Puzzle Strike 2’s expansion, called Bold Adventures, has four new community bank decks as well as 10 more characters. The third of these bank decks is Steam Crank.
Steam Crank introduces a new mechanic: the chain combo.
Many cards have a strip at the bottom with a “chain” ability. The chain ability happens if the card you played immediately before it that turn is the same color. For example, if you play any pink card then immediately after that you play the pink card below, then you get ALL the abilities on the card:
The chain ability is always in addition to the main ability on the card, not instead of it. So in the above example, you get to swap up to three times and then, if the card you played immediately before this was pink, you get to use a crash gem.
Here are a bunch more cards that trigger chain combos, to give you a sense of it:
Because the chain mechanic triggers only on playing consecutive same-color cards, it has an effect on how you build your deck. Getting a lot of cards of a single color is even more powerful than usual because now they can give chain bonuses. That said, there’s still a balancing act. If you have a lot of blue cards, those are good at defense, but you probably need SOME non-blue cards to actually win. If you have a lot of pink cards, those are good for engine-building combos of their own, but you might need at least SOME blue defensive cards, or a green card with swaps, etc. It’s still very possible to trigger chain combos of multiple colors (meaning you play a blue, blue this turn then pink, pink next turn, etc), but you’ll want to think about a few more same-color cards than you usually draft.
That said, you could always branch out with Bejeweled Corset:
Now you can trigger any card’s chain combo without even needing to worry about colors!
The Steam Crank deck has another minor mechanic as well. It comes from these cards:
Steam Engine puts more cards in your hand, but only if they’re 0-cost cards. Note that Steam Engine itself costs 0, so if you have both copies of it in your deck, one copy could give the next (which you could then play again, since it costs 0).
Turn the Crank, on the other hand, costs 1. But it doesn’t look at just the top 4 cards of your deck—it immediately gives you ALL the 0-cost cards in your discard. This is incredibly powerful. It might return a lot of cards, which you can all instantly play (because they cost 0). Though you can’t use Turn the Crank to replay 0-cost cards you already played that same turn (because played cards don’t actually go to the discard until the end of your action phase), you can still replay all the 0-cost cards in your discard pile from previous turns.
Are there really many 0-cost cards though? There sure are, the deck has loads of them:
When you have a bunch of 0-cost cards, card draw becomes even better. It normally does not make sense to spend your last action of the turn on something that draw cards, but if you are likely to draw things that cost 0 to play, then go ahead! Research Notes comes to mind:
Do you see the connection between this 0-cost mechanic and the chain combo mechanic? The abundance of 0-cost cards in all colors makes it a lot easier to trigger those chain combos, and to trigger longer chains. For example, if you had Acid Flask and Bell Jar in your hand (shown at the start of this post), could you trigger BOTH chain combo bonuses? The answer is no unless you have a third green card to start off the sequence of greens. If you had a 0-cost green card such as Research Notes in your hand though, then you really could play Acid Flask for its main and chain ability, then Bell Jar for it’s main and chain ability.
Steam Crank is an engine builder’s dream, so see what you can do with it!