This kind of dynamic is what makes the game so fresh, since you'll never see the same set of units twice.
As people who frequent a Dominion forum, you don't have to tell us that.
Here's a serious question though (for everybody who's playing) -- I've never been big on RTS games. Never got into Starcraft. Right now, most comparisons suggest that Prismata is more like Starcraft than Dominion in terms of gameplay feel. How big a deterrent should this be for me? I know I should just try out the demo, but I haven't had/made time yet...
I don't get all of the talk about starcraft. I'd say prismata is 50% magic, 48% dominion, and 2% starcraft. it's a round based card game.
So I think the problem with any comparison is that we're talking about comparisons across five different games, and the important mechanics are spread across multiple axes. It's not so much "Starcraft without X" or "Magic with Y," but a combination of a set of features.
Thankfully for everyone in the thread, I enjoy overanalyzing things! Let's consider the five games we're examining--Magic, Chess, Dominion, Starcraft, and Prismata--along a number of game mechanic/design axes. For the sake of "simplicity" I'm just going to look at the endpoints of the axes. Then we can consider similarities more in the mode of genetic similarity between species.
Does the Game Have: | Yes | No |
Strategy/Tactics | All | |
Luck | DM | CPS |
Economic Buildup | DPS | MC |
Time/Twitch | S | CDMP |
Unit-Based Combat | CMPS | D |
Multiple Setups | DMP | CS* |
Discrete Attacks | CDM | PS |
Tricky Math | DMP | CS |
Symmetry | CDP | MS |
Perfect Information | CP | DMS |
I'm sure we can all argue for the inclusion of other axes, and that the axes shouldn't be equally weighted, but again for simplicity, let's consider them equally important. This means that:
Games | Similarity |
D - C | 40% |
D - M | 70% |
D - S | 30% |
D - P | 60% |
P - C | 60% |
P - M | 50% |
P - S | 50% |
C - M | 50% |
C - S | 50% |
M - S | 40% |
So based on these, Prismata is more like Chess or Dominion than it is like Magic or Starcraft, though only by a little bit. Meanwhile, Dominion is a lot more like Prismata or Magic than it is like Chess or Starcraft.
(Yeah, yeah, I know, 5 slices of bacon are all similar to each other, doesn't mean any given one is 30/50/70% like the other, plus they're all delicious, but they all came from the same pork belly, or some other analogy? I dunno, it's far too late.)