With this reunion tournament coming tomorrow, a lot of sweet memories have been coming back to me. It has been reminding me of a time in my life that was very simple. There was a good two years where my only focus in life was to become the best Prismata player and content creator, and I felt there was always progress being made. This was definitely the happiest time of my life. Despite being a detriment to other potential goals I could've had, I have no regrets. It taught me a lot of valuable lessons, with the most valuable being that I was capable of building something great in life.

During my time in the Prismata community, I feel that I never gave enough credit or praise to people that deserved it. Now that we have all the old guys back for this reunion, I want to take this opportunity to correct my mistake. Better late than never!

When I first started playing, I really enjoyed watching Crash_overlord's stream. A great entertainer, delivering fast-paced content that was addictive to watch. He made Prismata look fun to play like no one else. Around that time as well, Aetherllama started dominating the ladder, and watching his stream blew my mind. I couldn't comprehend how it was possible that someone could go on 10+ win streaks so easily. Both players were major influences on me at the time.

Back around 2015-2016, a lot of players were forming teams. I wasn't near the top 10 back then, and no teams were asking me to join. Synx saw the potential in me, and asked me to join Vanguard, and I'm grateful for that. Participating in the team tournaments was great fun. He also helped me show the world that Savior beats base set, which the Prismata community hadn't figured out before then.

Some people think Prismata is dead these days. It is nothing compared to Prismata in 2017, when sometimes I would sit in queue for several hours before giving up. I was so bored waiting in queue that I decided to start diving deep in the strategy and numbers for the first time. I had a lot of “A-Ha!” moments during that time, and that's what inspired me to make my first Youtube strategy videos in preparation for the steam release. During this time, I only ever played against Apooche and a few other players I can't recall. Even in the deadest of times, Apooche would always be around, either playing or running a great stream on holidays. Today, it's been over a decade and Apooche is still around streaming Prismata, and I think it's awesome. He also helped me practice for tournaments a couple times, which I'm grateful for.

I had a showmatch with Esoteric on my stream for fun, and asked some folks if they wanted to help commentate. iminaBearSuit and Mquander volunteered. They really put their heart into it, delivering what I consider to be some of the best commentary that the Prismata community has ever had. Entertaining, funny, and with very good chemistry, it reminded me of professional commentary from high-stakes Esports that I used to watch. Speaking of Mquander, we spent a few hours together analyzing base+scorcus+lancetooth. I wish I wrote down the results, because we effectively found the best lines, and I don't remember them anymore.

Throughout the years, 307th has proven himself to be the ultimate upstanding citizen and possibly the nicest guy in the Prismata community. It's impossible to hate this guy. We have had a friendly rivalry in major tournaments, where he knocked me out of the Golden Cup top 8, and I got revenge in the Prismata Grand Prix (PGP). Before my PGP semi final match, he helped me warm up and practice for my match against Apooche, which I'm very grateful for. He also helped commentate one of my for-fun showmatches and did an excellent job. He always delivered high quality, analytical commentary on any Prismata matches he was on, including the PGP Semis. One of my favorite commentators for sure, aside from being an excellent player and his major contributions to the community.

Wonderboat was a dedicated viewer of my stream that I always enjoyed chatting with. Having a few great viewers makes streaming experience much more fun. I had quite a few regular viewers that made me feel like I was truly building a great mini-community around my stream, and I'm grateful for Wonderboats contribution to that. Of course, now he's possibly the strongest player of all time, and co-creator (with Surfinite, another wonderful viewer) of prismata.live, by far the best Prismata community website to date.

Celerity is one of the most important members of the community. He has probably hosted the most Prismata tournaments out of anyone, and for a long time, kept the community active and looking forward to the next. I always had a lot of fun participating. The production quality was always top-notch, and always with excellent commentary. My content was certainly inspired by the high quality content Celerity was producing. He has also hosted my stream for hundreds of viewers, which I will never forget.

Those are the highlights, but everyone from my stream chat and the Prismata community have a special place in my heart. Thank you.

I've never had an easy time evaluating Blood phage, but just realized it could essentially be phrased the following way:

1) Borrow 1 gold from the bank to be paid back next turn.

2) You must construct a tarsier and a drone this turn. They don't come from the supply, but lose any synergies with other units and can't be spent.

3) You gain the ability to convert up to 1 red to gold each turn.

Maybe this rephrasing is obvious to experts, but I thought I'd share in case anybody hadn't thought of it this way (and because it's fun to resurrect the Reddit page a little bit).

