Poker Poker Magic
Poker Poker Magic is a game that shows how adding one extra wrinkle to what first appears to be a fairly straightforward puzzle game doesn’t double the difficulty, but increases it exponentially. It has a sort of Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo or Puyo Puyo vibe, with 1x2 playing card-style blocks falling from the top of the screen, and you can see your opponent’s playfield on the right side of the screen. Make matches and combos on your side to send match-blocking poker chips to your opponent, and fill their screen before yours is filled.
Whereas Puzzle Fighter just had colors to match (lots of colors, but still, just the one part of the brain), Poker Poker Magic has you making poker hands: 3- or 4-of-a-kind, flushes, or straights. The harder the hand, the more chips you send to your opponent. You clear chips by making matches of cards that are touching said chips. The hardest part for me, by far, was switching between matching numbers (like going for three 7’s) while also trying to match suits for a flush, while also keeping an eye out for potential straights. One more wrinkle: the straights need to be sequential, and there are only 7’s through aces, so if you’ve got 10, 9, 8, and 7… you’re out of luck with that match. Can’t add a jack on there and say, “Taa daa!” You can kind of do a zig-zag if one card is directly next to the next in the sequence, though! Try to sneak a jack in down by that 10.
I was able to recognize at a glance the suits on the 1-bit black-and-white Playdate screen with practice, but it does also feel like a game that would benefit from a few colors. It’s also single-player only, which for some puzzle gamers might be a deal breaker.
There’s a cute little story mode where you get to play as one of three different characters at the beginning (plus three secret characters you unlock later), and each has their own full story! It seemed to be split into easy, medium, and hard based on which character you pick first, too. I was able to get through the whole bird storyline (he doesn’t understand humans, adorable), but the difficulty spiked on the boy and girl’s storylines and I wasn’t able to progress that far into them at all. It’s tough!
The secret, I found out later, was to not play against every opponent the same way. Sometimes you should just throw a match to watch how your opponent does things. (There’s no penalty for losing, and the level restarts immediately.) By the second batch of levels, your opponent will be speed-dropping every little thing, and filling your screen with blocker chips before you can react. Instead of trying to get 4-of-a-kinds or flushes or straights, just focus on the one that would be best against a certain opponent. If they’re dropping a lot of chips on you, make flushes to clear out large batches of blocking chips at once. Enemy making lots of 3-of-a-kinds? Save up to drop some straights on them and totally take out their rhythm. Every character you’ll meet is beatable, but you’ll need to take each one as its own colossus, with its own strategy.
If you like puzzle games with a little twist and are ready for a challenge, Poker Poker Magic might be exactly the game for you to spend hours on your Playdate. It’s tough, but there’s a lot of strategy to be found if you’re willing to give it the time. There are five save slots; the game is trilingual in English, French, and Japanese; and the art is great. It does all the things we want out of a puzzle game… just make sure you bring your A-game.
(Released July 12, 2024, on Itch and September 10, 2024, on Catalog.)