Primacy preview— Circle gets the hex

Rondels are making a comeback, and Alex Wolf is leading the charge with Primacy's area control. I loved the economic rondel area control in Imperial 2030, but if Alex keeps honing it here like he has since we first saw Primacy at Origins 24, it's going to wind up so sharp just handling the box will draw blood.

During setup, everyone's going to draft their board positions and choose their asymmetric abilities, which look to be the gentle nudge of being a smidge better at x or y part of the game rather than the dramatic “have a great economy but get your teeth kicked in” of other offerings. Once you start digging into the meat of the game, the decisions you made during setup come back to help or hurt, as controlled hexes give an array of economy boosts from bonuses tied to use of a specific token on the rondel to an extra dollop of dudes.

Just about every facet of gameplay has its own twist, and the most unique that stood out most to me was the freeform nature of the rondel, usually one of our hobby's  more restrictive mechanics. There is no player ownership over the action tokens, and the only rule governing token advancement is that tokens can't coexist or jump over each other, with the next token in order acting as the hard limit for its predecessor. Advancing one token like crazy might be what you need to enact your strategy, but that does come with the compromise of opening up a bunch of options for the token before. Likewise, if I'm tired of the player after me getting too much value from moving the map boon token, nothing's stopping me from just cozying it up to the next token. No boon for you.

The other big highlight is combat resolution, which hits that elusive sweet spot of strategic and quick to resolve. Whenever someone rolls up on someone else's turf, boards and screens go out, and the participants allot their gear cards to control of the hex, doing violence, and getting points. It's beautiful, in a way that lets even a single guy threaten a horde with the gear to back it up: maintaining control may mean sacrificing a ton of plastic, unless you think they don't care about taking either and are just sending them in to reap the points. Could be, or you could just get blown out.

Speaking of gear, throughout the game, everyone's gonna be grabbing upgrades, slowly speccing themselves into what they're really good at at the expense of other things. You want to do that thing and make one guy scary, or a stack absolutely unassailable? Then you'll have to spec hard into gear, but that also means you probably won't wind up with a bunch of the rulebreaker cards. I know, plenty of games have some form of upgrade system, but every playtest of Primacy has left me feeling like I built my own asymmetric faction from the ground up, and I kinda dig that.