I haven’t seen this game mentioned around here before. A friend gave me a key a few years ago, and I played it some. Now that it’s on Steam, they are apparently sending out Steam keys to anyone who has owned the game in the past. And they’ve added a lot of single-player content (with more to come), which has renewed my interest.
Although it’s been in development for a long time, it’s labeled as Early Access. When it leaves Early Access, I think it is supposed to become free-to-play. But before you hit your browser’s Back button, let me say that I also generally avoid any game that term applies to (with the exception of Let It Die).
Prismata is different in that spending real money gives you no advantage at all. Nor does grinding or logging in every day, other than that you’ll probably become a better player if you keep at it.
This is a pure strategy game, which means that it makes me nervous to play it. Chess is a game that I appreciate but do not enjoy all that much. Prismata approaches that line as well, but the theme and the variety keep it compelling for me.
You have no deck, but both players have access to a pool of basic units and up to eleven randomized ones (out of more than 100). Units attack, defend, and generate resources in different combinations.
I don’t think that I will ever become especially good at this game because I am unwilling to take advantage of having perfect information in perfect information games. But I enjoy it nonetheless.
I think the developers have been pretty successful in achieving their design goals. I had not read anything by them previously, but the points they brag about are what I’ve observed as the game’s strengths.
Is this comparable to Dominion in any way? Like, both players have access to a randomized pool of cards, and it’s up to them to figure out how to build the best engine with what’s available?
Yes, that’s a good comparison for how you collect new units, though in Prismata you put them directly into play rather than shuffling them into a deck. And they persist until they are destroyed by the other player.
I’ve found this game to be stressful in a way that reminds me of Android: Netrunner. Every small gain counts and a mistake can really hurt you. And unlike Netrunner, it’s always a mistake rather than sometimes bad luck with an educated guess.
This game absolutely rules, I have 70 hours on it now, and ya’ll should cop that and try it out sometime. It is keeping me sane while waiting for Artifact, and it might end up being a better game than that.
Yes, I do wish they’d go back and refine some of the art, such as the drones. But I guess the more they work on “skins” that are based on the original portraits, the less likely that becomes.
This game is fascinating! I got a beta invite a few days before this free weekend and I’ve been messing around with it a bit.
I’d agree that it’s a little ugly, but it’s really good on the UI and usability front. Lots of smart design decisions with hotkeys and how you interact with the cards.
This game actually has fantastic design, both the UI and the game itself. Everything is intuitive to interact with. The only action you ever have to do with an individual card is click, and you can click and drag multiple cards.
All the starting units are intentionally named so their hotkeys are only on the left hand side of the keyboard. The 3 tech buildings start with A, B, and C. You can hide the basic units from view once you’ve inevitably memorized them. On your turn you have unlimited undo back to the start of the turn, you can check damage before you commit to building, the game automatically adds up your attack, defense, and shows you how much gold you’ll make next turn.
It’s very clearly years and years of work, which is probably why the developers are so exited to write long articles about it.
I tired this and I’m really just not built for any card game more complicated that Hearthstone or Gwent. I can’t keep track of resources for the life of me.
Yeah, it’s got sort of a steep learning curve. I think the resources are pretty interesting once you play for a bit, but they’re certainly overwhelming at the beginning.
The early turns in this game are pretty important. It’s good to come up with a strategy and then build just enough drones and just enough tech buildings to implement that strategy. It’s a game all about efficiency, so you want to waste as few resources as possible.
It’s sort of unlike RTSs in that way; since there’s not an execution barrier to perfectly use your economy, every resource matters and any resource you waste between turns is typically inefficient. In an RTS you might spam out workers as fast as you can, but in this game you only really want as many workers that you need to enable building the set of cards you want to build.
The resource buildings are pretty neat, since you want to fit them in at efficient times, and it dictates what your options are after you build it. By watching just what tech buildings an opponent builds, you can get a good idea what their game plan is, and you can build your own tech buildings in response to try to counter (which in turn, communicates things to them).
When this game was free last weekend, the offer was used by around 100,000 bots to collect and sell Steam trading cards. This caused the game to be the fourth most active game on Steam temporarily.
And it turns out that they held the free weekend in the first place because a key giveaway had become unmanageable.
