I’ve been sitting on this review a while, waiting for Nosidam Games to launch the Kickstarter project for it. In a way, I’ve very glad I did. The initial draft of the rules I had gotten for the game were confusing, and severely affected my enjoyment of what turned out to be a very excellent game.

At its heart, Primary is a deck building game, where you get to create your deck of cards from a pool of different colors. Different color cards have different effects. The three primary colors: red, yellow, and blue have the powers of offense, support, and defense respectively. These colors can be mixed to produce green, orange, and purple effect. These have the powers of recovery, take, and control. The numbers on each card let you know how many times you can use it’s effect. Merging and splitting colors are necessary in any strategy. Combine a 2 blue and 2 red to create a 4 purple card. Later on split that 4 purple into a 2 red and 2 blue again.

Red – Red is the key offensive tool in the game and decreases your opponent’s future turns.

primaryBlue – Blue is the key defensive tool in the game and protects your future turns from being lost or effected.

Yellow – Yellow is the key supporting tool in the game and it makes your turns more powerful.

Green – Green is both defensive and supportive, and allows you to regain lost turns.

Orange – Orange is both supportive and offensive, and allows you to take your opponent’s potential turns and make them yours.

Purple – Purple is both offensive and defensive, and allows you to make your opponent’s turns less effective.

The object of the game is very simple, stay in play longer than the other players. You’re out of the game when you cannot: a) play a card on your turn, or b) sacrifice a defense counter off a card to skip your turn.

You can take a look of the updated rulebook I used to play to get a better feel of how the game actually works.

The game carries much more strategy and depth than I originally though when I received the first draft of the rules. Deck building is half the fun, and seeing how well your deck plays out is a satisfying experience.

Primary has a goal of $13,000, and as of this post has already reached around $2000 with 32 days left to go. This is a project I’d love to see funded. The game is a beautiful as it is fun, and I can’t wait to see the finished product.

A prototype copy of Primary was provided free for review by Nosidam Games.