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%

New year, new stories

Welcome to the new year!

We are so excited that you are all joining us for another year of nonsense and nonsensibility. This month we wanted to give a development update on co-op and competitive scenario play, as well as talk a little bit about working with the established characters from the Sentinels canon in this new medium.

Real quick: not everything is finalized, so some things mentioned here and in previous posts may see changes before the game ships.

We are rocketing through scenario development for co-op in the hopes of getting everything ready for art next month. We have three mission arcs with three or four scenarios in each in the core box, and three more mission arcs in the day-one expansion. So far, we’re on to “final” playtesting on two mission arcs, and are chugging through the third arc.

Co-op scenarios in Prime War are going to be objective-driven fights, with a strategic element similar to the Sentinels of the Multiverse card game. The player characters (as not everyone is a “hero” these days) are coming up against Adversaries that challenge them to think in a variety of ways to thwart the various plots and schemes throughout the various realities that we explore in Prime War. That’s not to say that there aren’t some scenarios that focus on the players plowing through waves of minions; however, most scenarios use that as a backdrop for shutting down portals, escorting civilians, analyzing infections, rescuing familiar faces, or dishing out some damage to the Big Bad. We want to engage many playstyles in our cooperative missions, so there’s options for every character to shine in some capacity, showing off why they were chosen by the Prime Aspects.

PvP scenarios in Prime War look a little different. We want to pit two teams against each other through multiple match types. The core box features a series of Capture the Flag matches, King of the Hill and Capture Point matches, and some neat variations on the classic Deathmatch-style match type. We’re working through these internally at the moment, and will be bringing these to playtesters as co-op playtesting winds down.

Each of the characters in the Sentinel Comics canon is fascinating in their own way, and we’ve been incredibly privileged to be allowed to play around in this sandbox. When we were first working on these characters, we were looking to represent three major things: who they were; what they have become; and how it feels to read about these characters as a fan. With only a character board and seven unique cards, it was essential to capture the most memorable aspects of each character while portraying how they show up in a primarily combat-centric setting. Some characters jumped out right away, telling us exactly how they would be expressed (Tempest, Blood Countess, Argent Adept), and some took a little more digging (Haka, Man-Grove); however, they’ve each been boiled down to the greatest hits to keep every card fresh and useful in a variety of situations.

We’re excited and anxious about the stories we’re telling through the scenarios and the characters themselves, and we can’t wait to have you all join in the fun we’ve been having! Thank you all for your continued interest and support!

Smith at the Forge

-P.S. Feel free to chime in with what you want to hear about next! We’re cooking up one about how we translated some of the characters from the SotM card game, but that might get detailed and therefore delayed until some other things become public.

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