Puzzle Strike Fans Are Rallying

How does a board game not get lost in the shuffle these days? Pretty hard considering how many hundreds come out every year. Last year, more board games were successfully funded on kickstarter than the total number of board games that the traditional industry releases every year! Boardgamenews.com is an unending flood of press releases. Some companies release expansions to their games faster than I can make the box art for my games. I'm less into expansions anyway and more into creating the perfect polished jewel of a game...though that's not exactly what keeps a game in the news.

The Puzzle Strike fans are working together make sure that one of the best deckbuilders around (the best there is for competitive play?) gets some badly needed publicity. Check out that thread and pitch in if you like. Right now they are trying to address how strangely few ratings the game has on boardgamegeek and how few reviews it has on Amazon. There's certainly more ideas in that thread, but those were the first and simplest things the fans chose to address, which makes sense. If you have the strategy guide, just showing that around would do wonders too I bet.

On my end, we're working on an all new UI for the online version of Puzzle Strike and Yomi, as well as the first launch of Flash Duel online. There's a kind of ridiculous amount of stuff in the update, so it's taking a while. (The current online version is at fantasystrike.com/ps by the way, as of this writing it's before the updated UI.)  There's also the iOS version of Yomi in the works, and if that does well in the market, you can expect a free update to it that would add more 1p content, and someday an iOS version of Puzzle Strike, too. Meanwhile Game Salute is working on expanding the international distribution (of the tabletop version) of the game so that game stores in other countries have an easier time stocking it.

The focus in the Puzzle Strike publicity task force thread is thankfully not on what I should be doing (I'm spread faaaaar too thin as it is and doing my best to get to keep development going), but rather what fans can do right now to grow the community. I know from the fighting game world that a passionate group of fans for a game can really raise the profile of their community and get more and more people interested. It's exciting that we have that kind of passion! Feel free to join in that thread and give your own ideas or complete the "missions" they created so far.

I need a cheesy outro...Strike on!

Year of the Snake and Chess 2

To celebrate the Chinese new year and the upcoming year of the snake, here's a beatiful new piece from Chess 2. It's the Jungle Queen!

 

Chess 2 is asymmetric with 6 different armies (including the original Classic army). It has a new win condition for crossing the midline of the board with your king (in addition to your grandpa's checkmates). There's also a double-blind bidding mechanic called dueling that makes memorized openings even more impractical, and emphasizes adaptation and reading the opponent's tendencies.

It's designed so it's pretty easy to play with a regular Chess set (only a few changes to remember for each army), but it's pretty cool to have custom sculpts that really express what the new pieces are about. At some unpredictable time in the future, I'll share more sculpts of special pieces from the game with you!

Visit to France

I just got back from Paris for some design consulting. I can't say much about that, but I'll tell you mostly about two other things there: a political protest march and Disneyland Paris.

The Protest March

I was walking around the streets of Paris with a friend and I saw one street blocked off for seemingly no reason. A single policewoman stood guard. I didn't think much of it until a bit later when we encountered some sort of parade. It seemed to be a protest by the young socialist party. At the front and rear of this small march were a few police cars. There were also three policemen (including one old man with gray hair) in full riot gear. The protesters had various signs and a float (you know, like in a parade) and they all seemed pretty happy. Music was playing. One sign mentioned worker's rights while another was rainbow colored (gay rights, it seemed). It was a fun novelty to see the little event. I wondered how the police were so ready for it though. Did the protesters apply for some kind of permit to march? And if they were turned down, wouldn't they march anyway? I don't really know how it works.

Then I looked at other various shops and landmarks, and accidentally encountered the parade a couple more times. Paris is designed around a big circle, so the city blocks are triangular (or trapezoidal) rather than rectangular, so that can kind of throw you off. It was no big deal though, there were plenty of other ways to go so it's not like my path was really blocked. (Not like the dreaded Mainstreet Electrical Parade in (USA) DisneyLand. That thing will block you like nothing else.)

