Pride, Publishers, and Playtesting

Hey all,

We are terribly sorry for our lack of updates over the last few months. We’ve been caught up with day jobs and preparing materials on our end to get everything ready for the demos at Gen Con.

We recently came back from a week of meetings with Greater Than Games to help clarify and resolve some of the more ambiguous pieces of the support mechanic and the co-operative mode to make sure that new players have as few barriers to play as possible. We’ve been working on this system for a little over two years now, and we were skeptical that changes were needed, as we had been very comfortable with the system for the last several months. However, a good developer brings things to a designer that are problematic, and a good publisher has an eye out for what may turn new players off. In >G, we are incredibly lucky to have both, as well as an uncompromising desire for this game to be the best that it can be. There were some hard discussions about complexity and demographic reach that helped us to realize that Prime War needed to be more than just a fun game for us, and therefore needed to evolve in a couple of areas in order to really blossom.

All that to say: Co-operative play is getting one more facelift; and after this week, we’re glad that >G pushed for another iteration, because we may have very well been complacent and content with the previous version. The new structure is more fully integrated with the activation phases that characters use, simplifies minion math and management, and is a little more intuitive for new players. We’re still putting it through its paces in order to fully evaluate its capability and to iron out any new snags that may have cropped up in the modifications, and after that, we’ll get to updating the existing scenarios to work with the new system. It’s been a long and contentious journey to this version of co-op play, but initial feedback from >G playtests have been incredibly promising.

We want to be very clear to anyone who has some anxiety about what may sound like us bending over backward for the Co-operative mode: nothing is being sacrificed from Versus play in order to make Co-op better. This will always be an excellent team vs. team game for those of you who want to match wits and cunning against your foes at the other end of the table. The simple truth has always been (and continues to be) that co-operative play is an incredibly frustrating thing to get just right, and therefore needs a little more attention paid to its inner workings. The core rules that govern rounds, combat, movement, Meanwhile, and terrain are all super solid and create a really fun playground to try different team compositions, strategies, and combos for new and veteran players alike!

We also got to discuss some neat options for possible content to go in the box, but we’ve been told that is heavily dependent on the quotes that are received from the manufacturer. Learning things about the board game industry is always fun and weird… This is also one of the reasons we’ve been hesitant to talk about any of the specific scenario content, as we’re incredibly unsure about what will all make it into the final boxes, at least for the next couple of months.

Once again, our sincerest apologies for the radio silence. We know you are all just as eager to hear about Prime War as we are to tell you about it, and we’re sorry we haven’t been able to keep you as up to date as either of us would like. We’re hopeful that at Gen Con we’ll be able to show off some fancy assets, and by the end of the year you’ll be able to see some neato promotional material that we had some fun talks about this week!

Smith at the Forge

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%
Versus Scenarios (3×3) 20%
Co-op Scenarios (3×3) 50% (restructuring of co-op system re-set some progress here)
System (rules, dice, maps, environments) 85%
Co-op system(rules, threat/boss structure) 85%
Expansion 1:
Characters 95%
Versus Scenarios (2×3) 20%
Co-op Scenarios (3+3+5) 45% (restructuring of co-op system re-set some progress here)
Conversion Kit:
Characters (9 FoF + 6 UR) 90%
Scenario Maps 30%