Prismata: A New Hybrid Strategy Game

Hi everyone,

For the last few years I've been on the development team for a strategy game called Prismata. Prismata is a perfect information, deterministic, turn-based strategy game, making it an abstract strategy game like most games on Little Golem. However, it combines elements from collectible card games like Magic and from real-time strategy games like Starcraft: in Prismata, players take turns spending their resources, building up their economies, constructing an army, and obliterating one another until only one side remains. This economies-and-armies theme makes the game feel very different from other abstract strategy games.

We recently started a Kickstarter campaign. Please check it out if you're interested in finding out more!

This message is confusing:

> an abstract strategy game like most games

> very different from other abstract strategy games.

The claim aboutuniqueness of economies-and-armies theme is highly questionable (Antike Duellum, for instance).

I won't even start on the claim about Starcraft.

alihv: Prismata is an abstract strategy game, but different from other abstract strategy games in feel. Sorry if my explanation was confusing.

Doesn't Antike Duellum have event cards that must be shuffled? That means it is not an abstract strategy game.

Also, I don't think I made any claim about Starcraft at all. I only said Prismata borrows elements from it. There's no need to be combative/negative, I'm only trying to share a project I'm excited about (which I thought might interest the LG community).

> That means it is not an abstract strategy game.

Technically that's true, although the cards influence the game pretty little. OK, here's a corrected example: any of the two-player variants of Antike.

> I don’t think I made any claim about Starcraft at all. I only said Prismata borrows elements from it.

Yup, that claim. I won't start on it.

> There’s no need to be combative/negative

Look, I haven't even said anything about the game itself. I just feel that your marketing is a little over the top.

alihv: Antike definitely looks like a cool game. I've never played it. However, it still seems very different from Prismata. It looks like Antike's focus is on cities and expansion, making it similar to a game like Civilization. Prismata's focus, on the other hand, is on the tradeoff between military and economy (as well as between different military techs). This makes Prismata more similar to a deterministic version of Magic: the Gathering or a turn-based version of Starcraft (but without a map).

OK, I suggest you to look into board games like Antike, Caylus and (if you insist) Starcraft: The Board Game because questions will inevitably keep popping up asking for comparisons with those. I don't understand your marketing strategy at all - but that's your strategy, not mine. I wish you luck and I'm curious how things will turn out.

It seems to me that Prismata has a strong theme, which disqualifies it as an abstract game, whatever the mechanics. In addition, the first post in this thread seemed to me  to be advertising for a commercial venture, which I believe to be an inappropriate usage of the LG forum.

Kerry: I guess that's a matter of the definition of an abstract strategy game. When we started working on this game, it had no theme - the theme was added fairly recently.

Prismata will be free once completed. Since I think it is an interesting new deterministic strategy game, I thought it would interest the LG community. I've been playing on LG for years, and people post about new games or variants all the time. Yes, Prismata is commercial, but so are many board games, and again, Prismata will be free.

Peronally, I don't see any problem with posting a link about a game - even if it is not entirely abstract and even if it is commercial.

Shalev, is there a page somewhere with the rules of the game?

ypercube, an explanation of the rules can be found here.

Abstract games can't have theme! I think that is pedantic. If you can find a theme that meshes well with an abstract system, that's just great! Take Go, an abstract game that has been around for thousands of years.

Go has a strong theme which is right up to the moment. You deploy paratroopers anywhere, including behind the enemy lines. If a group of paratroopers do not have access to a clearing where a helicopter can support them, they are cut off, overwhelmed and taken prisoner. But none of that bars Go from being an abstract game.

As for theme, Scott A. Boorman wrote a book, "THE PROTRACTED GAME a wei-ch'i interpretation of maoist revolutionary strategy"So, I do not think, rich theme automatically disqualifies a game from being abstract.

It is unlikely a game built up with an eye only on abstract principles will easily coincide with a strong theme. But if it happens, that's great. It is not a disqualification, it would be something rare an precious, IMHO.

Here's one definition of abstract:  "not representing or imitating external reality or the objects of nature." In my understanding, "abstract game" contrasts with "theme game." Of course, a theme can be added to any abstract game with sufficient imagination. Likewise any theme game can be made abstract by removing the theme.

Since the proposed definition of abstract game excludes chess, I wouldn't endorse it.

Chess is not my favorite game, but chess is one of the most paradigmatic abstract games we have. If you're interested in defining terms that exclude chess and arguing that they're more pure, you might find yourself at home in rec.games.abstract...

By a strict definition, tomatoes are fruits and watermelons are berries. However, such a definition is unusable since it tells you nothing about why people eat tomatoes and why people eat watermelons.

Same with games. We do love to play abstract games not because we hate theme, right?

Some one said "abstraction means not representing or imitating external reality or objects of reality".

Please do not tell the mathematicians this. They think that abstraction is " the stripping away of all that is not essential  leaving only that which is strictly necessary for the theoretical treatment to be undertaken.

If you say Newton's law  F = M*A is not about objects of nature, I suggest that you duck. Physicists are likely to through rotten tomatoes at you :-)

Abstract games have a bias towards mechanics first, with theme a distant second. There is one recent abstract game that models the flight of a flock of birds.You play just with counters on a hexagonal board with a movement mechanic and not a picture or model of a bird in sight!

I've thought of responding because, at least in my mind, I know what I'm talking about. But I get the sense that I'm swimming against the tide, as it were, so I'm going to leave it. Good luck with Prismata!

Very much a Yucata.de type game, not of a simple enough design which is what this site is maybe all about

cool game, I just tried the offline version for a couple hours. a lot fun playing it :)

Thanks purgency!