Between Heroes and Monsters - Primal: The Awakening A Review

Primal: The Awakening (Hereafter referred to as Primal) is a 1 to 4 player card based boss battling game from Reggie Games. Originally launched via Kickstarter, Reggie Games are now moving to a webstore based platform for selling the game, this is something I greatly approve of and as such I think it's a great time to dive into this game.

In this review I'm going to break the sections apart as follows; a dive into the physical nature of the components; an overview of the setting, writing and art direction; then a breakdown of the game's player and monster mechanics, a look at the campaign structure and then a brief section on each of the game's current expansions and what extra they can bring to the table.

The Components

Primal comes in a big white box, and when I write big I would probably be better served writing it as BIG or even BEEG because it is absolutely massive. While it is not as long as the Kingdom Death or Aeon Tresspass: Odyssey (AT:O) boxes Primal's box is far taller than either of them. Here's two pictures alongside the KDM Box for scale:

The reason for this size is simply because of the miniatures, the game comes with sculpted miniatures for each of the player character pawns and every single monster held in a vacuum formed insert. Kingdom Death does not have such a space inside its box and the miniatures have to be stored elsewhere. So on that front Primal takes less storage space than Kingdom Death and Oathsworn, but more than AT:O does.

These miniatures are honestly fine in quality, not amazing, but not terrible. I'll write more about that in the art direction section, but the main thing I do have to bring up here is that Primal is not a game that needed miniatures. While the game does have a board, this board is small and simple. Monsters do not move around, they rotate on the spot and player pawns move around four sectors that surround the monster.

The main reasons for using miniatures in games are for spectacle, because they are practical to move around and because big crowd funded games must have miniatures in the box. That last reason is of course absolute nonsense and the other two reasons are also not very strong here where Primal is concerned. The miniatures barely move around and Oathsworn has had massive success with standees for monsters and plastic pawns for player pieces.

I don't begrudge the existence of the miniatures, but I do think that Reggie Games have cut a portion of their potential player base away by not offering a smaller box size that came with standees or even poker chips/cardboard with their first kickstarter. I love miniatures, I love painting miniatures, but honestly if I could go back in time and get a standee version of this game? I would, without hesitation.

So I genuinely hope that Reggie Games offer on their store a Standee version of this game, because that would really open this game up to a whole load more players. Ones who don't have time for miniatures, or have more limited storage space. However, given the production costs involved in such an endeavor, it seems unlikely that they could retool the design to have a core box shipped with standees and the miniatures moved into a separate box the way that Oathsworn set their purchasing options up.

Outside of the miniatures, the rest of the game is really high quality. The cards have a clean and clear design that is relatively easy to follow (sometimes wording can be a little weak, but it is never a deal breaker and Reggie Games are great at answering rules questions on their official discord). Some of the various tokens are a little small and I have had more than one occasion where I've temporarily mislaid one, but those are exceptions.

In particular I really like the card quality employed here, Primal is at its heart a card game that is closer to Marvel Champions in style than any other boss battling game out there; so what the cards are like to use, the snap and feel of them matters a great deal. I have sleeved the game (using the Sleeves box expansion), but that is not because the cards feel weak the way that they do in some other games, instead it is because they get a LOT of handling and shuffling through the games.

So. Much. Over Hang.

The other elements of the game are character/monster boards and various manuals. The game has a rulebook and a campaign book. If I'm honest this isn't quite enough, the game provides some excellent reference cards for character keywords/abilities, but doesn't do the same for the monsters and terrain. This results in an experience where I ended up having to add bookmarks for certain pages such as behaviour set up, terrain effects and various monster abilities.

The rulebook is also structured kind of like many Fantasy Flight Games rulebooks, where it is great when learning, but after that first game the rulebook is not so great. As such I would have preferred a “Learn to Play” book and a separate manual with the full rules. This situation isn't a deal breaker, but it could be a lot better and I'd prefer to not have to resort to printing third party files for core things such as terrain.

