Blockles Gets Crap

[Radiance]

The consensus best way of playing was to prioritize doubles, not only during downstacking, but as a stacked attack. Every other line clear was just not worth it. Tetrises weren't worth it not because they only sent 3 garbage lines, but because they sent 3 straight garbage lines. Blockles was all about producing your own random garbage.

Looking back on all of this, I'm sort of awed at how deep the strategy of item play was after only a year. I'm convinced that the mind games would only have gotten more complicated if Blockles were still around.

There wasn't much to appreciate about itemless play, but item play was a truly beautiful dance of a game.

[Paradox]

The good ol' scramble urself then swap strategy. But Tetrises were good in Items remember because it increased your chances of stronger items.

[Radiance]

Yeah, opening on a Tetris was dope in 3+ player games. IMO a bit high-risk in 1v1, though. Someone needs to get on making an item clone.

I was thinking about what the best set of items would be, and I came across the idea that a good item would have both offensive and defensive uses. By that, I mean that an item is well-designed if there are situations where you'd want to use it on yourself, and situations where you'd want to use it on your opponent.

Blockles' +1, +2, +4, -1, -2, -4, Clear, and Switch fit that. Scramble doesn't quite fall into the category of a well-designed item, because you'd never really want to scramble yourself. Note that if you have a switch, or foresee an opposing switch, there is no real reason that scrambling yourself does anything different from what spamming your board does. What I mean is that since you can spam your board, there's no real unique tactical depth in comboing a swap with a scramble. There also aren't very many ways to play around a scramble once a player's picked it up. It happens, and your board turns into random garbage regardless.

If I were to do a sort of Blockles items-on clone, I'd make it so line clears send random garbage, and + items send straight garbage. I'd also probably do away with the scramble because of it being so one-dimensional.

I don't even know why I think of these things. I guess I crave Blockles' items play that badly.

[Zoon]

Fond memories. Co-incidentally, myself, Marissa and Richelle (Unicornfetus) have started to play Cultris, so we're all back in the game, if not a tad slow.