The Con Days Are Over, the Con Days are Done

We had an excellent weekend at PAX Unplugged demo-ing the co-op mode of Prime War, and we’re very grateful for everyone who came out to play with us!

Since our last showing at Gen Con, we’ve gone to St. Louis to meet with Greater Than Games, finalized a lot of character work, and revamped the threat system for Co-op play.

Co-op’s major change from the Gen Con preview is that threats can now act either before or after a player’s action. Previously, the threats always acted before a player, and were able to interrupt player’s choices pretty significantly; now, the majority of Threat cards activate after the player’s action, and only truly surprising or significant threats act before the player. We also simplified the threat’s targeting structure, allowing players to manipulate who is being targeted by which threats and reducing the amount of “ganging up” that was seen at Gen Con. All of these changes led to a system that is now much more friendly and fun! The playtesters have been working through the first mission arc of the co-op story (the first scenario of which we demoed at PAX Unplugged), and everything seems to be going very well so far.

The characters have been fairly solid, without changes, for about a month now, with playtesters reporting a fairly even win rate in competitive play with characters regardless of allies or enemy teams. Currently, we are toying with some enhancements to character’s methods of movement, as most scenario play sees a lot of use from the movement card and we wanted to make sure players never feel like they are “wasting” a card play. This will necessitate another round of re-balancing; however, these enhancements are not intended to shake up the combat style or complexity of a character, so the level of impact on balance and power level should be fairly minor, and allow for rapid iteration and finalization.

We got to play a “high level” competitive match while we were in St. Louis, which only whetted our appetite for the potential competitive scene. We brought the Prime Aspect’s Boons into play, giving every character an interesting and powerful augmentation to their own abilities and allowing for more varied and clever tactical choices to be made by each team. While we were there, we also tested our mettle against some of the Bosses of Prime War’s co-operative mode, taking the fight to some recognizable, but wildly different, faces from across the disparate realities. There was also an incredibly productive meeting about the graphic design of the iconography and layout, as well as the component design of the maps, scenario books, threat and environment tokens, and box shape.

Now that we’re not constantly cramming for Cons, there should be a more regular structure to our updates here, many apologies for being in the dark for the last few months. Feel free to let us know what you want to hear about, and we might make that the focus of our next post!

I cannot express enough thanks to the playtesters who have gotten us this far, and the intrepid souls who ventured into the Block with us this weekend to try out Co-op! You are all super in my book.

–Smith at the Forge

Gen Con Debrief

Whew! Everyone’s home, mostly recovered from Con Crud and lost sleep, and ready to get back at it!

We are extremely grateful to everyone who came by the >G demo room to check out Prime War; your experiences and feedback was invaluable to our process moving forward. We learned a few things about the “best” way to demo Prime War that will influence the structure of the rulebook, as well as what we bring to PAX Unplugged later this year. We got a chance to run two dozen or so team deathmatch games, including a small handful of 3v3 matches that were truly a spectacle to behold!

Several of you were brave enough to try out Co-op play, and we are incredibly grateful for your time and patience. Many of you expressed your excitement that your were able to fight alongside your friends, and some were disappointed in the timing of some of the enemies’ actions. We’ve taken all of the feedback we’ve gotten from everyone and are looking to tweak some of how the threats behave in order to reduce the frequency of dead rounds. Being Knocked Down is a staple of the game, and should be present in the co-operative play; however, it is currently almost always preventing player actions, whereas that is much less common in PvP play.

We’re excited to start a new round of playtesting in the coming weeks, with major foci on polishing the core box characters and finalizing the co-op threat system. We will also start introducing more scenario play, built from the modular environmental objective system that some of you got to see.

Once again, excessive amounts of gratitude for those of you who came to play Prime War, we are truly overwhelmed by your graciousness and enthusiasm!

Until next time,
–Smith at the Forge

System Streamlining

Hey everyone!

We wanted to give an update about the recent changes we’ve made to the core system. The game rests on a few major pillars: Round structure, Combat, Movement, and Environments, and there have been major upgrades over the past month with the intention of sifting down each of these pillars to find the simplicity and fun inside.

Round Structure: We previously had each player select a card secretly from their hand, reveal those cards simultaneously, then execute any actions in a 20-step action order. This was tedious, and made tracking who had gone and who still needed to go a fairly frustrating hassle. We have now reduced the 20 action orders to 5 Action Phases, with Start and End phases before and after the Action Phases for use by environment cards. This makes it very easy to go through each phase individually, ask if anyone has any actions during that phase, take those actions, and proceed to the next phase very quickly.

Combat(or more specifically, Dice): The three classes of dice used in the game had, up until recently, been more or less identical, except for the slightly reduced odds of guaranteed success as players went from the d4s to the d12s. Since day one, we wanted the different die classes to feel like they represented different types of skills, and different levels of proficiency. The d4s have now been changed to be reliable successes, with a slight bit of maneuverability if a blow doesn’t quite land(3Hit, 1Shift). The d8s are now truly the jack of all trades, with half of the faces being a success, one as a Vital hit, one face as a Shift, and the other two faces as our conditional successes(Opportunity and Support). The d12s are now all about the power, with four Vital faces, but also introduce three blank faces, as this is power with much less control. The other five faces are made up of three Support and two Opportunity, allowing a power player to make the most out of very large hits, if they can position themselves.

Movement: The Shift faces on the dice that we mentioned earlier are fairly new as well. Play had often become more static once people had closed in on each other, with characters preferring to lob attacks until someone went down in a blaze of glory. Adding the Shift face, which allows attackers or defenders to Shift one extra hex per die that shows that face once the attack has been resolved, has breathed new life into combat, especially for characters at range. Now, characters that want to stay away from the chaos may find themselves being closed upon by the very enemies they are attacking, and characters that want to be a little more mischievous can slip away after making their attacks.

Environment: The environment has been a major facet of the game since the very beginning. Players need a reason to fight, a reason to fight here, and a reason to fight now. Integrating environmental Objectives that allow the players to gain bonuses, trigger hazards, and acquire alternate paths to victory keeps every match fresh and exciting. We’ve cooked up a more straightforward way to identify what each environment card does, how they interact, and how players can trigger them that has made utilizing this aspect of the game much more welcoming to newcomers, while allowing veteran players to maximize the utility of their specific character’s abilities.

Thank you all for checking in, we can’t wait to show off how everything looks!

–Smith at the Forge