Dogpile was a surprise for me. It is the combination of at least three types of games: rogue-likes, card games and the so called suika game genre. ## The Suika & 2048 Genre I passed by both of these completely. They come from japan, look like casual or mobile games and are highly addictive. In 2048 you double values in a square and can only combine equal values. So arranging equal values per row matters. Suika (watermelon) is a game where fruit drop into a limited playing field and need to be recombined into larger and larger fruit without going over the line at the top. The whole genre looks very young, the Switch version of Suika was released in [[2024]]. First mentions in [[2022]]. I immediately notice the mobile game aspect. These games are highly addictive and repeatable and look cheap. This is not what I liked about Dogpile. ## Card Games It is most commonly compared to Balatro, which I didn't play. But I imagine it to be somewhat like [[Inscryption (2021)]]. That means it's a card game where you compare values on cards to win encounters and different arrangements of cards and modifiers on the playing field can influence your strategies. I suppose those contain elements of randomness and strategies to build efficient decks, that give good sequences of cards on average. I like deck building a lot because you have to anticipate the most common situations in which you will find yourself and design a deck that will be robust under these conditions. This is different to for example [[GWENT - The Witcher Card Game (2020)]] (I mean the original one in the Witcher 3), [[Thronebreaker - The Witcher Tales (2018)]] or the more recent [[Voice of Cards - The Isle Dragon Roars (2021)]] in that there is no story-related element that let's you level up your deck beyond all enemy resistance. These games use card mechanics to build a world, which is less a card game than an aesthetic. ## Rogue Like The rogue like element here is like [[The Binding of Isaac (2011)]]. There are various tags of which you accumulate 5 per run. They have a big influence on your playstyle and allow for vastly different strategies. Some of them can be built from the beginning, with others you can turn a game around while playing it, if you correctly recognize the situation you are in and acquire the necessary modifier. I think this is the part that I like most. It might be similar to [[The Fun of Discovering Combination in Games (Every 2 Months)]]. Theory crafting is quick, it takes minutes. You see the effects immediately. Restarting a failed attempt is quick and painless. Redoing a strategy you decided on is always possible because you the common modifiers all the time and strategies work with the common modifiers alone, whereas rare modifiers have the potential to blow them up to crazy levels. In particular, some strategies allow for rule breaking. First you learn that there are bad traits, disadvantages, penalties. And as you keep on playing you discover that you can create a setup in which those are exactly what you need to reach some goal. ### Personal Favorite I had this set of modifiers: - more miniature cards. - regain the biggest played card with a flaw - miniature cards generate a card one tier below - 2-3 cards with minor flaws AND miniature Result: In one round I could play 1 card over and over again. It would spawn a lower common tier that would almost always combine with something on the field and sometimes with the current card itself. ## The Aesthetics The game feels crunchy. Everything pops, squeaks, thumbs, creaks in a way that makes the most common event of combining and spawning cards pleasant. The drawings are cute, shopping feels deliberate (tchatching sound). This is a light layer of feedback that makes you feel the game mechanic. And then the mechanic is interesting enough to play it hundreds of times to try out some crazy new strategy. ## The Math ChatGPT helped me conceptualize the math behind this. There are two main elements of the Suika genre. The number of elements you need to combine to win. And the constrained on size which makes it difficult. The number of elements is binary accumulation. So the number of smallest elements needed (the number of combinations) to reach the highest tier card is: $ N_base = 2^n $ A king (tier 12) needs 4096 Aces. The game "2048" aimed for 2048 combinations. If you start combining from a higher tier, the number of combinations required are: - r = starting tier - n_max = final tier (King) $ N_{\text{remaining}} = 2^{n_{\text{max}} - r} $ So every tier halves the game's compelxity. Each tier penalizes the player by occupying a bigger surface area. $ \text{Area}_n = A_0 \cdot (2^n)^\alpha = A_0 \cdot 2^{\alpha n} $ with - \(A_0\) = area of base card - \(n\) = tier index - \(\alpha\) = scaling exponent (\(0 < \alpha < 1\)) Designing you would deside on a total area of the playing field of A and then decide how many of the biggest cards you want survivable. In the case of Dogpile, that's two kings, without modification. $ k \cdot \text{Area}_{\text{high}} \lesssim 0.1 \text{–} 0.2 \cdot A_{\text{field}} $ with - \(A_{\text{field}}\) = total playable area - \(k\) = number of high-tier objects you want survivable The form of the cards and their physics behavior are then probably designed non-mathematically. The optimal deck contains 2 of a lower tier for every tier+1 card. Smaller cards are a buffer for merging. If you have room for 2 kings in 75% of the area, one is 36%, then a queen is 18%, jack 9% and so on. Calculate margin of safety for the junk already lying around the playing field, let's say only 75% is usable and so on.