Primacy - Kickstarter Preview
Transcript
Hi, my name is Paul Groen and in this video Mark from Ninja Geek Games is going to be giving you an overview of Primacy. This game is coming to Kickstarter on September 15th, 20126. Check the link in the description of this video for more details. Hello and welcome. I'm Mark from Ninja Geek Games and in this video I'll be providing you with an overview of Primacy, a two to four player game from Spielcraft Games. For generations now, humanity has entered cyberspace. uploading their consciousness into a high for a shared reality. However, the primacy that led this interface is no more and people have begun to wake up. As a result, gangs and syndicates have taken advantage of the ensuing chaos. All in order to control the city for their own agenda. So, where do you come in? Well, you'll take on the role of one of these factions in an attempt to rise to power and control the city for yourself. During play, you'll need to recruit and move soldiers around the city to control important locations.
Upgrade your central processing unit with cybernetics for advanced actions and improve public relations with the people for victory points. At the time of this video, the campaign goes live on Kickstarter on the 15th of September. And there'll be a link to the campaign in the description. Also note that this is just a prototype, so components and rules that you see here are subject to change. So let's plug in, download, and enter the digital world. So the aim of the game is to earn victory points that are tracked here where the player with the most at the end of the game wins. Some VPs are gained during battle and others are earned at the end of the game through the five endame scoring objectives that are randomly placed at setup. All players will get a chance to score here, but certain actions in the game may result in you being able to place your own scoring markers on these cards to boost the values of the BPs earned. And I'll explain this later in the video. Each player gets a player board that essentially represents their console or central processing unit. And it's here you'll be adding cybernetic tiles that improve the actions that you take during your turn. Each of the six actions are included here. And basically, the more tiles you have in an action column, the more times you can carry it out. Each player starts the game with the same console that details your starting cybernetic tiles as well as the custom rewards for gaining and adding more. However, players do have the options to choose from asymmetric console screens that slide in over this base version, but these aren't available yet. But you do get to select a faction tile that sits nicely within your console. And these provide ongoing and passive abilities during play and are double-sided, so you get a vast choice available. Although the rules for these are still being tweaked, they allow for
you to gain cards, increase on certain tracks, will deploy extra soldiers onto the map, for example. During the game, you'll be wanting to recruit, move your soldiers around the map, engage in battle, and control hex's of certain colors. These provide you with credits, allowing you to gain more cybernetics for your consoles. soldiers that you can deploy as well as being able to advance up certain tracks. Briefly, the PR track is a multiplier that boosts your progression of the support track based on certain map areas that you control. The support track in the middle could see you adding score markers to endame scoring cards to generate VPs located on this track for your faction. So, everything in the game is closely linked. Each player gets two actions per turn where there are no rounds in the game. players just continuously take turns until one of the three endgame conditions are reached. These are when one player has placed all four of their scoring markers on the endame scoring objective cards or all of the slots have been claimed or if one player has no control markers on the map. Each player starts the game with three of these control markers on the map. And as you move soldiers around and take hex's, you're able to add more, like a show of dominance. And as we'll see, you can even replace opponent markers with your own. The actions a player can take are determined by the rondle with the novel action selection mechanic. The rondle has seven wedges showing the six actions available to you and three cursor tokens that have a choice of two different actions on each of them. These are all placed randomly as setup. So you'll get a variable layout with each game. During your turn, you choose one of the cursor tokens, move it clockwise, and then take one of the two actions on the cursor
that you moved as well as the action on the rond wedge that you landed on. You can move the cursor any number of spaces, but you can never land on a wedge that already has one in place. But if you want to pass one other cursor, you must spend VPs to jump over the token. During this time, if a red cursor passes over the upload line, then all players get to take an upload action. And this is how you get your scoring markers onto the objective cards that I mentioned earlier. Also, if playing with lower player counts, all of the cursor tokens are read, so the upload action occurs more often. I'll explain the upload action later in the video because it's first better to get an understanding of the fundamentals of the game, especially control of map hex's. So, it will make more sense when I go over it later. The six different actions in the game are upgrade, income, command, recruit, weapons, and juice.
