It’s an epic monster hunt as you and your fellow hunters work cooperatively to take down massive monsters in this boss battler board game.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/reggiegames/primal-the-awakening

Pros

• Theme
• Game Play
• Campaign
• One-off

Cons

• Price

The Page

This is a well laid out page, and it does a good job of highlighting the right things. By that I mean that it isn’t only just showing off the minis, sure we get lots of shots of them, but they do hit on game play as well, and they have play through videos up on their page as well. And it’s not just playthrough videos, they have previews, they have how to play videos, and they have them not only in English. Now, I watched some of the ones in English, but I like that they are reaching out to a larger audience by not just having it in English.

And it’s not just in video form, they also have a ton of details on game play on the page as well. It goes through how the boss battles will work. But not just the boss battles, but how character progression goes and more. Reggie Games has created one game before this, but that one clearly went well for them, on the second try and this one they look like they are a long time professional Kickstarter company with the layout of this page.

The Game

I hadn’t checked out much game play until I saw that the Rolling Solo YouTube channel had done a playthrough of a boss battle. That really caught my attention for a few different reasons.

Firstly the card play is very interesting. I like when what you play and what order you play it in matters. Not only can it matter for how you attack and how you do defense, but it can also matter for how the monster will react. The fact that there isn’t so much a monster turn, but monster reactions to what you do is great, it feels really dynamic in how it plays out. Yes, the characters will take some attrition damage at the end of their turns, but it isn’t a big amount of damage like the monster attacking.

I also found it interesting that this wasn’t on a big map, so no fighting through minions, but more than that, no hex or square based movement. It’s simply the monster in the center of the board and four spots around it that characters can move. But it doesn’t lose a tactical nature. Depending on the phase of the monster, you go through various damage tiers, where you can even deal it damage will change, it might be the front and back and then the back and sides.

The drawing of the monsters aggression was really interesting as well. It feels thematic as one character will do a massive amount of damage and the monster will focus on them, but then another player might and the focus will change as time goes on.

Finally, the characters also seem unique. In the Rolling Solo playthrough one of them had a bow and was ranged and could basically pepper the monster with some small bits of damage which adds up over time, whereas the other was more of a tank and drew the aggression. They were able to deal out some bigger hits but not always as consistent damage.

Back or Brick

Right now, I’m leaning towards this being a Back for me, but I’m only in at $2 right now so that I can get access to the pledge manager. What really sold me on this one was the fact that it’s a big boss battler but you can do it in a stand-alone fight as well as a campaign. I have a boss battler that is coming in Oathsworn, but that’s a big epic campaign that has a massive story section as well as boss battle at the end of each story. This one is all about the boss battle, I also am really interested in it because no dice that I remember in the playthrough so while there are random elements it isn’t a purely dice chucking Amerithrash game. The only thing holding me back is the price point, which I get because of all the massive minis in it, so I’ll probably just put more money in during the pledge manager.

How about for you, is this game a back or a brick?

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