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