The Narrative, World Building and Art Direction

There is no argument that the people behind Primal's lore and appearance have some talent. The campaign has a series of mysteries to unveil through clues provided during the narrative. Likewise there is a sense of an inhabited world here, it doesn't feel as well defined as Oathsworn or ATO's do it achieve so much with so little the way that Kingdom Death can with its snapshots. It sits somewhere between those with a weighty narrative that honestly gets a little bloated at times.

There is also a secondary issue that can be encapsulated with the phrase “We have Monster Hunter at Home”. There's a lot of places where this game feels like it was originally designed to be a Monster Hunter licenced game, but didn't get there and so took its own path. This is not necessarily a negative, Primal feels comfortable and familiar in how it echoes that seminal video game series and it is honestly a better Monster Hunter game than the Steamforged Games adaptation (though don't get it twisted, I do think Monster Hunter World: The Board Game is way better than it has any right to be). It's simply very easy to describe this game as Monster Hunter (MH) adjacent and have the listener immediately understand how the game operates if they have any level of familiarity with that series.

Nowhere is this more evident than when considering the monsters and the weapons crafted from their remains. Many of the monsters will have veterans of MH drawing comparisons with some classic monsters fairly quickly. The world also could exist in the MH franchise with a small amount of changes and the campaign even follows similar beats to the classic MH style.

For example here is the Toramat

Here's the Barroth sculpt.

There are differences for sure, but it is clear that the Toramat is heavily inspired by the Barroth's design and you'll see this in a bunch of the monsters. It's a double edged sword, on one hand it helps players draw connections between the game and a familiar franchise, but on the other hand it may appear too derivative for some people. I am of the position that it is more the former than the latter.

For myself this is all fine, it made adapting to the game's setting very seamless. Though I will confess that the writing in the campaign book is too verbose (ironic coming from me I know); playing solo it isn't an issue, but with others this became a game of group reading around the camp fire and that meant at times the clues leading to the interesting unlocks got lost due to wandering attentions. Think of Oathsworn's Encounter Mode if you want an idea of the relative level of detail in the writing, it's serviceable, but too long at times – especially at the start of each chapter. That's enough about the setting, time to get onto how the game plays.

The Gameplay

Primal offers a few different ways to engage with the game, with the core box giving us a campaign and “expedition mode” a mode where you can jump in and play a single battle at a range of different levels. As the game very much considers that the players will start out with the campaign, this is the mode I'll focus on. Expedition mode is a solid enough affair, but it isn't my jam.

To start with each player will choose a character to play for the duration of the campaign; each character uses a specific weapon type exclusively and that will inform your playstyle somewhat, but as you level up you'll gain access to alternative options which will give you different ways to approach the game. The four core characters use Bow, Sword & Shield, Two-Handed Sword and Thor-Egg uses a hammer (Thoreg is the only character's name who sticks in my mind because we call him Thor Egg when playing and this image amuses me).

Once the character is chosen, you'll get a character dashboard, a starting weapon, helmet and armor, plus a healing potion. The Helmet and Armor determine your total health and the weapon dictates the contents of your deck. One shame here is the hunters come in a fixed gender, you can't play a female Thor-Egg if you wanted to; which I think is something that wouldn't have been hard to achieve; gender neutral names, an extra model for each player and the back of the hunter dashboard could have the alternative character's art there. This may not matter for most people, but my partner is one who enjoys playing female characters only, so felt excluded from choosing most options and a little frustrated that the female hunter in the core box was of the bow stereotype.

We'll dive into that deck in detail now because it is at the heart of everything that happens in Primal. Each deck is constructed from a set number of cards in four different colours. The exact ratio of these cards is determined by the weapon itself, this can vary not just from one weapon class to another, but also different weapons of the same category can have different ratios.

The four types are:

Offensive types

• Red – Attacking cards, the primary way that damage is dealt to the monster

• Blue – Manoeuvrer Cards; which reduce the monster's Struggle (more on that later)

Defensive types

• Green – Dodges

• Yellow – Parries

Green and Yellow share a lot of similarities, but there are thematic differences which can have a lot of impact in respect to the particular weapon or even monster. Some monsters require more dodging, others place more emphasis on Parries. So while a lot of the time they appear to be the same because they provide a total that determines how evasive you are in a given turn, that's just on the surface.