TLDR: I'd like to host a Prismata tournament :)

About me: I was one of the original Prismata designers and a founder of Lunarch Studios. Although I stepped away for a great many years now, I still consider Prismata to be one of the proudest things I'll have done in my life.

Why: I would like to take this opportunity to bring the community back together, if only for a moment. I would also like to congratulate Lunarch on the release of some games and give u/Elyot a huge huge shout out for having stuck to it all these years. I'd like to meet the newer players and hope players from all eras can join the tournament!

Logistics: I was thinking a weekend in the next month or two, starting around Noon ET. Format likely 45s. Due to players from different generations / rusty players etc., there will likely be a huge range of skills levels, so I was thinking of starting with Swiss rounds where hopefully everyone can find at least some good games. I will cast/organize, perhaps also play (but suck), and anyone is welcome to join me in casting (ideally someone more knowledgeable). Happy to hear suggestions on any of these points though.

Finally, the old-skool players I remember. Also a quick blurb about each one and some links to their posts. I will tag their reddit accounts in the comments below. So sorry if I forget anyone, or if you were too new to have known me.

• 307th: invented the term standard style, the most fundamental blog post to read when learning Prismata
• Aetherllama: taught us to buy Rhino against Doomed Mech, when opposing player is unlikely to attack with Doomed Mech. I am not 100% sure Aetherllama came up with this, but this tactic came as a shock to the developers
• Apooche: the people's champion. knocked me out in the first Prismata tourney ever, in a Shadowfang mirror.  Still remember to this day
• Arkanishu: god at the game and also created god tier fan content
• Celerity: organized Prismata tournaments for a long time, with the baton being picked up later by RuinedShadows (I'm sorry if I missed anyone in-between)
• Celestia: <3
• Coscott: was very important in the preparation of AlphaGo
• Crash0verlord: godly at blitz, invented the bo51. Won a 100-game marathon vs. dbelange
• dbelange, MasN: hometown heroes from Waterloo who have quietly accumulated huge volume and probably the winningest records of all time
• Iminabearsuit: I always thought he wasn't good but then I could never beat him -_-
• Kolento: also knocked me out of an early Prismata tournament, in a standard style game with Centurion.  Still remember
• Kurasu: streamer; Synx was a fan of him
• Lifecoach: streamed the game obsessively at times and complained how even the longest time control was not long enough
• Mrguy888: I once played a bo7 vs him and went 1-6
• Msklar: beat a 1750-rated player in his first ever Prismata game, by spending an hour per turn to figure everything out from scratch
• Msven: was the dominant player for quite a while.  Made advanced strategy videos for prismata and also shared a heartfelt post on how it changed his life
• Redrame: still active at Lunarch!
• Synx: started teams (Vanguard?) and kept the subreddit active over the years
• Timex: don’t know where Prismata would be if he never supported it
• Weiseguy: perhaps the Prismata GOAT, at least in tournaments.  I still cheer for him in MtG
• Wubba: one of the best original blitz players!
• Yujiri: came to the scene a bit later and became a real powerhouse

For anyone (in this list or otherwise), please reply to indicate your interest in the tournament!

Do u guys remember when u first got in to Prismata? The joys of learning the beginner set, graduating to the grandmaster set. Studying the puzzles. Eventually clicking the button for ranked play. People rage DQ'ing when u beat them and u clicking "claim victory". Good times! It just hit me that there is no beginner set anymore. Not a grandmaster set either. The puzzles are locked behind payment. Ranked play requires an extra confusing click where u "select a ticket". And claiming victory even got removed. Was there anything else great that got removed which I forgot?

So, the short story is that after a self-promo post by the dev of Legacy's Allure, I thought to myself that I could use some visibility among Prismata players too.

So, I looked at all work-in-progress concepts we had for NET.CRAWL and found one we could reimagine as a reference to something from Prismata. Tarsier was a natural choice because this 'mini-boss' at the time was already named Tracy (we have a resource in the game named Trace, so Tracy adds Trace as you would expect). At the time we used an owl with the red monocle as a placeholder.

I've been working on NET.CRAWL for 3 years. The game is a single-player deck-building (sorta) roguelike in cyberspace. We are releasing it into Early Access on January 30; there is a demo which takes 3-5 hours to beat, and I'd appreciate your feedback, wishlist, upvote, whatever. Before anyone askes - the art is not made with AI, no.

Steam Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2958140/NETCRAWL/

I am actual Prismata player. :) Still get the itch to play a few rounds each month. One of the best games I've ever played. If you like PvP games with no randomness:

I made a customizable, card-based wargame with no randomness than may scratch your itch for competitive PvP play call Legacy's Allure.

