Puzzle Strike Missionaries

David Sirlin just posted this little gem to his blog.

I don't think I've ever heard a designer talk about his own game with such cult-like implications. Share the Good News of Puzzle Strike!

I also wanted to comment about "creating the perfect polished jewel of a game," but I'm not sure what to add aside from the fact that Puzzle Strike ain't it.

In the 1920's, President Wilson formed a secret agency known as Threshold to combat the forces of evil bent on awakening Cthulhu.

I would be absolutely fine with Threshold "adjudicating" Sirlin and his cult.

"Puzzle Strike Missionaries" sounds like a variant of "The Shocker", but from behind and with a finger in the eye...making her puzzled LOL

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

I'm done with Sirlin and his games -- I wouldn't be surprised if it was his attitude that was keeping his games from getting the press he feels like they deserve. Or instead of no expansions, it was the 3 editions that came out so fast, making the original supporters feel like they had bee duped as he had obviously had the new editions in the works for some time.

Usually, when you aren't achieving success, the first place to look is at your own product and in the mirror.

I believe he's going to call his next game (or at least the next edition of Puzzle Strike) "Bigger than Jesus".

Seriously, hubris much?

It just goes back to my exchange with him over Yomi...I gave it one of the best reviews I've ever given a game (one that I stand by to this day) and he was unhappy that I criticized the cheap-ass flimsy cardstock that had no business in a $100 game. There were like four or five emails back and forth, I think he was trying to get me to recant and revise the review. Wouldn't do it. Cardstock sucked.

He's obviously a talented designer, but he fumbles over the line between self-promotion and self-aggrandizement.

I usually never care about designers when I'm looking into a game, but I also somewhat irrationally sick of this guy.

He worships balance and tournament scene, an attitude I despise. He also belittled Knizia's game, take ideas from the said game and added to it to create his own. I don't like his attitude with "revisions". May be because he comes from video game background, and with video games you can just release patch to address game balance.

Sevej wrote: He also belittled Knizia's game, take ideas from the said game and added to it to create his own.

Yeah, was it really necessary to diss the game that you *ripped off*?

For me personally, though, it's not so much that I don't like the guy, I don't like his *games*, and that's primarily because of the tournament-competitive-mindset worship that seeps through to his game design, where it's the #1 design goal. Other than having I believed mentioned that he thinks that asymmetry makes a game fun, where has he ever talked about "fun" being something that he considers?

I agree with a lot of what Sirlin says. Incremental improvements, building on what's current, etc and so on. His personality could use work, but talk about the pot calling the kettle black if I belittle him for that.

The ONE thing that keeps me away from his games is the revisionist nature of his development style. Totally hypothetical: If I have Puzzle-omi 1.0, and I like Puzzle-omi 1.0 then good for me, right? Well, maybe. Even if I don't play in tournaments, if I meet some friends and/or newcomers on a game night and they're familiar with Puzzle-omi 2.0, then I have two choices:

1) Upgrade anyway and be a part of a growing player base.
2) Be that crusty curmudgeon bastard.

I don't want to pay to be the first person, and I'll pay for being the second. All it would take for me to buy in is a reasonable upgrade pack.

And to contradict myself, the OTHER thing that bugs me: Give credit where credit is due. There's no shame in standing on the shoulders of giants, but at least be man enough to admit that you're doing exactly that.

San Il Defanso wrote: David Sirlin just posted this little gem to his blog.

I don't think I've ever heard a designer talk about his own game with such cult-like implications. Share the Good News of Puzzle Strike!

I also wanted to comment about "creating the perfect polished jewel of a game," but I'm not sure what to add aside from the fact that Puzzle Strike ain't it.

Yeah suckers! The game that's so perfect I make you buy a new edition every year to fix how broken it is. Don't worry, just put down another $50 next year because the fourth edition is even, er, perfect-er!

Why playtest your game before publishing it, when you can find suckers to buy edition after edition, and pay to play test it for you? It's a perfect polished something alright.

SGT Dave wrote: Why playtest your game before publishing it, when you can find suckers to buy edition after edition, and pay to play test it for you? It's a perfect polished something alright.

Say what you will about Sirlin but his play testing process is probably one of the most rigorous ones outside of multiplayer video games. You're unlikely to find a board game designer who play tests more than him.

The real problem is his placement of tournament balance on such a pedestal that even a minor imbalance requires a new edition in his mind.

I find his outlook interesting in case study way as it is so far removed from mine. I'm not a particularly competitive gamer; I play to win but am more than happy to screw around and have fun. To him winning is the only point of playing a game.

Sir, you will have a hard time convincing me that Puzzle Strike has had more playtesting, or is better balanced than Dominion.

