Puzzle King Tetris is a Korean bootleg Tetris that fell from the sky like a meteor. You might be fooled by its crusty audio and glitchy graphics, but inside is one of the most competitive versus Tetris games of its era that is also fun at basically every level of play. This guide will go over its concepts and strategies so you can feel confident when playing with friends or competing in bracket.
The core conceit of PKTet is this: any time you send a double or greater, you send that many lines plus your character's attack statistic over to your opponent, which will eventually arrive in real time as an attack pattern unique to your character. Damage arrives irrespective of whether or not your opponent is holding a piece, so they're going to have to move fast because:
If there's a damage making its way to your board and you clear even a single, it will immediately get reflected back to your opponent. What this means is that you need to set up your board in such a way that you not only can send a pile of damage on command, but you also need to be poised to reflect your opponent's inevitable counterattack. You need to be looking not only at your piece, your queue, your board, and planning all of this, but you should also look at your opponent's board, piece, and queue so you can catch them off guard and send them damage while they're hemming and hawing about an O piece they can't clear with. Understanding this helps make PKTet's bizarre choices like having completely different piece queues for both players, a hard drop slow enough for opponents to visually react to, or memoryless piece generation, begin to make sense.
Now that we have a grasp on the core conceit of the game, let's examine the primary strategy: two wide. You're going to try to build a two wide well that's plenty deep anywhere on the board, and the reason is that, with the exception of the line piece, every other piece will automatically clear a line if thrown into a two wide well, meaning that even if you don't clear cleanly, you'll always be able to defend yourself against an attack, and be available to attack as well.
However, what to do with an I piece? If you leave a foot at the bottom of the two wide well so you can clear with it, it turns into a 1 wide well and now your flexible build becomes a fairly rigid build that's difficult to combo off of. Instead, we're going to look at an important skill that gains new strategic value in this game: skimming.
Skimming usually refers to taking singles with the explicit purpose of simplifying your board or downstacking. Here, skimming lets you defend yourself from damage without eating lines from your two wide well, which usually means that you get more mileage out of your stack in general. I encourage you to familiarize yourself with clearing in this manner because of the incredible value it can get you over the course of the game. You don't have to memorize the following scenarios; the most important thing is to understand the concept:
With clearing taken care of, we should make a brief detour to talk about the character meta: It does and doesn't matter.
So having an attack statistic above Scurd's is valuable, if only because juicing attacks that your opponent can't defend against is good. However, speed is by far a more valuable statistic, because characters like Farmer are so slow that your opponent likely will be able to place three pieces before damage arrives, even if you're only poking.
Bear in mind, of course, that the speed of singles actually matters: the faster your single moves, the sooner it will reflect your opponent's garbage, which means that it will be closer to your opponent, giving them less time to place pieces and bat it back, so being slower is worse both offensively and defensively.
The final consideration when picking a character is damage pattern. For most characters, there isn't a compelling counterstack available.
Sorry but you're just not downstacking this.
Scurd is fairly straightforward to downstack and return if you get lucky on I pieces. Marry and Farmer are borderline impossible to downstack. Cockhu and Pinkie are both possible to downstack a token amount of damage from, but the amount of risk and commitment to counterstacking basically exceeds the value of returning damage this way. Fundamentally the game is about playing footsies and tennis with two wides and skims, and while I encourage you to pick Marry or Cocki-u if you wish to win a tournament, ultimately fundamentals matter far, far more than character selection does.
You can play this game right now on the internet with your friends with smoooooooth rollback netcode using Fightcade, and if you'd like to play in a tournament of it at some point in the future, I encourage you to head on down to Puzzle Wednesday to stay posted on this and other upcoming events.
(If you struggle to find this game available, it is also listed in the default FBNeo and likely MAME romsets as "4in1boot")