These cards are broken down into a few different elements. The top has from left to right the stamina cost, the card type icon and colour and the aggro icon. The Aggro Icon is unfortunately not a great contrast design, it can be easy to overlook if the icon draws aggro or not and to be honest I think that the icon should not be present at all if there is no aggro drawn.

The middle section includes the name of the card and any extra abilities it performs, the abilities are really wide ranging and offer a whole host of different benefits, some of them combo with other cards, you can get discounts, bonus damage, additional effects. There's so many that I can't list them all, they're the dressing that goes on top of the meat of the card.

The bottom has a stamina icon in the left, traits (if any) in the middle and the ID on the right. Traits are a word that is referred to by other cards, so you may be rewarded for playing a lot of Slash cards for example. The Card ID tells you if the card is a Starting one (S) or part of one of the particular development paths, these are broken into A, B, C, D & E; plus each one is split apart into a first and second tier. You can't pick A2 without already having A1 for example.

The Stamina icons in the bottom left is the last important piece and it is here where we really get into why I compared Primal to Marvel Champions; when you play a card you need to generate enough stamina to pay the cost and this is mostly done by discarding other cards from hand. This tension is great in Marvel Champions and it loses nothing at all in Primal, it's one of the most enjoyable parts of your turn, working out what cards you can afford to play and trying to optimise that for maximum impact. Add onto that the ability for other players to spend cards in order to help out the current player's turn and you have a fantastic puzzle that involves optimisation and team play I really cannot overstress how strong the coordination and team play elements are. You'll find yourself discussing not just what you are doing on your turn, but how you can work together and interlace your turns to effectively navigate the demands of the situation.

To understand the other half of the puzzle it's time to go to the monsters.

Each monster has their own dashboard, deck of behaviours, stances, perils, objectives and an attrition deck (which is shared between all monsters, but some monsters will vary this). The Dashboard has spaces for behaviours cards, usually three, which are placed face down so that you can see the icons on the back. This “signal” on the back of the card tells you what will cause that card to be resolved. That means monsters are entirely reactive in their behaviour, sometimes reacting to player actions, sometimes reacting to changes in phases and so on. The behaviour cards themselves are set by monster level, while the system is a little esoteric due to using symbols rather than numbers (and not having a reference card available meaning unless you memorise things or use a specific sorting system) it does ensure that the monsters are gradually changing as they level up over the campaign. The Level 2 monster will shed some of the Level 1 monster's moves, but not all of them and same with the Level 3 monster.

In addition to these behaviours the monster also has a stance card that determines how much damage needs to be generated to cause a wound (most monsters have 10 wounds, but the amount of damage per wound varies depending on monster, stance number and player count). It also tells you which zone(s) the monster can be damaged from. In order to explain that, we'll briefly get to the board. This has a place in the centre where the monster is deployed and then is divided into four equal zones. There can be terrain in these zones depending on the monster/scenario and the players will navigate around these zones either by moving (costs stamina) or being moved. The monster instead of moving rotates around the board and depending on where it is facing in combination with the stance cards you'll have some areas marked red indicating that Red Attack cards can deal damage when used by a hunter in that zone. The shifting of what zones are vulnerable adds a lot to both the monster's personality and the challenge of the scenario, you can't simply sit in one zone and slap its flanks mindlessly with your comically oversized sword, you're going to have to move around and find the right spots where it is vulnerable.

Eventually enough wounds will be dealt to pass a threshold printed on the monster's stance card, with that it'll move into the second stance, and later on a third one. These new stances can add more wrinkles and challenges, but they can also bring into play perils and opportunity cards. Perils are extra modifiers like Traits in Kingdom Death; opportunities are the opposite, they're a mission to complete for some benefit. Be that dealing a certain amount of damage to the tail or damaging the monster's prominent horn (to provide a couple of examples).

Then there is struggle and the behaviour cards themselves, struggle is a timer constructed from tokens, as these accumulate they'll eventually reach a threshold based on player/hunter count. When this threshold is reached the monster will Unleash and deal damage to all the hunters based on its damage value in the given stance.

