Fixing the Bamboozle

After having played a couple of "real" games (i.e. against real humans), the feeling that the Bamboozle is underpowered is confirmed. The matches are vastly dominated by Attacks and Blocks, and a couple Bamboozles pop up now and then, but with a ratio around 10:1. And when the Bamboozle is fired, it is typically to counter a Block that has just been fired, not really to take advantage of the Bamboozle power.

Just to recap, the Bamboozle is a Magic (that interrupts Blocks but that gets interrupted by Attacks) that does exponential damage, provided that several Bamboozle are fired consecutively. Damage-wise, to make it worth an Attack, you need to connect your third Bamboozle.

The problem

However, it is practically impossible to chain two (or three) Bamboozles in a row. The reason is that once the first (or second, depending on how soon your opponent wants to stop you) Bamboozle is fired, an easy reaction is to fire an Attack. If you do this, the possible outcomes are:

• Either your opponent has fired their next Bamboozle, and you will interrupt it (the Attack being slighly faster than the Bamboozle)
  
• Either they have done an Attack themselves, and it will be a draw. However, their Bamboozle chain has been stopped.
  
• Or they have done a Block (the natural counter to the Attack you just did). However, being able to cancel the move you are currently firing, you can simply switch to something else once the Block has been fired. You will have lost some time, but the Bamboozle chain will be broken.
  

And so, if you want to stop a Bamboozle chain, the worst thing that can happen to you is losing the firing time of the Block your opponent is doing.

So, once your opponent decides to stop your Bamboozle chain, they can do it easily.

What to do?

The goal is not simply to make the Bamboozle a move people fire more. To do so, simply multiply the damage done by 5, and you've got it (and then you have to tune it to not overpower it, but the idea stays the same).

The goal is to make the Bamboozle a move that people use, wanting to connect several in a row. And, when they know that their opponent is about to counter it, take advantage of the situation. In other words, in the case you have been able to fire 3 Bamboozles in a row (your next one will be at 16 damage!), your opponent is bound to Attack to counter you. If you're sure they will, you need to be able to Block, and take a real advantage by doing so.

I don't have the solution yet, but I'll use this post to explore several trails.

The first thing that seems natural to do is to make this switching out of Attack more difficult. I don't really want to make move cancellation impossible, because it is still an interesting feature. If your opponent Blocks and you were firing an Attack, a mind game comes in play: will you cancel your Attack because of the Block (in which case your opponent had better fire another move, since the Block will be useless), or will you go on with it, in which case your opponent should not do anything and wait for you to be Blocked?

Another possibility could be to change how the Bamboozle works. Instead of forcing it to be consecutive moves, it could be changed to "as long as you don't fire an Attack, or are not hit by an Attack". Which means that a player intent on going with strong bamboozles will llmit themselves to Blocks and Magics, possibly for the whole game. Which means the opponent can try going for full-attack, and cancelling them if they see a Block coming, effectively negating all possibility for the Bamboozle player to launch anything that brings a Green charge.

This again brings back to the fact that it is too easy to cancel a move being fired, and escape the Block. A possibility could be to limit the number of times a player can do so. For instance, each player can cancel one or two of their moves once per game, or have a strong penalty when cancelling the move (like a delay on the next move). This would still allow for mind games (as long as cancellation is possible), but limit it to a couple of crucial times (like when you are firing a fully charge Energy Blast).

Let's suppose from now on that the number of times you can cancel your moves is limited. I don't think that, by itself, it is sufficient to restore the Bamboozle. In the initial scenario, the Attack is still a no-brainer to a Bamboozle chain threat. The worst penalty for the one firing the attack is either the Block penalty, or the cancel move penalty. Given the current Block penalty, it is a safe gamble to take (especially since there is still a chance that the one firing the bamboozle will try and go for another bamboozle). So increasing the Block penalty is another way to try it (maybe simply increasing the block delay by one would be enough).

TL;DR

As of today, the Bamboozle cannot be played the way it is intended: it is too easy to counter it, with close to no penalty. Possible ways I will be looking at are making it more difficult to cancel a move being fired, and increasing the Block penalty.

But as usual, it would be easy if things could just be figured out by thinking about them. Next step will then be to prototype these changes, and see how it goes.