Puzzle Strike Shadows Review

So you’ve played a deck builder before, huh? Well, what if I told you that this deckbuilder simulated a puzzle game which simulated a fighting game? What if I told you that there were unique fighters, and that the whole thing was done with chips? And, most importantly, what if I told you that this was, bar none, the best two-player deckbuilding experience on the market? Hopefully you’d say, “OK. I want to play some of that.” Well, that’s Puzzle Strike. The new Puzzle Strike: Shadows set is a standalone expansion- you can play it either by itself or with the existing 3rd edition, and it offers a completely new set of combatants and chips.

It’s subtitled “A Bag of Chips” for a reason. Each player starts with an identical “deck” of seven chips along with the three unique chips belonging to the particular fighter the player chooses. The game comes with ten fighters, so there is plenty of variety. All the chips go into a draw bag to randomize them. On a turn, a player draws five.

The middle of the play area holds the ten common chip types that will be used for the game. Puzzle Strike comes with 24 types of common chips, so any given game will use only a subset allowing for a great deal of variety- much like how Dominion generates a random set of available cards each game. Sirlin Games advertises that there are 411 million combinations possible. Believe it.

On a turn, a player first adds one gem to his gem pile. Then, he can play one action chip (though some award additional actions) and implement its effects. Besides getting more actions, they might also result in gaining money to buy new chips, granting additional opportunities to buy, or directly attacking another player.

Effects can also “crash” a gem by sending it from his own gem pile to an opponent’s. Single value gems can also be combined into bigger gems – up to a four value gem. When crashed, a big gem separates into little ones, littering the opponent’s pile with baby gems. That opponent can also “counter crash” by sending gems heading back to the opponent. Counter crashed gems cancel out the incoming gems and they all get discarded entirely.

If a player ends his turn with ten or more gems in his gem pile, he loses. In the multiplayer version, the player who has the smallest gem pile at that moment is the winner.

The gimmick of Puzzle Strike is that it’s a deckbuilding take on a puzzle game, which is in turn a version of a fighting video game. Thematically, the game is derivative and proud of it. Mechanically, it owes a lot to Dominion. Action/Buy/Cleanup is the identical pattern. It even includes piles of chips to be purchased and added to a deck.

But once you step beyond this foundation, Puzzle Strike offers a completely unique experience even in the crowded world of deck builders. The game is extremely aggressive and competitive. There are no strategies where you can slowly build up points while shielding yourself from attacks. Instead you must combine and crash gems forcing your opponent over the top.

Puzzle Strike also offers unique starting chips. Unlike most titles in the genre where everyone starts off with the same boring cards, here you get special abilities right off the bat. And those are often quite powerful. This results in an early game that is actually interesting. As your “deck” grows, though, they come out less frequently. But, by mid and late game, those effects can sometimes be huge because you have access to more options by that time.

The game also does a great job of ramping up tension. On the first turn, you add a single gem to your empty gem pile. No worries, you can crash it later or just ignore it for some time. But as the game goes on, gems pile up. And, if your opponent can crash a level three or four gem at you, you might go from having four or five gems in your pile to having eight or nine! That’s when the bead of sweat hits. When you realize you’ve been trying to put together a little chip engine and you have no way to combat this gem influx.

But the combat portion isn’t just about crashing gems. Several of the available chips that a player can purchase are labeled with the red attack banner. They have a variety of effects including making an opponent discard a chip or directly adding gems to their pile. There may also be blue defense chips which have an effect when attacked. Some simply stop an attack, but others let the attack happen but give you a benefit – like adding more currency to your deck.

All of Puzzle Strike, then, feels like tough as nails combat. Strikes and defenses, attacks and blocks. Puzzle Strike is a phenomenal deck builder and my absolute favorite to play with just two. The zero-sum nature of the crashing gems and purchased chips is extremely enjoyable. Plus, as one player buys one type of chip, signaling his strategy, the other can attempt to react to it by buying a counter. Or, simply by buying the same thing and execute right back against his opponent.

With three or four, the game is fully functional and still provides enjoyment. The immediate end keeps anyone from being eliminated. It does lead to some weird situations, though. I might crash some gems sending someone over 10. They aren’t technically out until they end their turn so we keep going. The next player then crashes gems at me so that he has the fewest gems at game end. It makes killing someone off a risky proposition and you always want to kill the person on your left.

That aside, however, Puzzle Strike is fabulous and the new Shadows set is a great entry point or a fine way to expand an already vast amount of content. Direct and indirect interaction, combat, reactions – the deckbuilder wonderfully emulates the give and take of fighting games. It is definitely an experience worth having.