And the actions are all carried out the same way, whether it was selected from the rond wedge or the cursor. And these are also aligned on your console board. I've already mentioned that the power of an action is based on how many cybernetic tiles you have in place for that action roll on your console board. And it generally means you get to do that action a number of times with just one of your two actions. Now, when you select the upgrade action, you can add more of these cybernetic tiles to your console board if you've got the cash. To do this, you select one of the cybernetic tiles in a marketlike area, pay the cost, and then move the token to the top row, which becomes more expensive for the next turn. You then take the matching cybernetic tile from the supply and place it on your console board in the associated action row. And you can do this a number of times based on how many cybernetic upgrade tiles you already have in place. Adding these tiles to your console may have another costing credits, which is the game currency. So this can become a costly action, but it may provide you with a reward or bonus. So later in the game, if you selected a command tile, you could end up moving soldiers around the map. or if you place the associated tile in this column, you could get some weapon cards that are used in battle. So you have a lot of potential for some free actions here. Therefore, this means that upgrade is more of an expensive preparatory action. So that over time, this offers a weaker version of the basic action when a tile is placed on your console. So at least you get to do something.
Area control is also an important aspect of the game where you want to control certain map hexes to block off opponent soldiers, force them into battle, or gain the hex benefit. Taking the recruit action allows you to deploy soldiers into areas that you control at one soldier per cybernetic tile that you have in the recruit column on your console board. And you then get to make use of the blue hex benefit by recruiting even more soldiers. Therefore, you could start to stack quite a few soldiers onto hex's, but you can swap out three of your soldiers and replace them with a car mele. This actually doesn't do anything, but it does stop you from running out of soldiers for future actions. It's basically a multiplier token. Now, control of the different colored areas or hex types is important for recruitment, as we've just seen, but also for the income action. Here, you gain credits based on the number of cybernetic tiles that you have in your console area for this action, as well as for the yellow hexes that you control that all provide different credit values. As credits are primarily used for buying and placing cybernetics onto your console and provide more options on the rondle during action selection, these hex's can become highly contested areas. As a result, if you want to control more areas on the map, the command action lets you move your units around, and you'll get a movement point allowance from your console command row.
You get one movement point for each command cybernetic tile that you have on your console board. And here, you can move any number of soldiers within a group onto one adjacent hex. If you have multiple movement points, you can spend these to split movements between groups of soldiers. And if you have more, you can move them again or select units in other hexes, so you can be quite versatile here. The map is randomly created as setup, and although there's a fixed shape based on player count, you'll end up with a mixed placement of colored hex's, some with these green walls that soldiers cannot move through. Soldier movement allows you to place control markers onto your newly gained hexes. And if Zavi, you could end up taking over another player's hex if it's left undefended. The game starts with neutral soldiers already in play just to spice things up a bit. And if you decide to move into these areas and claim the hexone, the neutral soldiers fight back. For this type of combat, both you and the neutral units lose soldiers at a 1:1 ratio.
[snorts] So you have to go in with at least one more unit than the neutral team has if you want to control the hex. However, moving to an area with other player soldiers, and you initiate battle that's resolved at the end of the turn. What's unusual here is that regardless of how many areas of soldiers from different players in, only one battle is carried out and all players involved jump in. Battle is carried out on a separate battle map that each player involved in combat has and is initially played out secretly behind a screen until the resolution step. Battle requires players to play weapon cards from hand, but is also mixed in with unit strength, which involves the number of soldiers in contested areas on the map. Each battle map has three objectives that are PR, scrap, and conquest. Although this name is being changed to rep during development of the game, and players are looking to win two out of the three objectives. In order to win battle, you will need to place hidden weapon cards onto one or more of the objective areas on the battle map.
