Bullet was one of the things that made the last part of the Dark Times tolerable at my house. I'm glad Mork found a character he could get into for the art, because I like this game a lot and I wanted us to be in there somewhere. Anne-Claire is a an optional item in the new " Bullet Universe" Kickstarter, but we'd launched it as a charity goodie originally and that turned over ten thousand and change to mental health charities. So, yay! But her design is really neat, and deserves to be part of a larger set too. I had a lot of fun filling Google Sheets fields with her custom text.
There are a couple games that take Capcom's "Super Puzzle Fighter" energy and try to manifest it in a boardgame - one of my favorites, maybe the first game I ever tried to become competitive at, is David Sirlin's original Puzzle Strike (in its physical or digital incarnations). You certainly battle with "gems," but it abstracts this out into a game about combos. It makes sense but isn't really literal. Which I get - making a whole game about literally matching gems is like… would that even work? Well, it turns out that it does work, and it's called Bullet.
It's best thought of as something like an asymmetrical fighting game, but it can also be played in teams, and every character can be flipped to become a boss you can battle cooperatively. Gems fall from the top and you have to use each characters unique "patterns" to clear them. I wish them the absolute best in their Kickstarter, and if you have Tabletop Simulator the scripted mod for Bullet is incredible, packed with official and community content, and essentially just plays like a videogame version of the real thing. You're probably gonna back it on Kickstarter if you play that, though. Just saying.
(CW)TB
