What is Prismata -could it be the next eSports Game?

Other night I was browsing through Kripparian's youtube page and I stumbled upon a video called
"[Prismata] Kripp Teaches & Plays Prismata" and all I could think about was "What is Prismata?"

Prismata is an easy-to-learn, fast-paced hybrid strategy game that borrows familiar elements from real-time strategy games, collectible card games, and tabletop strategy games, combining them in a radical new way. One might call it turn based Starcraft, just without a map. What makes this game different from a card game, like Hearthstone or Magic The Gathering is that instead of having a deck of cards you have workers and build orders. In your rounds you spend your resources, build out your economy and battle.
All the game mechanics are beautifully animated and if you aren't hyped already you should check out the Prismata trailer.

Basic Gameplay :

In every round of Prismata you get your set of basic workers and a random set of dynamic workers. You will get the same basic workers and a different set of dynamic workers every game. Dynamic workers are more expensice than the basic workers and bring in stratefic diversity to the game. However, to be able to play your workers you need to build up a solid economical income. To be able to do this, every player start the game with 6 Drones and 2 Engineers on the board. In Prismata you have four different types of ressources: Gold, Lightning Bolt, blood, sapphire and emerald. They are produced by certain basic workers and are needed to build more expensive workers. Drones gives you gold, engineer gives you lightning bolts, Condout emeralds, Blastforge sapphires and the Animus gives you blood at the start of your turn, actually it's pretty simple. Anyways all resources except for the gold and the emerald disappear at the end of your turn, that means if you didn't use your gold it will carry over to the next round, but your blood,sapphires and lightning bolts not. The combat system in Prismata is as easy to understand as the economic system. You need to understand two things first. Number one- there are blockers and non blocker units. Number two- there are Units that can regenerate their life and there are some units that cannot.
Droids are, for example blocker units and they have one blue cross (blue cross is the symbol for regenerable in the game), but if you use your drone to generate gold you won't be able to block an attack with this drone on your opponent's turn. Besides that there are units that gives you attack each turn. Anyways what differentiates Prismata's combat system to a lot of other games is that you can chose your block order. Deciding your build order wisely can win you games, then in order to win the game you need to destroy your enemies workers and resources. That's basically how the game works but if you want to learn more about Prismata's gameplay you should check out these two videos.





Developer : 

The Lunarch Studios is an upcoming Game Studio from Waterloo Canada. Lunarch studios was conceived in 2010 by a group of competitive gaming enthusiasts. The guys behind the Lunarch Studios were annoyed by clunky "pay to win" type of games and decided to go on the journey to create their own game. They were all MIT PhD candidates and used their free time to build up a game from scratch. Eventually they all left MIT to bring their game to the market and to where they are now. What is so interesting in Lunarch Studios is definetely their market strategy. They gave out alpha keys to popular Hearthstone streamers like Trump, Kripparian, Reynad and Kolento to host a small Hearthstone and Prismata Tournament. This is in my opinion a very interesting way to promote your game by hosting a Hearthstone tournament! If you want to check out some of the VODS click here.


So if you want to support Lunarch Studios, they are hosting a Kickstarter campaign to fund Prismata, if you like the idea of the game be sure to support them and if you want to stay tuned be sure to let them a like on Facebook, follow them Twitter and subscribe to them on Youtube! They also have their own Subreddit, go check it out!