Puzzle Strike - Tips & Strategies

Even though the rules state you can buy as many new chips on your turn as you can afford, it is generally a good idea to avoid doing so and only buy 1. The quicker you can cycle through your bag of chips the easier it will be to get a combo going on future turns.

After playing most of the characters, the ones I’d recommend for a new player are:

Setsuke – This character revolves around a quick rush strategy. I’ve been pretty successful by using lots of chip drawing abilities and either working them into a series of crashes or building an economy to buy the ! puzzle chip.

Jaina – A very aggressive character, Jaina works by assaulting quickly. Her chips can cause you to get some wounds, so you’d really want to play aggressively quickly and early.

Grave – A very strong character and very good for new players to get the hang of how the game works.

Jaina is an insane brawler that can pack a huge punch early. She’s really good for players who want to just punch the opponent over and over again until they pass out, bloody at your feet!

Of Jaina’s chips two really strike me as being great! One adds a red action and allows you to Trash (remove) a Wound chip (which is kind of a dead chip that does nothing) from your hand or discard pile and then send a gem to the opponents pile. In and of itself, this is nothing that great – however, her Purple chip gives it versatility. Her Purple chip is a free double crash chip, which allows you to send two of your gems to the opponent at the cost of giving you two wound chips. Together, these can create some good synergy for each other – but you need to be careful. If you add too many wound chips to your bag then it’ll slow you down considerably.

As for building your deck, for her I tend to focus on Red actions like Sneak Attack (forget the name off hand) which allows another Red action and forces the opponent to ante a gem, but I also really like adding Combines with her too – because of her ability chip.

The biggest thing to note about Jaina is that you need to generally fight out the gate and win fast. I find that Jaina, unlike a lot of the others, tends to get weaker and weaker as the game progresses – so she either wins early, or has a fairly large up hill battle to go. This is, in part, due to filling her bag with wounds.

If you like to play an aggressive in your face style, then definitely try Jaina.

Satsuki, the hot ninja girl (at least imo) is a terrific rusher. Her ability chips let her draw cards and take extra brown moves. The way you want to take advantage of her is to make sure you buy Chips that turn your brown moves to black moves, increasing your speed and tempo in the game.

Also include lots of drawing in your bag too. What I like to do is try to load up on drawing extra chips, making me cycle through my bag quickly and get the Gems I need in order to buy Master Puzzler! If I can get Master Puzzler out with her, then its game over for the most part.

She starts to get weaker around the mid and late game, so be sure to try and rush your opponent quickly and bring them down hard. If you are an aggressive player who likes to see the look of ‘ Oh no!’ on your opponents face, then definitely she is a great character to try out and play.