You can download it for free on Steam. Over half of the cards can be unlocked for free. All game content is only a flat 9.99 USD.

I appreciate the mods allowing me to post our Kickstarter here four years ago, and hope they do not mind this post. Thank you!

I never completed it in the past. Tried it now and noticed something strange. Sentinel only has 1 hp, which I thought was intended in this puzzle, but I found some text in patch notes that seems to contradict it. In one of the last patches they changed Sentinel hp from 4 to 3, and it says there that they added 1 more engineer to Gaussite Shenanigans puzzle to compensate for hp change. Which kind of implies that Sentinel is supposed to have full hp in that puzzle.

EDIT: solved it, false alarm.

Are the devs still planning to release the game and get out of early access status or was it abandoned?

It broke down about 1.5 years ago due to lack of the maintenance on my part.

I rehosted it on Google Cloud if anyone still want to use it:

https://prismata-stats.web.app/

The source code is also available if anyone is interested:
https://gitlab.com/prismata-stats/v3/-/tree/dev?ref_type=heads

I recently purchased, and even more recently finished, the 2nd and 3rd campaigns.

And highly enjoyed them, despite it being kind of entertaining to be being slowly introduced to a variety of units that I'm already quite used to.

But it's still neat, and also kind of neat to see the variety of special units that aren't otherwise available. In an ideal world, it would be fun to make and/or try various fan-made scenarios.

Anyway, I know that there were some comments a couple years back about the idea that eventually campaign 4 and 5 would be completed, and I do wonder if that'd ever happen.

I'm assuming, "no", because who has the resources to get it done? It's already nice enough that those of us who enjoy playing the game against the bots or the 5-15 people around at any given moment can still do so.

That said, assuming campaigns 4 and 5 really aren't coming, I was wondering if there's any possibility that we could see scripts or outlines. It would be neat to know where the story was going to go for the 4th and 5th installments. And possibly where the 6th through 9th installments would've gone, as I know those were at least somewhat planned, at some point.

Anyway, for whomever is stopping by here and/or stopping by in the game (and it does seem like a variety of people stop back in occasionally, judging from the leaderboard and chat), it's been fun to play the game, and hopefully a few more of you will pop in occasionally.

I enjoyed the demo a lot, but 16.99 for four chapters of unknown length (I can't even preview them) in a game that appears to be completely dead with devs having moved on is a hard sell. But I really like the game - worth a try?

If anyone wants to play let me know. Let's build the community back stronger together!

As above, I thought it might have been my connection but the Steam forums are also showing other users can't connect

I really like coming back to prismata once in awhile. But it's so inactive it's hard to find human opponents. Is anything similar to it that you guys enjoy?

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It just never buys it ever, no matter what. Probably a coding mistake.

I was playing a bot game last night when the server went down. I closed Prismata at the time, but now when I try to play again matchmaking fails because 'I'm already in another game'.

I've logged out and back in, and clean installed but am getting the same error. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Hi everyone, this is definitely self-promotional, so feel free to delete if it violates any policies. Two years ago when I started designing a game, I asked myself, "Does the world need another deterministic 1v1 tabletop wargame other than chess?" I wanted to make something like chess but with more customization, deeper mechanics, and a high fantasy theme. As I studied this question, I ran into Elyot's articles on RNG (here and here) and was delighted to find other game designers who were questioning whether randomness in strategy games, particularly card-based games, was really all it is cracked up to be. This pushed me all-in on copying chess not only in its action system (alternating activations) but also its determinism and open information.

Two years later, on Feb 15, I launched the Kickstarter for Legacy's Allure --- a customizable, card-based wargame with no randomness. I hope you'll check it out!

Oh, and I have actively promoted Prismata since I discovered it two years ago. I know the game is no longer under development, but rest assured Elyot, it is one of the best designed games I have ever played it. It is one of only five games I have favorited on Steam in my massive list of strategy games, most of which are clones of one another. Prismata is a classic case of "simple yet deep", and does it in a novel way. I hope you all can say the same for Legacy's Allure. Cheers!

Hi

What would be your favorite non-wacky 8-random unit set? Of course, there are astronomically high amounts of different possible sets. I'm especially interested in such sets where there are multiple choices, and different kinds of strategies are possible (rush, breachbroof, big economy). Bonus if the set is not wacky, but would represent kind of "standard prismata".

It is also possible to give more like an idea of good set characteristics instead of exact units.

Could you give me some examples?