Sirlin's big attitude is not at all proportional to his design chops. Yomi is a fairly good game, but also pretty simple and unpolished. His other two games are blatant rip-offs where apparently he goes around dissing the original designers? I am actually a little ashamed to say that his personality is the primary factor for me trading off my Sirlin games, but let's face it - none of them were irreplacable anyway.

I am a big fan of Yomi and Puzzle Strike, but I'm down the general consensus here. My Yomi review is still the #1 review of the game at BGG, and I had a stupid email exchange with Sirlin over it as well. One of the things he took exception to was my joke about him displaying the Dunning-Kreuger effect (where incompetent people vastly overestimate their competence, but more competent people are more accurate in their self-assessments).

Yet I think this has just been proven more accurate over the intervening years. Sirlin is at best a mediocre marketer, a mediocre publisher, and a nightmarishly awful PR guy. But he thinks he's amazing at all those things, and refuses to get better people than him to do it. The best thing he could have done was to have FFG or some other big player to do all the logistics so that he could concentrate on what he's good at, development. And to contractually obligate him to shut up in public.

I have zero doubt that Yomi would be much bigger than it is if it had been sold much more like Blue Moon (starter set, expansion decks) than its current structure. And if Sirlin had gone with standard card stock, realizing that hardcore players would sleeve anyway, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel on nerd game card quality. And if he'd skipped over the stupid laser-etched wood phase of his design, perhaps realizing that there's a reason why that isn't a popular format in the industry. And, and, and....

As far as ripoffs go, I do think Sirlin has a case for incremental improvement of existing designs. There's plenty of repurposing of others' ideas in the hobby, although he is especially crass in his attitudes towards Knizia and Vaccarino. The worst offense of his, I think, is in his shameless stealing of the Dominion chip graphic design:

boardgamegeek.com/image/395648/dominion

The other major issue is that by focusing so much on the mythical tournament scene (mythical for Sirlin's games anyway, because there's been few or no tournaments for his games outside of his core group of fans holding online tournaments between themselves), he neglects to make his games accessible to the casual player, which in turn prevents a large enough user base to ever develop into a tournament scene. Yes, some games that are fun in a casual setting break down when played at very high levels. But no games that are not fun in a casual setting get played in significant numbers at very high levels. The only Sirlin game that qualifies for this is Flash Duel. Yomi has opaque and needlessly complicated rules around jokers, and feels random until you get about 20+ games under your belt. Puzzle Strike is a nightmare to teach because of all the little symbols and the several layers of complication laid on top of Dominion's clean turn structure.

Anyway, I'll still continue to play his games, but I won't actually buy them until their development cycle seems stable. If they go a year or two without a new edition, then that seems pretty safe. Until then I'll play other games; it's not like there's a shortage in the hobby. Or on my shelves, for that matter.

I now wish I had written a review so he could irritate me with his blathering complaints, at which point I would verbally buffet him and publicly humiliate him. Maybe that's not possible, though, because it sounds like he has no shame.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sirlin

Wonder who wrote that Wiki page.

SuperflyTNT wrote: I now wish I had written a review so he could irritate me with his blathering complaints, at which point I would verbally buffet him and publicly humiliate him. Maybe that's not possible, though, because it sounds like he has no shame.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sirlin

Wonder who wrote that Wiki page.

That's just begging for an edit describing Flash Duel and Puzzle Strike as unlicensed bootleg versions.

According to that wiki page, Sirlin is a pretty accomplished guy. Two degrees from MIT, and was a major contributor to several famous video game franchises. Yet he apparently can't take criticism very well, judging by his need to privately email anyone over a perceived slight.

Like Stan Lee said, with great ego comes great fragility.

His horrible PR skills and giant ego kind of make me like him more than I should. I could care less about his games, they're good games but I don't love them or anything. But this obsession with negative press is hilarious and his ability to believe in himself is borderline admirable.

He's a real character and that's worth something, plenty of designers are boring nobodies that we never hear from, his honesty (or unfiltered opinions) are refreshing.

Yeah, I love all this fuss about the "tournament scene"...there is no scene. It's bullshit. Very, very few people are playing any of these games in any kind of tournament setting and if there are any occuring offline, I've yet to hear about them.

Some of that comes out of fighting games, since that's such a big deal there...so it's really sort of a marketing thing "hey look, you can play this game in a tournament like Evo"

99.9999% of board gamers couldn't care less about any kind of "tournament scene", and most CCG players that are into that are locked down into Magic and nothing else.

I would love to hear the actual sales figures for Yomi and Puzzle Strike.

JJ is kind of right, it's rare that we see this kind of bullshit rockstar attitude in game designers....it's kind of amusing.