe sets. They are also in the expansion, for those who already have chips and a Pandante deck. Check it out on kickstarter now.

Codex-themed Pandante Deck

Codex is an upcoming customizable (not collectable) card game that does things very differently from the rest of the genre. It's themed after RTS video games such as Starcraft and Warcraft 3. You command heroes who each have their own spells and you build tech buildings that produce units. You carry a lot of versatility into each game because the cards in your codex are analogous to all the things a given race could build in an RTS. You choose which subset you want in your current game by building your deck as the game progresses. Players don't know exactly what other players are building toward, so there's a natural form of fog of war involved.

Here's the game's logo:

Although Codex has been in development on and off for over 10 years, it's not quite finished yet. You can get a sneak peak at some of the art though because there's a limited edition alternate art version of Pandante's deck on kickstarter right now. It lets you play Pandante with a Codex-themed deck!

Here's what normal Pandante cards look like:

And here's the Codex-themed version:

Also, here's the Joker from each deck:

This special deck is for two of the higher pledge tiers on the Pandante kickstarter (you get Pandante deluxe with or without professional-grade play poker chips, the new revised printing of Flash Duel, and this special Codex-themed Pandante deck). By pledging for this collector's item, you're also supporting the development of Codex and helping us reach stretch goals for Pandante and Flash Duel, too. Here's where you can pledge.

Stay tuned for another preview of this deck showing the Panda Champions / Codex Heroes.

Making the Golden Panda Coin

Winning by lying is the highest honor in Pandante (on kickstarter now). When you do that in poker, it’s usually best to keep your bluff secret, but in Pandante we want to showcase that exciting moment. We want you to show everyone that you got away with it and gloat about it.

In the original version of Pandante, winning by lying gave you one of six Panda Lord cards that are powerups for the next gambit (the next hand). In this new version of Pandante, I wanted to make it even simpler: rather than picking through 6 cards with a bunch of words on them, you should win one satisfying, iconic thing. (The Panda Lords are now things you can start the game with, giving each player a special power if you want to do that.)

What satisfying, iconic thing should you get for winning by lying? What should it do and what should it look like? My first idea was that it should be a big, shiny metal Panda Coin that you can spend to draw 5 cards and discard 5 cards. That’s very powerful, but you deserve it. Also, you’ll have to use it or lose it because if someone else wins by lying while you have the coin, they’ll steal it from you.

Playtesting showed that this worked just fine. People liked it, and liked that they immediately understood the reward for winning by lying. So then started the long task of actually making a metal coin. I wanted it to be simple to match the graphic design style of the rest of Pandante, so the first thing that came to mind was a Panda on one side and the bamboo logo with the game name and company name on the back.

I wanted something similar to the Panda on the box’s front cover. Here was the first mockup:

 But it should really show the Panda holding 5 cards rather than 6, given what the coin does. Also, it needs to be graphically simplified a little to work well as a metal carving. Here was the first version of that:

One way to make a metal coin is to have exactly two heights on the face. To do that, think of the graphics as pure black and white (with no other shades) and the black areas are raised and the white areas are recessed.

You can make a nicer looking coin if you do it another way though. Rather than each “pixel” of coin being on or off, you can carve a 3D shape into it. Vertical curves that let you round the edge of a face and show more nuance. To accomplish this, I did my own “artist’s rendering” of what the metal coin should look like with various curves and different heights:

That looks pretty good, but I cheated here. The dark background behind the panda and behind the logo isn’t what a real coin will look like. A metal coin is made of just one kind of material, so it can’t have such different colors. I want there to be as much contrast as possible though, so what can we do?

We can use different textures. By making the background a rough texture and the figure a smooth texture, when light bounces off the coin it will be easier to separate the figure from the background. Here’s my artist’s rendering of that:

Looking really good now! The next step is to turn this into a 3D model that the coin manufacturers can use:

Then the final step is a physical prototype. Here it is:

This coin is huge: 2 inches in diameter! It has to be to fit in Panda paws though.
Here’s a video of it moving so you can see the contours in the light:

This awesome coin will be included in the new Pandante Deluxe on kickstarter if we unlock that stretch goal. It will also be in the $25 expansion if we reach that goal. Pledge now and let’s do it! (kickstarter link.)

Sirlin on Game Design, Ep 9: Pandante

We discuss the development of Pandante's expansion and 2nd edition. All three of us were involved in this development and playtesting. The core game has simplified and streamlined rules and we go through each one and explain why we made these changes. We also cover all the new (optional) content and what it adds to the game.

At the time of this post, Pandante is on kickstarter right now. Please support it if you can.

Special guest garcia1000 discusses "chat techs" and trolling rhetoric.

Hosts: David Sirlin, Matt "Aphotix" DeMasi & Sean "MrGPhantome" Washington