Sirlin Games at Origins Game Fair

Origins is this coming week in Columbus, Ohio. It's a huge gaming event with about 35,000 attendees. I won't be there, but my games will have a presence there in the Game Salute area. They have a huge 18-booth area, right up at the front of the hall, starting with Booth 100. There's an section in there carved out for Sirlin Games.

There will be tournaments for all three of my games at Origins. I think the times will be: Puzzle Strike on Friday at noon, Yomi on Saturday at noon, and Flash Duel on Sunday at noon.

Good luck to all who attend!

The Neuroscience of Zen

Dr. Philippe Goldin and Ryushin Paul Haller spoke tonight as part of the California Academy of Sciences lecture series in San Francisco, at the packed Herbst Theater. This was the last lecture of this season, and we learned tonight that every lecture of this season was sold out, including this one.

Goldin has a Ph.D. in neuroscience and spent 6 years in India and Nepal serving as an interpreter to Tibetan Buddhist lamas. He now works at Stanford. Haller is a Buddhist monk and Abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center.

Goldin opened by saying that now is a time of convergence, a meeting of East and West. The East has had centuries of Zen Buddhist traditions that seem to draw upon some ancient wisdom, and the West has rigorous scientific methodology and study and it excites him that these things are now untied. We now know that zen practices stimulate the brain in a very measurable way, and have tangible, positive effects.

Haller pointed out that both neuroscience and zen are "amoral," meaning they are not attempting to prescribe any sort of moral rightness or wrongness. Instead they seek to illuminate and explain "what is." Incidentally, I found Haller's mannerisms and way of speaking interesting. On the one hand, he's an old man that one might be mistaken for a crazy person or something. But he's actually very thoughtful in his speaking. Also he's Irish and has a bit of an Irish accent, though he's also lived in Russia, Afghanistan, Japan, and Thailand. His appearance and accent don't really match the stereotype of the kind of wiseman that he is.

Meditation Exercise

Haller said he'd like us to do an exercise with him, and that we might find it silly but that it might help us. He asked us to imagine for the next two or three minutes, that we "are not ourselves." Meaning we have no concept of what it's like to be who we are, and instead we are just experiencing the present moment.

He then apologized for asking this, but he said we should all stand up. I thought this moment alone said a lot about him. His apology was sincere in that he was acknowledging that he is kind of invading our personal space by asking us to do anything at all. And we didn't even have some terrible forced interaction with strangers, like Jane McGonigal's disaster thumb wrestling thing. Anyway, after standing up, he asked us to sit down, but in a different way than usual. He demonstrated the method, and said we should imagine that we are not familiar with our chairs, that perhaps they won't be able to hold our weight. So sit down very carefully, and with much attention to whether the chair can take the weight, and what it feels like as we sit down. He then asked us to close our eyes as he suggested we think about our breathing, the feeling of our feet on the floor, the feeling of the muscles on our face, and so on.

This is, of course, meditation. It's something I know a fair amount about from reading science about it, but not something I know of first-hand. Somewhat ironically, he got my attention here. (The irony is that meditation all about the direction of attention.) It's actually very difficult to just think about those things he's saying without thinking about anything else. The mind is whirring and buzzing with thoughts about every kind of thing, and meditation is an attempt to clear the mind of those things. Think of it as trying to balance on one leg. A master of balance is actually someone who, when a slight imbalance begins, can very quickly correct it and return to a balanced stance. Likewise, an expert at meditation can return to an empty mind very quickly when stray thoughts enter.

I am no master. I have written

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Puzzle Card Randomizers

Hey here's some sample images of what the Puzzle Strike "randomizer" cards will look like:

You can use them to randomly determine which 10 puzzle chips to use for the bank each game. If we reach the next funding level, everyone who orders Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition and/or Puzzle Strike shadows through Kickstater will get a set of these cards for free. There's only one week left to get in on that. Oh, and other kickstarter bonuses that are already guaranteed: you get the game a month before anyone else...and you get a free copy of the print-and-play version if you get a physical version...and you get a free character unlock on fantasystrike.com!

If you're on the fence, catch up on what went into making Puzzle Strike, and why it's special in the genre of deckbulding games:

The Quest for a Tournament Quality Deckbuilding Game
Casual Play Matters

Special thanks to evilgordo for the graphic design of the cards. And to the hundreds of you who already pledged on kickstarter.

Diablo 3's Ability System

Diablo 3 comes out in a couple weeks. I'm giving it the coveted award for "Biggest Comeback In System Design." Diablo 2's ability system was so bad that it's almost unbelievable, while the way Diablo 3 handles ability customization is one of the very best systems I've seen.

Diablo 2

Diablo 2 had talent trees where you spend points to unlock new abilities, very similar to how talent trees work in World of Warcraft. Also, you could allocate stat points into various different stats however you wanted as you leveled up. At first glance, these seem like ok things, but let's look at just how deeply problematic they really are.

Don't Use Points!

First, the best way to play Diablo 2 is have this big red "+" button on your screen almost the entire time, the one that says you have extra points to spend. The reason that will be on you screen for weeks is that you'd be a sucker to actually spend the points as you get them. You counter-intuitively (and unfunly) should stock up on those and spend them much later on. So the simple and fun thing to do (spend points as you get them) is just a trap for noobs.

Next, the whole system of allocating points in the first place didn't really customize anything. It was just a giant test of if you did your web research enough to know the only reasonable way to spend those stat points. You don't have to take my word for it either, let's see what Jay Wilson has to say. He was an avid Diablo 2 player, and the Game Director of Diablo 3 for the last 5 or 6 years.

Here's a written transcript of the relevant part, in case you don't want to watch the vid:

"You usually take as much strength as you need to get the armor that you're targeting, and that's usually around 120 or 220, depending on what type of armor. You take 75 dexterity because that's the amount you generally  need for good block percentages. You take NO energy at all unless…there's like one type of build you can make on a sorceress that uses energy shield. And then you put everything else in vitality. That's a shitty customization system. That's just not a good system." --Jay Wilson, Diablo 3 Game Director on Diablo 2

Talent Trees

Next, there's the talent trees. There's two problems here, one medium sized and the other is one of the most mind-blowing fumbles in design out there. First the medium problem: it's pretty hard to make talent trees that give any real choice. They sure seem to allow choice,

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Puzzle Strike: Casual Play Matters

Thanks to everyone who pledged in the Puzzle Strike Kickstarter campaign so far! It's still going strong!

I recently wrote at great length how important it was to making Puzzle Strike the best game it can be for expert tournament players. While it's nice to know that the game holds up at that level of play, 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: 2nd Edition

In Puzzle Strike 2nd Edition, the 4-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 2nd 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 deckbulding game where you collect victory points and where the game ends when the stack of victory point cards is empty, it's very 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 2nd 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 2nd Edition, you can only crash 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 2nd Edition.

Great, so what's the problem? The problem is that even though player elimination and forced target selection solve very 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: 3rd Edition

With the 3rd 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

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