Tantalizing Tidbits

Hello sidekicks and minions, today we’re going to try to stoke your interest and quench your curiosity.

The tale of Prime War is a bit outside the normal stories of Sentinel Comics, due to the fact that the story doesn’t truly focus on the characters we’ve come to know, heroes or villains though they may be. Prime War is much more so the story of the Prime Aspects and their conflict over that no-land’s land, that place where nothing matters and everything is possible: Ur-Space. The Prime Aspects are vying for control in this place because of its unique position in the multiverse; namely, that from here one can go anywhere, given enough power. The story told within the PvP missions of Prime War games and tournaments is that of the conflict between the Aspects through their chosen standard bearers. Players will take the reins of a character in service to their aspect, and show dominance through objective-based combat in order to advance their faction’s cause. The co-op missions, on the other hand, tell the story of the various adversaries that threaten multiple realities, and how the Aspects send their adherents to shut down these existential dangers. These might be a power-mad Cult of Gloom trying to break out of a world they’ve already dominated, an entire universe of infected trying to spread the Rat Plague to another reality, or some things even more sinister and creepy! One of our favorite parts of playing with multiple realities is that we get to see how some things become gross, awe-inspiring, and occasionally disturbing when left unchecked. Not every mission will be an overblown “What-If” universe, as the Aspects will stop anything that threatens their dominance over the space between worlds, no matter where it comes from.

The mechanics of Prime War have evolved from a few different things over the last 2 years or so. Starting from Sentinel Tactics, which introduced us to character-based team PvP in a board game setting, we sought to build a system that could support this team-centered approach, with interplay between teammates’ abilities in order to maximize a character’s abilities. We also liked Character boards with unique abilities, playable power cards, player recovery instead of elimination, the hexagonal map system, and combat that was influenced by dice rolls, so we decided to use those aspects; however, we did away with multiple elevations of terrain and introduced custom dice that have binary success/conditional success states, instead of the numeric scale used for range and power in Sentinel Tactics.

We also had a big influence from an excellent video game called Atlas Reactor, which is also a character focused team tactical game. Atlas Reactor featured simultaneous action selection with action speed-based executions per round, additional bonus abilities that characters could bring into a match for one-time use effects, a resource system for a character to access their fancier abilities, map-based pickups that can enhance specific statistics of a character for a short time, and a cooldown mechanic for most abilities so they could not be used every round.

We really gelled with a restriction on ability re-use (especially coming from high-level Tactics play, where some characters could consistently pour 20+ dice per turn on attacks), so we incorporated a Meanwhile mechanic to Prime War that allows some more powerful abilities to be restricted to less-frequent use.

Player downtime was a huge sticking point for us, and the simultaneous action decision space was an excellent way to combat the waiting that players encountered on others’ turns. Players now all secretly select the action their character is taking that turn, and all players reveal their selected action simultaneously. Play then proceeds, with every action taking place during its defined Action Phase, and the potential for analysis paralysis is vastly reduced.

Neutral objectives (like map pickups) were a large focus for us since day one, as we wanted to help encourage players to fight in and over specific areas on a map over time, and not just rush to the center and slug it out; therefore, we built a robust environmental objective system that players can use in their own skirmishes to enhance their regular play.

We wanted each character to behave differently, and their fighting styles to be reflected in how they gain and spend the mechanical resource (currently) called Focus; consequently, we’ve allowed each character to gain some focus over time, as well as some characters gaining additional focus for playing to their strengths. This Focus can be spent to fuel reactions, manipulate cards in a character’s meanwhile, or to unleash devastating abilities.

Additionally, we made a mechanical representation of how Prime Aspects grant their champions power for each match in order to help them accomplish their goal. These Boons can have a number of effects, and are effective at helping characters play outside of their natural role in order to shore up a team’s weakness or enhancing a character’s strengths to allow their team domination over the field.

A few more major mechanics that had more nebulous influences were a Panel tracker, Trophy cards, Rally abilities, and the mechanics governing co-op adversaries. The Panel tracker represents the comic book that we’re playing through, and helps establish when a match is over, when players gain Focus, when threats spawn, and when some scenario events happen. Trophy cards are a method of tracking victory, where each character starts with their own, and must give it up to the character that knocks them down. The giving of a Trophy card also reveals that character’s Rally ability, which encapsulates that character’s determination to finish the fight, often by drastic means. The mechanics of Co-op Threats and Bosses are slightly in-depth for what has turned out to be a rather long post as it is, so we’ll save that for another time, but suffice to say we strove for simplicity and spectacle when pitting players against the multiverse’s adversaries.

Development Progress:(all values are rough estimates from our perspective as designers, and do not include any art, layout, editing, or proofreading work still necessary)

• Core Box:
  • Characters 95%
  • PvP Scenarios (3×3) 20%
  • Co-op Scenarios (3×3) 50%
  • System (rules, dice, maps) 90%
• Expansion 1:
  • Characters 95%
  • PvP Scenarios (2×3) 10%
  • Co-op Scenarios (3+3+5) 25%
• Conversion Kit:
  • Characters (9 FoF + 6 UR) 30%
  • Scenario Maps 30%