Architect Recommends: Prismata (Patreon)

Hi, and welcome to a series of short game recommendations exclusively for my Patrons, in these articles I’ll talk to you about a game you probably should play and the reasons why I think it’s interesting and/or worth your time.

In the spirit of that, let’s take a look at Prismata, a game that about 75% of you are going to take one look at and immediately write off.

Prismata is a competitive economy-building game that pits two players against each other to see who can build the most robots and blow up the other guy. The actual backstory to why you’re doing whatever you’re doing is more or less not important- it’s something about wars being fought by remote-controlled nanobots or whatever. What IS important is that this game gets very bonkers, very fast.

The closest comparison would be the tabletop game dominion, which sees you building a medieval kingdom from randomised resources to compete with other players. Prismata takes this a step further thanks to the digital format with activatable abilities and an incredibly sleek UI.

At the start of each game, you’re given some drones, which make money, and engineers which make energy. Simple enough. Energy helps you build new drones, and money builds all sorts of things, like resource producing structures in three different flavours, which in turn enable you to build a whole variety of crazy robots, each with their own effects. Games quickly turn into these hugely complex battles of efficiency as you try to squeeze every last drop of value out of each of your units.

Whilst you might start out with those cute little drones, in just a few turns you’llbe branching out into armies of grenade-spewing mechs, monkeys with lasers strapped to their faces, alien spaceships, comets and more. What struck me is how well balanced the whole thing is- despite the fact that each game’s pool of available units is randomly selected (with a few staples like my beloved Gauss turret) no one strategy seems overpowered, and I found myself getting stomped into the dirt by a variety of different approaches. 

Prismata is by no means a simple game, and whilst the campaign and training missions do a decent job of teaching you the basics, the depths of prismata are potentially limitless- seriously, I’ve barely scratched the surface but if you’re the type to optimise build orders and play mind games with your opponents, there’s potentially thousands of hours of content up for grabs here, and the game’s not even finished yet!

A turn based competitive economy game with limitless complexity is not exactly the easiest sell but if you’re willing to get really stuck into Prismata and work out when the right turn to build your first thorium dynamo is (turn two, by the way) then this is one of the deepest and most rewarding games to come out this year.

Oh by the way did I mention that dragging your mouse over a row of units to activate them all is THE most satisfying thing in the world. 

Prismata is available on Steam for £19.49 https://prismata.net/

EDIT/ADDENDUM: I totally forgot I said I'd do that dauntless review, whoops, err, that'll get done at some point.