A few weeks ago we received a mystery Joker card in the mail. He traveled all the way from New York to wet Manchester with a message: Zach Gage and the Puzzmo team are ready to share their latest creation. An ace in the field? Pile-up Poker. A fresh take on the centuries-old card game, designed for those who love the little newspaper games that Puzzmo has been offering daily since launching last year.
last time we spoke Gage shared his vision for a space that can be home to many playful puzzles and a community of players. until now, I stink seems to deliver on that promise. The platform has over 600,000 monthly active players. Two-thirds of the revenue comes from subscribers (who get access to more games, features and bonuses), and the rest from advertising. It is important to note that the average number of games played per day is increasing by 20 percent per month. But what kind of experience do people aspire to?
Puzzmo has been launched under a number of names including Cross|Word, Really bad chessand Tower of Spells. More soon followed. flip art, Yasna cube, Wordbind joined the family, and now Pile Up Poker occupied the center of the state. We were told Pile Up Poker actually tested well enough during development to warrant an accelerated wide release instead of the usual three-month subscriber-only early access period. There was clearly something special about it, and after its release on June 3rd, it became the most trending headline on a daily basis.
On paper, it’s a simple success story that could just as easily have been scripted, so we were surprised to hear Pile Up Poker was effectively canceled mid-development before being rapidly pulled back from the brink.
House of cards
“I want people to be able to show up and just click and find their way,” Gage tells us, explaining how Pile Up Poker was conceived as a more free-form experience that encourages instinctive experimentation.
On a visual level, it does this almost immediately by presenting players with a four-by-four grid to fill with cards to create poker hands (horizontally or vertically). In a single game, there are several moves (draws), each of which requires players to lay down four cards before the fifth is discarded. There is also depth. Eventually you realize that the discard pile can be used to make another hand, as can each of the four corners of the grid. Oh, and more hands means more multipliers. Great multipliers that increase a number.
“One part [encouraging that experimentation]which we changed from Pile-up Poker, is that instead of a big instruction popup at the top of the page, there’s a little goal that’s very vague and doesn’t tell you how the game works. This is a big change for us, because I feel like people just close the instruction pop-ups. So you don’t really get any information, and then the game has to do all the learning work,” explains Gage.
“So what we’re trying now is an approach where our games are very sandbox-like and you can explore them just by clicking.” So, in its current form Pile Up Poker looks like a strangely familiar blank canvas that demands a wistful study – even if you have no knowledge of poker. Gage believes it’s “affordable fun” that doesn’t encourage players to find the optimal way to win. That last one is especially important when you’re trying to appease Puzzmo scoreboard hunters. As is sometimes the case during game development, the earliest version was the exact opposite.
Gage says the first incarnation had a five-on-five grid and was inspired by video poker. Discarded cards played a bigger role, and when players avoided them, they were moved to another place in the game space. “You didn’t really throw anything away,” adds Gage. “This version was very limited, where every decision had an immediate effect. Instead of having cards in hand, these cards were on the board. You could move some of them to a higher row and then your cards would fold down and new cards would appear, but you could move less of them.
![Early Early](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt740a130ae3c5d529/blt6d801a4e19e256a1/6661e477472c5f5153c86fc2/PuP_v3.png?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Gage says the “v3” prototype is where things “get a little wild and/or messy”
“I think at the time, because I’m developing games for myself, I try to make games that replicate my experience, and at the time I was working on closing [Puzzmo] and it was a very complicated process. Then, once that happened, I had to learn to be a person who is a good leader of a small group of people. I have never done this before. My life consisted of a thousand things that I tried to learn in a million ways […] and that’s what ended the game.”
In short, this is the version Pile-up Poker it was difficult. But Gage says it was so difficult that it actually put people off playing it. There were too many permutations to consider. Too many causes and effects. Depth isn’t bad, but this incarnation threatened to drown out players.
Those frustrations eventually boiled over and culminated in a phone call with Puzzmo owner Hurst. Gage told them he had decided to cancel Pile-up Poker because that’s not the experience he wanted on the website. He believed that it was too intense and completely contrary to the project they needed to implement. “I was like, ‘we can’t make this game,'” Gage says. “We needed a new plan.”
What a difference a day makes
Gage, still upset about the cancellation, shared the news with his colleagues at an event the next day. The whole team was in town and many of them still wanted to play. With nothing to lose, Gage gave in and quickly received feedback.
“One thing that’s funny about making games is that when you make a good game, there’s always a thousand terrible games lying around,” he says. “And when you make a bad play, there’s usually a good play right next door. But sometimes it’s impossible to see.”
Gage admits that it is easier for him to see something that is very far away than the answer that is close to him. “I really tried [to see it], but I couldn’t do it. Then [our crossword editor] Brooke Huzik sat down and thought, “What if it was three cards?” What if you could play them anywhere?” Then he got into that zone very quickly, which is basically the game you see today. I spent a little more time on it and added a discard arm and it became a game.”
Gage has previously admitted that he makes games for himself. He had many successes with this technique, but this time it just didn’t work. In opening the project and his own process to external forces, he found perspective. It helped pull Pile-up Poker back from the edge and for Gage it was a pivotal moment. “I was so ready to take a radical change in what the game could have been because I just canceled it. And also because a lot of the things Brooke said were things [game designer] Jack Schlesinger kept trying to get me to hear. So it was an interesting team-building experience in a good way, and for me it related to the experience I was getting trying to do a good job [as a team leader].”
When asked if the experience means he’s now more open to collaborating a little earlier, Gage suggests it’s entirely possible, but he still believes it’s important to start creating with a consistent vision. “It’s hard because there’s tension in game design. All design projects, but especially games, are about the story you’re telling. You’re setting up the answers to the questions you’re asking people from the beginning, and sometimes that means that what’s right later on won’t be right at the beginning because the rest of the story hasn’t changed,” he explains.
“When you’re working as a game show host, you have to make sure the story is consistent. You have to balance this by listening to feedback from everyone on the team and being able to open up the design to other options. It’s a very difficult process, and even more difficult when you’re working with more than one person, I’ve definitely learned some lessons, but I also think that [challenge] it’s natural for games. The best way to do this is to start with a situation where everyone who enters [ideas] see history in the same way, but have different ideas.”
For Gage, progressive collaboration is about maintaining those formative design rhythms without stunting growth. He explains the idea of scoring a corner Pile-up Poker replaced diagonal scoring simply because it was more fun. Multipliers were added for the same reason. Despite these transformative changes, the final version still remains feels similar to the game Gage originally wanted to make, which at its purest was a card-discarding puzzle game. The attributes may vary greatly, but most importantly for Gage, his soul remains the same.