Notation to talk about moves in Duelyst

Hello everyone. Today we tackle an interesting issue that comes up quite often when we discuss our games with others.

Have you had a wonderful game where you exhibit amazing positioning skills, outplay your opponent and win a close contest? Of course. But how do you convey what exactly happened in the absence of a replay? Indeed, how do you tell someone where your Dancing Blades is being played, in relation to the rest of the board? I think having a notation system is extremely important for a game that utilises a board like Duelyst. This is also rather useful for some writers like myself who illustrate actions on the board and sometimes actions get a little complicated in simple text.

First: An empty board –

partly true. I said empty, but it has markings!

Zyx Notation System

The basic foundation of the method is
‘Name Side of Board (number of tiles Horizontal, number of tiles Vertical)’

Player 1 General starts on Left (1, 3) abbreviated to L(1,3)
Player 2 General starts on R(1,3)

Player 1 Faie plays a 2 mana minion Crystal Cloaker diagonally up (Hexagon),
a standard opening, is denoted as:
1. Faie L(3,3) Cloaker L(4,2)

If the Cloaker was placed diagonally down on the Diamond mark,
It would be 1. Faie L(3,3) Cloaker L(4,4)

If a Mini-jax spawns on the Triangle mark, it will be
Mini-jax L(1,1)

From the Player 2 perspective, let’s say Argeon plays a defensive start after moving one tile diagonally up and deploys the Knight one tile diagonally up (This allows him to contest the mana orb next turn). This would be:
… 1 Argeon R(3,3) Knight R(3,1)

For any given turn, gaining a mana orb is ‘+1‘, Attacking something is ‘Attacker x Target‘ and buffs can be denoted by ‘Target + Buff‘. DW and OG refer to the obvious minion effects.

Finally, the Middle row is its own notation –
the top and bottom mana orbs are M1 and M5 respectively.
The tile marked with the Circle is M3.

Time for a dry run – can you understand what is happening below without seeing it? Use the empty board to make sense of the moves.

Wings of Mechaz0r! R(4,3) +1 Heartseeker L(1,2) Kaleos L(3,3)
Argeon R(3,3) Knight R(4,2) Argeon x Wings

Wings of Mechaz0r on middle mana orb, using the extra mana to play a Heartseeker above starting tile and then moving Kaleos 2 forward, followed by Argeon moving forward 2, playing a Silverguard Knight above the Wings and then hitting Wings. All of this condensed into two short lines.

That was not too bad, was it? We do not need to write comprehensive reports of the move-lists so often we don’t need more than two lines of descriptive notation to get our point across. The most common things will be Where and What happens next – and this notation will help us immensely in that situation.

Why a system like this one? I think simplicity is key. This uses no numbers higher than 5, Left and Right are universally easy to comprehend, and (x,y) co-ordinates are also a fairly well-known way to denote squares on a grid that most of us learn at a young age.

So if I now say,
Argeon M3 Argeon x Reaper of the Nine Moons M2 DW Grandmaster Z’ir M2

you can feel Argeon’s pain. Through notation.