What is Puzzle Strike
Puzzle Strike is a card game played with chips instead of cards (for way easier shuffling) that simulates a puzzle game. Break gems from your gem pile and send them to your opponents' gem piles while customizing your deck to do bigger and bigger combos.
Works just as well with 2 players as with 3 or 4 players!
Build Your Deck as You Play
You start with a just some gem chips (money), a Crash Gem, and three character chips that do various fun things. Over the course of the game, you buy more and more chips for your "deck." Puzzle Strike is about building a fun and effective deck as you go in addition to playing your chips well when you draw them.
Over 400 Million Starting Conditions
Each game starts with a different set of 10 stacks of puzzle chips, out of 24 total stacks. Also, each player chooses one of 10 possible characters before the game starts. This creates a mind-boggling number of different starting conditions--over 411 MILLION in a 4-player game. It's never the same game twice.
Shuffling Sucks
You go through your deck quite a few times per game in Puzzle Strike, and shuffle up each time you do. Luckily, you play with wooden chips instead of cards, so "shuffling" just means toss them in your bag and shake them for a couple seconds.
Comebacks Included
Slippery slope is no fun. That's where being ahead gives you an advantage to get more ahead, and it snowballs into games that aren't even close matches. Puzzle Strike is the opposite: the more full your gem pile is, the closer you are to losing, but the "height bonus" rule kicks in and lets you draw extra chips. Then you can do bigger combos or draw that crucial Crash Gem you need to clear out your gem pile and stay in the game.
The comeback mechansim means you'll have close matches often. You'll feel the thrill of being on the edge of winning and losing at the same time, as you hover right next to the lose-condition in your greedy effort to draw more chips.
Components
Puzzle Strike contains almost 350 chips. The chips are the same size as poker chips. They're made of thick 1/8th inch chipboard, 1.5 inches in diameter with edge-to-edge graphics.
There are also four bags included, used to hold your chips during gameplay. They're velvety purple because purple is an important color in Puzzle Strike.
The rulebook has full size 8.5" x 11" pages, full color. It's 8 pages long, but only 4 of those are really rules about how to play. The rest is a FAQ about specific interactions with the chips.
The custom box interior is designed to separate the chips into coherent groups for storage. It's also labelled so you know which types of chips go where. The chip storage tray goes to the very top of the box, so that when you close the box and turn it upside down, the chips are held securely in place.
Ante, Action, Buy, Cleanup
Ante Each turn, you put a 1-gem from the bank into your gem pile. That's called your ante. You lose the game if your gem pile totals 10 or more at the end of your turn.
Action During your turn, you can play one action chip from your hand. Many action chips give you more actions, allowing you to play several chips per turn. Building a deck that can do fun combos like that is what the game is all about.
Buy Each turn you must buy at least one chip from the bank using the gem chips in your hand as money. The bank contains stacks of all sorts of different chips that you can add to your deck, and every game the contents of the bank changes so it's always a fresh experience.
Cleanup At the end of your turn, you discard all the chips in your hand and draw a new hand. This means you have a hand full of stuff to do every turn. If your gem pile is getting full, you even get to draw more chips.
Combine and Crash!
The purple chips, Combine and Crash Gem, are some of the most important chips in the game.
Combine chips let you combine two small gems in your gem pile into one larger gem. Why would you want to do that that? So you break your bigger gem with a Crash Gem.
When you play a Crash Gem chip, you break (remove) one gem from your gem pile and it "de-combines" and goes to the gem pile of the next player. So if you break a 3-gem in your gem pile, you'll send three annoying 1-gems to the next player.
