Prismata is a digital card game with no deck building. Instead of deck building, the players are given identical sets of units to choose from, a standardized base set plus some randomly chosen units to make each game a little different. After that, the game is about building up the resources needed to enact one’s strategy while watching what the enemy is doing to try to predict their movements. It’s got all the transparency of a board game’s rules with a uinque and brilliant blend of the strategy found in deck building card games and real time strategy games.



The video below gives a much better overview of the game than I can give in a text description, but here’s a brief attempt. At the beginning of a match, both players start out with several gold generating drones and a couple of engineers, which are weak defenders who also generate the energy resource needed to construct more drones. Most other units require a combination of gold and one or more other resources to build, so players need to start out by building up more drones and other resource-generating units, just like they would do at the beginning of an RTS game.

The whole game follows the general arc of the buildup of an RTS game, to be honest. Get more resources ASAP and use them to build enough defense to keep oneself alive while creating an overwhelming force with which to crush the opponent. But Prismata skips the fog of war; a player can see what units and resources their opponent has and knows what units they can purchase, which means that the player has everything they need to anticipate and try to preempt the opponent’s next moves.

To top it off, the game is very easy to get into. There are some very helpful videos available and the playable tutorial matches start out as practical introductions to the basics but then turn into puzzles that lead the player into more advanced strategy. Turns are divided into three simple phases with actions like collecting resources, assigning offense and defense, and playing new cards being fast and easy to do. There are many helpful keyboard shortcuts, rebindable but bound by default to make it easy to play with one hand on the mouse and the other on the keyboard.

Prismata is planned to be free to play, but in the Kickstarter pitch, Lunarch Studios says that they have turned to crowdfunding because they want to avoid pay to win and believe that a traditional publisher would force them to monetize the game in a way they find distasteful. It seems that they plan to use a free to play model in which purchases are entirely cosmetic.

At time of this writing, the Kickstarter campaign has three days to go and they’ve raised over $125,000 CAD of their $140,000 CAD (approx. $120,000 USD) goal. It’s to be available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Backers are promised alpha access within 24 hours of pledging.

[Prismata]