Trashdome Finals: Dominion vs. Puzzlestrike

TheDukester wrote:

Stormcow wrote: Wanna see how thematic Puzzle Strike is?

LOL! As opposed to Dominion? The least-thematic game in the history of games and the history of themes?

Christ, that's funny. Good one.

Well, this is a really arguable point. Dominion has the exact same card, but at least it has art and some attempt at thematic justification - you get a wide variety of things at a Market, or something.



And Dominion has some great top-down designs too:



For example, you have Pirate Ship, which attacks your opponent, stealing their treasure. Later you can dig it up and spend it!



Rats eats the crap in your deck, but it multiplies too - sometimes the rats overwhelm you.

I'm not saying these are amazing or anything - but at least it tries to make sense. Is there anything in Puzzle Strike that actually conveys the feeling of playing a match-3 game? I mean, apart from the bright colors?

BattleSloth wrote: I'm amazed that people are arguing about cards vs. chips, when they should be arguing about which game is strategically deeper and better balanced.

Puzzle Strike took what Dominion was and improved on it.

Puzzle Strike did two things - First, it changed the VP cards into Purples, and secondly, it introduced individual character abilities.

The Purple chips provide the same function as the VP cards, but you have to play it to gain a benefit. It's changed from a Stock into a Rate. This looks similar, but now, instead of wanting to NOT draw your VP cards, you want to draw Purples regularly (so you can keep playing them). Unfortunately, Purples eat up your one action for the turn - meaning you have even less of an incentive to buy extra actions (that are not purple), making the game kinda less interesting overall, because it's always gonna be about playing Purple actions. It is not good for this kind of game to have such an overridingly important action sink.

The characters, plainly put, throw game balance out of the window. Even if the characters are balanced on paper, for the given spread of supply chips in any given game, one of the characters is going to have an advantage. Maybe a given spread is going to favor a character who has +actions, or trashing, or something - the point is, assuming you are adept enough to identify it, Puzzle Strike is inherently less balanced than Dominion.

The thing is, Puzzle Strike copied Dominion wholesale (see Market and One of Each), tinkered with some key mechanics, and arrogantly assumed that things would work out on the gameplay and balance end. It really doesn't though! Puzzle Strike is a less flexible, less well balanced game than Dominion.

Agreed monopurple took too much of the stage in early days, Stormcrow--but have you played it with -$1 Combine? It makes a HUGE difference and provides incentive to do something other than mindlessly play purple chips--because it will wreck your economy if you do.

No, I have to admit I stopped playing PS after the first edition. Is -$1 combine an errata that was introduced in a later edition or expansion?

Stormcow wrote: No, I have to admit I stopped playing PS after the first edition. Is -$1 combine an errata that was introduced in a later edition or expansion?

Yeah, it was the heart of the change to 3rd edition; although if you can just remember that "-$1 per Combine", you can play this rule with any set. Both 3rd Edition and Shadows have this printed on the Combine chips.

The -$1 Combine is huge, and in fact makes all of the previous sets much better even without additional balance tweaks. Now monopurple kills your ability to buy better chips like Double Crashes and engine chips. Sometimes it can even force you to buy wounds and kill your deck as a result. If you don't manage to finish your opponent with it relatively quickly, eventually they will come back and overpower you with a much stronger deck.

It's similar to Starcraft now, I think. Buying money is like expanding, and buying purples is like building units. You can rush by starting your unit/purple production very early, but that leaves you with only a short window where your opponent is actually vulnerable. If they get a chance to switch to units/purples with a better economy, they'll have more and better units/purples than you. So... you die.

BTW if this is really a F:AT argument and not one over boring things like "balance" then I think all this stuff is irrelevant. Puzzle Strike wins because it's not competitive solitaire where you race to see who can buy stuff faster. If you play well you get to feel like you kicked your opponent in the ass. Very important for ameritrashy fun.

Try playing this mofo followed by three crashes sometime:



Absolutely nothing in Dominion is that satisfying.

So if I'm reading this correctly the combine chip still costs 4$ (I think that's it's cost in 2nd edition) but you now have to pay a 1$ to do it?

JonJacob wrote: So if I'm reading this correctly the combine chip still costs 4$ (I think that's it's cost in 2nd edition) but you now have to pay a 1$ to do it?

You don't really "pay" the money because you often don't have any money available until your buy phase. It simply subtracts 1 from the total amount of money you have available when your buy phase begins.

Because of this it is possible to have zero or negative money. If this happens, you are forced to buy a wound, as normal for all editions of Puzzle Strike.

FourthDimensional wrote: If you play well you get to feel like you kicked your opponent in the ass... Absolutely nothing in Dominion is that satisfying.

I dunno, I've played a game where I've trashed my opponent's whole deck (including his hand). And another where I go from zero to suddenly buying literally every remaining victory card on the table in a single turn. Those were pretty satisfying. They were even more satisfying because they were combos I worked to figure out and put together, and not just about buying a big expensive card that explicitly sets up a lot of damage.

Stormcow wrote: I dunno, I've played a game where I've trashed my opponent's whole deck (including his hand). And another where I go from zero to suddenly buying literally every remaining victory card on the table in a single turn. Those were pretty satisfying. They were even more satisfying because they were combos I worked to figure out and put together, and not just about buying a big expensive card that explicitly sets up a lot of damage.

I suppose that's a good point, but make no mistake. Puzzle Strike is full of potential for crazy, creative combos that can drastically effect game results. I've personally sent upwards of 12 gems without using The Hammer, just by pigs and engines to Risky Moves a bunch of crap into my pile then play every purple my entire deck. I know for certain this is not the craziest thing you can do in PS, either.

The Hammer's just a great example of why the game is just more fun, thematically. The focus of the game is murdering the crap out of the other guy, not just buying all of the stuff before he can buy all of the stuff.

Dominion is like a racing game, really... No matter what, it's a race. You can have attack cards, which slow down your opponents, but that turns it into something akin to Mario Kart. You can slow each other down by lobbing shells around, but it's still fundamentally a game about who can cross the finish line the soonest.

In Puzzle Strike there is no finish line. You have to beat up the other guy if you want to win.