On Summoning Flows, Mobile Infrastructure and Divine Dragons

Recently we got to travel some cities in Asia and while doing that we happened to be playing quite a lot of Yugioh, whenever we rode a subway. This blog post may be a bit dumb, as we felt like comparing the technique with which we built up increasingly more complicated combos in the game, with the way we often see developments be executed in projects. 

Left: Taipei, top right: Hongkong, and bottom right: Seoul.
 All cities have amazing mobile infrastructure, so that we never encountered any connectivity issues.

But before we start getting into the mechanics, we want to point out one of the major differences between Asia and Europe: infrastructure! There are the obvious infrastructure achievements like the Taipei101 or the amazing Incheon bridge, which we take every time when coming from our going to ICN Airport in Korea. But there is also another, to us equally amazing yet invisible piece of infrastructure, mobile networks. After coming back Europe we noticed how we'd often lose connection to the game whenever we were in a subway or train, which virtually never happened in Asia. Even on the high speed train from Taipei to Kaohsiung, we never once lost signal. The mobile infrastructure in Asia was not built for playing games, but by playing, one can easily see the high level of quality that went into building and maintaining the networks. Coming from Europe, we can't help but marvel at those achievements. 

Flow chart of the effect and summoning actions in order to play Stardust Sifr Divine Dragon in one turn (which totally can be the first turn!)

Next we want to briefly explain the core mechanic of the game, how we personally went about advancing our gameplay and why we feel reminded of projet development. While on first glance Yugioh looks similar to games like MTG or Lorcana, i.e. a TGC where you summon creatures that fight, it has a very different core gameplay. It is about summoning a strong biest or group of biests and who ever achieves getting the strongest, is going to win the game. Most games only last for two or three turns. 

The flow chart shows a combo of cards which we play in succession, each arrow means the card either affects or summons the next. The whole chain starts with a single card and ends with two divine dragons, with which we usally win. To beat our gameplay one must stop us from completing this chain of cards. It is not how we started though. When first learning the game, we had a much shorter chain, resulting in a much weaker dragon. Through playing the game (one subway ride at a time) we kept discovering new cards to add to our chain, making it either more efficient or resulting in stronger outcomes. 

This bottom up approach we also encounter often times in software development projects, where an architecture is chosen and developed. And over time, i.e. multiple projects, we learn and find ways to enhance the architecture, making it more efficient or giving it improved performance. An alternative approach is to study decks / architectures before starting anything and building up a major deck as-planned. The question is then, will this theoretical deck perform as expected when in practice?

This dragon master mage is probably our favorite card. Summoning it requires a different yet equally complex flow of cards.

Lastly we want to shout out to the team at Konami, who developed the game. The graphics are fantastic, the animations on point and everything from game design to sound effects was amazing to us. Thanks to them, we have had many great subway rides on our trip.