I encountered more and more police. Police vehicles along the sides of streets. Vehicles across an entire intersection, blocking all of it. It looked like some kind of command center. There were 20 or 30 policemen with full riot gear here (wearing armor and padding). It seemed like an excessive number, but I guess they wanted to be prepared. That said, there were also more and more protesters. And then more and more police. Then I had encountered over 100 police. It was at this point that I realized how many policemen were really on the streets of Paris: ALL OF THEM. I imagined some sort of Batman villain who staged all this in order to commit crimes in another part of the city.

At this point, I needed to cross the bridge over the Seine river, but there was no way there other than through all the protesters. I had little choice but to be swept up with them. There were so many of them...more and more and more of them. All of Paris seemed consumed by them at this point.

The vibe was not like you might imagine a "protest" to be. I didn't see any anger from anyone. Loud pop music blared, people cheered and marched while holding their signs, floats rolled by, there was even a marching band in there somewhere. They weren't so much protesting as *celebrating*.

By now, I realized what they were marching for.

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Puzzle Strike: Strategy Game of the Year

Puzzle Strike won the huge honor of Strategy Game of the Year from boardgamestrategies.com.

"What game published in 2012 has demonstrated the most layers of strategy to peel back, and how enjoyable/stimulating is it to peel back those layers?"

"...one game this year stands out well above the others. Our 2012 Strategy Game of the Year: Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition."

"In our view, Puzzle Strike is the apex of that form." (The deck-building game form.)

Incredible! Thanks to the Puzzle Strike community for sticking with the game and digging so deep into it. And in a couple months, the online version will be getting a spiffy graphical upgrade, too!

Also in the news today, Flash Duel was on wired.com's list of best tabletop games of 2012. (Their full review here.)

Apple and Gaming

I'd like to call attention this article about the upcoming Apple TV, but first some background information.

iPhone

When Apple released the iPhone, it was a major disruption to the gaming market...but it took a while people to realize this. In the battle of Sony vs. Nintendo, no one really thought about Apple, and it's not like Apple had been a major player in games before. I remember a presentation by Ngmoco back then, that was trying to be the wake up call. They compared screen resolution of the iPhone to the DS and PSP, processors, multitouch input, the ease of the approval process, and the 70/30 revenue split and concluded that this was the real mobile gaming platform that mattered. It was some sort of controversial statement to some.

Even Apple itself didn't realize just how disruptive to the game market that iOS was. They held a media event for the iPod Touch that was all gaming and they explained that when they looked at the data of what people actually used their iPod Touches for, and what they actually bought, that gaming was HUGE. Way more than they had expected, so they wanted to really shine a spotlight on that and support it even more. By 2010, Nintendo's Iwata said that Apple--not Microsoft or Sony--was Nintendo's true rival, their "enemy of the future." This was already painfully obvious to anyone paying attention, but it was telling coming from the highest level of Nintendo.

Some quick stats. In 2009, Nintendo accounted for 70% of all mobile gaming revenue in the US. In 2012, both Nintendo 3DS and Sony PSP Vita combined account for only 36% of the revenue (source). In March of 2012, Apple's iOS platform accounted for a whopping 84% of mobile gaming revenue. Tangential trivia: 91% of iOS gaming revenue came from in-app purchases, rather than the price of the games themselves. (source)

iTV

The reason to go over all that is to give some perspective on what will probably happen next. Will it be Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo who comes out on top in the next generation of game consoles? What we might find is all three of them scrambling after Apple majorly disrupts that market, too. Before, they built a phone that just happened to be an attractive gaming device. Now, they are building a TV that will just happen to be an even more attractive gaming device.

Jeremy Allaire, the founder and CEO of Brightcove, gave an EXTENSIVE look at how he pictures the Apple TV working, including his predictions of how disruptive it will be to console gaming. Here is his long article, complete with many mockup pictures. That article is the whole reason I'm posting, so check it out, it's worth a look. If I had more ability to actually make game software, I would say this is the biggest upcoming opportunity there is in games, and I kind of wish I could be involved. In any case, the gaming industry is in for quite a ride next time around. And so is the cable TV business.