#prismata

Um. Potato?

Happy Halloween!

The deal with Prismata is that it’s a fun game and you should play it even though it’s 7 years old and not very well known.

Prismata is a board building game with perfect information. Both players have access to the exact same pool of units, both players can see the entirety of the other player’s board, and there are no units with any randomness: everything does exactly what it says it does and nothing else. There’s a generic base set that includes basic economy units like drones and resource generators, as well as a basic attacker and defender for each color, then anywhere from 1 to 11 special units are added to the selection.

There are 5 resources

Energy: created by engineers, used to buy drones.

Gold, created by drones. Used to buy, well, everything.

Behemium (Blue, or B): The defensive resource produced by the Blastforge, which costs 5 gold. Any unit that can absorb a half-decent amount of damage will require B. Blue has some offensive units as well, but they usually come in the form of burst damage which requires sacrificing other units or resources (Drake, Grenade Mech, Odin) or flexible units that let you choose between damage and some other resource (Militia, Auride Core, Thermite Core).

Replicase (Red, or R): The offensive resource produced by the Animus, which costs 6 gold but produced two R per turn. Offensive red units range from cheap, fast, aggressive units that fall off in the midgame (Electrovore, Grimbotch, Perforator) to big, expensive haymaker cards that you base your entire strategy around (Amporilla, Tatsu Nullifier, Lucina Spinos).

Gaussite (Green, or G): The alternative/hybrid resource produced by the Conduit, which costs 4 gold. Green persists between turns, like Gold and unlike Energy, Red, or Blue. Green units are all over the place and often have their own unique mechanics, ranging from multi-purpose damage units (Mahar Rectifier, Asteri Cannon) to ‘frost’ units that freeze defenders without damaging them (Cryo Ray, Nivo Charge), to ‘fragile’ units that can’t absorb damage (Aegis, Innervi Field).

Which brings me to the next topic: how offense and defense work. At the end of your turn, all the damage you’ve generated gets added together into a big pool. At the start of the other player’s turn, they have to decide how their units will block that damage. When a unit is selected, it takes damage up to its hit points. It works like MtG - a Wall has 3 hit points, so if it absorbs 2 damage, it goes back to 3 health as soon as the damage phase is over, and can absorb 2 points of damage indefinitely. Centurion is one of the best defenders in the game with 6 hp, meaning it can absorb up to 5 points of damage indefinitely. The exception is fragile units - their health goes down with each damage point and stays down unless the unit has some kind of regeneration. Arranging your defense so that you can absorb as much damage as possible is a big part of the game.

But like I said at the beginning, every game is essentially a mirror match: both players have access to the exact same options, and you win by recognizing what strategies the units work well with and how you might counter those strategies with other units. Is it worth being greedy to get that big game-winning unit, or would an aggressive build run over you before you can even afford it? If you go for an aggressive build, how could the other player try to come back after they have their defenses up? Since all the resources have different costs, which resource you choose first will affect your economy for the rest of the game, since you always want to be as efficient as possible with your gold and resources.

But here’s where it gets more complicated. Player 1 starts with 6 drones and 2 engineers. To balance out the first turn advantage, player 2 starts with 7 drones and 2 engineers. This actually changes a lot: the way the numbers work out, player 1 can efficiently build any resource on turn 3 without cutting drones, or go for a very effective greedy build by buying an extra engineer on turn 2. Player 2’s best openings are a turn 2 Conduit into turn 3 blastforge - flexible and very efficient use of money but also slower - or a VERY effective aggressive ‘fast animus’ build by skipping a drone on turn 2 to buy an animus, which lets you build attackers (usually the Tarsier from the base set, which is a cheap attacker in exchange for taking a 2-turn build time) while still buying drones, but can be slowed down if the other player starts putting damage on the board too.

Keep in mind that I’m saying this as a dedicated casual player, but it seems to me that player 2’s fast animus is the north star that the meta revolves around. On some level every game comes down to player 1 looking at the unique units and asking “does any of this counter a fast animus,” and player 2 asking “is any of this better than a fast animus.” And that’s honestly my biggest problem with the game is that the tarsier is a little bit too strong of a unit for the base set, but to be honest it’s probably more accurate to say that I like goofy builds and a lot of games end up with me getting run over while I’m busy buying Doomed Mechs or whatever.

Today, all I wanted was straight lines. So instead of feeling bad, I leveraged it to my advantage. So here’s Prismata, or as Ophinia’d call them “We needed 4 party members to balance the game so here they be” They never talk and seem to be completely uncaring what happens. So she’s not wrong.

I know about the bug squad, SSSh that was August

Prismata is a gemstone fox, who shoots weaponized love. Ophinia constantly questions the morality of forcing enemies to like you, but it never seems to bother the one who never speaks. They move with care and grace, kinda like Bayonetta but you never get the idea they’re having a blast. 

To make things worse, every one of Prismata’s specials is a very poor acronym. Aimed Special Shots might explain why they never speak.

In high school in 2001, I drew a dragon.

He was an ocean-faring dragon named Prismata, the father of one of the main characters in a story I wanted to write called “Adrift.” The story centered around a small pond dragon named Koi that gets swept out to sea and meets a young sea dragon named Prism- Prismata’s son. Prismata has gone missing (”missing,” I know where he went, he ran off with Amethyst), leaving an imbalance in the local ecosystem’s hierarchy, as Prismata previously protected a huge swath of the ocean in the area. Prism has been struggling to hold onto the same territory against a young mongrel dragon named Rife that is determined to prove his worth. Koi arrives in the middle of this, and helps them to come to peaceful terms so they will take him home.

My mom, @mamaspark, adored the original drawing of Prismata, enough that she wanted to make a quilt of the drawing. In 2006, I redrew the drawing with a little simpler design, and she made the lineart into a pattern (pictured above, slightly chewed up by her cat, Finny, who was Helping as cats are wont to do). SIxteen years later, today, she presented it to me for my birthday!

The piecing on it is absolutely amazing, down to the little black claws that are actually individual pieces of fabric she stitched on with hair-thin thread. She sent it out for quilting to someone that quilted in the bubbles and the swirling water. The rainbow fabric on the edges came from a friend of hers. A lot of work and a lot of anxiety went into this, but it turned out perfectly imo!!

I used Inktense pencils then water to blend them. It’s drying now. After it’s dry, I’ll add the hot fox crystal bubbles. I’m almost finished!!