But you could bluff and place cards on some or none of the objectives. These cards are then revealed and the objectives are resolved in order for each of the contested hex's on the map with what players have in front of them. For each objective, units may be removed from hex's on the map, and then there's a remaining unit strength comparison, as well as a reward for winning the objective. Before we look closer at battle, each player begins the game with a starting hand of weapon cards to help them in battle. But as an action, you can gain more to bolster your faction. To gain these, there's a market area of weapon cards of four different levels that you can gain in different ways. You can pay credits to claim weapon cards from the market of a level equal to the number of weapon cybernetic tolls that you have on your console, but you must then discard from hand. And you can take cards from the draw deck or the display area. However, if you don't have the cash, you can level up instead. First, choose a weapon level card from hand and discard it. And then take another card from the market area. Again, the number of levels that you can go up is based on your weapon cybernetic tiles. This is the cheaper method, but your hand size won't increase. Again, in this instance, if the display doesn't take your fancy, you can always opt to draw blindly from the deck. Each weapon card shows up to three different icons to be used in battle. That are kill shots, shields, and firepower. And within each objective, there can be any number of weapon cards present. So, during battle, you first resolve the PR objective for each player for the contested hex. Here, you compare how many killshot and shield icons each player has on their assigned cards and remove units from the contested area for any excess kill
shots. Then you sum the number of remaining units in the hex and the value of the firepower icons to see who has the highest strength where this player wins the PR objective. You then move on to the scrap objective and repeat the same process and then finally onto conquest. The player who won each individual objective gets a little reward. So for PR, you move up the PR track. But for the scrap objective, it depends on the color of the hex where battle took place where you can gain credits, advancements on the support track, and juice cards that I've not explained yet. At this stage, the winner of this objective can spend two credits to gain VPs. And you can also gain VPs if you win the contested objective. And again, this iconography will change during development. The player who won two out of the three objectives is the overall winner, where the loser removes all units from the hex. The winner still has to lose half their units, but they now control the hex.
The last action is juice, where you can gain juice cards to your play area, where you have options to take from a market or draw deck. At this stage, you also get to play soldiers back onto the map in blue hexes that you control. See, I told you controlling these hex's was important. Although you're limited to how many of these cards you can play on your turn, these cards provide boost to kill shot, shield, and firepower values during battle or special abilities such as selecting actions on the rondle instead of moving cursors, moving up one of the tracks, spending credits to get additional actions, or just getting free stuff. for my playthrough. These are actually very beneficial to help buff up your turns. Earlier in the video, I mentioned that the upload action is taken by all players when the red cursor passes the upload line. To upload, you multiply the number of terminal icons that can be found on red map hex's by your PR track value and then advance your marker on the support track that many spaces. And all players do this. If you complete a loop, you pay the cost in credits and you can now place a scoring marker on one of the objective cards that locks it in place. And this provides a huge boost to endame scoring.
These scoring cards are simple requirements like control of the most specific colored hex area, having the most credits at the end of the game or being highest on a particular track. Now, regardless if you have a scoring marker on a scoring card or not, you will still gain between one and five VPs for its requirement. However, if you have one of your tokens on a scoring card during the scoring phase, you get double the points, but the spots are limited, so don't delay here. The game ends in one of three ways. This occurs when one player has placed all of their scoring markers on the scoring cards, all spots on the scoring cards have been claimed, or if hex area control has been highly contested and one player has no more control markers on the map. Your in-game VPs are then added to VP's game from scoring cards where the player with the most wins the game.
There are a lot of decisions to make here. Most notable are action selection. Do you bolster the upgrade area on your console so that when you gain tiles later in the game, you can claim quite a few for one or two action types for some really big turns? Or do you spread these thinly over all actions over the course of the game so you don't waste turns on just purchasing tiles? Remember that the more tiles you place on an action row on your console, you could end up getting a cheeky action as a bonus, but it does cost. So, you really need to think about the layout of your console. Area control is also very competitive, and this is because you'll gain credits and soldiers of plenty, as well as the possibility of progressing up the support track from an upload. Sometimes you may move a cursor on the rdle that doesn't wholly benefit your turn with the actions that you want to take, but it generates an upload. This is great if you have a load of red hexes under your control because you may be able to add those price of scoring markers for bigger endgame VPs. If multiple hex's and/or players are involved in combat, you resolve each of the three objectives for each of the contested areas. But you all make use of the same weapon cards that were secretly placed on the battlemat. So you really need to think about which cards benefit a particular objective because you might not win all the contested hex's here.
Primacy has a lot going on, but everything seems to tie in quite closely, and there are options to go down different routes to get what you want. And this is where those powerful juice cards come in. These let you gain more actions for your turn, which are normally limited, or free weapons for battle to give you the edge over your opponent. The campaign for Primacy goes live on Kickstarter on the 15th of September. And I hope this video gave you a good overview of the game. Thanks for watching. I'm Mark from Ninja Geek Games and on behalf of Gaming Rules, cheers.
Heat.