So let us now return to Behaviour Cards; these cards are flipped up and resolved after the given reaction icon has been triggered. This could be after a Red attack card, at the end of a phase or sometimes right after another behaviour card resolved, eep! Also you can't simply bury your head in the sand ignore them, because the monsters also cycle their lowest number behaviour(s) at the start of a turn meaning those inevitable 'trigger on X phase' cards come back. Also because you have a limited number of round to win (10 usually) there is a consistent pressure to move forward and progress where possible.

Also at the end of a player's turn they have to draw a card from the attrition deck, if they have not played enough defensive cards then they'll take damage, too much damage and they'll get downed, losing time and also a large portion of their health when they get back into the fight. Second down and you're out. It's also worth mentioning here briefly that emptying your deck of cards causes a small amount of damage to you on the reshuffle, it adds up, especially for builds that cycle their deck very quickly.

All of this comes together to give us a battle where hunters move from zone to zone, controlling the monster's struggle and dealing damage when the situation is right. It's a really crunchy and satisfying card play experience to have, though I will note that playing solo requires two hunters and that can be very mentally taxing and fatiguing. These turns are significantly more complicated than an individual KDM survivor turn or even a heroes turn in Marvel Champions, so be aware of that if you are a solo player, but with two or three players this game excels.

The Campaign Structure

The campaign starts each time with the same fight against the Vyraxean, a Fire-Bat wyvern. This is one of the weaker parts of the campaign because it is the same monster each time despite there being multiple different Level 0 options that could alternatively be used. The first couple of times this isn't a huge deal, but be aware that there's no official rules for starting with a different monster.

After that prologue the campaign is broken apart into chapters, each chapter follows the same structure; there is an introductory passage detailing the situation as it stands; then new missions will be placed on the mission board and sometimes older missions will be retired away. This campaign comes with prompts for the expansion monsters already as a part of it, so it works smoothly with those expansions.

Then the players will spend resources to craft weapons, armor, helmets, potions and items. The resources are determined by the monster just defeated and include a mixture of elements, materials and plants. Players will have various forges based on the elemental types of the monsters they have slain, for example the Fire Forge will be unlocked at the start from defeating the Vyraxean and plant materials are spent at the Herbalist to craft single use potions.

The forges start at Level I and increase automatically at set stages to keep pace with the increasing monster level; this helps players have a smooth transition from Level 1 to Level 2 to Level 3 because they are not kept too far behind due to being able to directly upgrade their preferred weapons.

Crafting itself is as simple as spend the relevant resources and get the card; there are rules that allow some exchanging of resources between players and “the bank” along with rules to ease upgrading from a Level 1 equipment card to a level 2 version of the same thing.

In addition to being stronger, weapons, helms and items can also be constructed from different elements, changing the contents of the weapon deck, increasing/changing the base damage of your weapon attacks and also providing additional unique abilities that you can combine with the contents of your deck. There's a lot of strategy here and room to take hunters in a huge range of different directions even though all you are changing with crafting equipment-wise is a weapon, a helm, a suit of armor and an item. If you enjoy discovering and exploring builds, this is the game for you and the resource drops are even generous enough to allow you to switch things around a bit.

We have Fire, Horn, Coral, Crystal, Thunder and Metal as different element types, giving a lot of ways to explore your hunter load out and there is even a typing advantage system which gives you some benefits if you take equipment that has an advantage over the given monster. It's a modification to your deck size, which is super significant because the size of these decks is so small that shaving or adding just 1 or 2 cards has a major impact on the game experience.

Also upon defeating a monster you're also granted a vision passage; these passages should always be read out and paid attention to (perhaps even taking notes) because they offer opportunities later on to uncover the mysteries of the world and get some exciting unlocks.

However, if you fail to defeat the monster you're kicked back to the pre-depart stage, with a refund of anything spent/lost during the fight, this means there is no “fail forward” system, players will need to either master the fight or choose a different monster to tackle instead. How you feel about that is a personal thing; I appreciate having an option, but if somehow players hit a wall with every monster not having any way to move forward make cause a frustrating off-ramp point where the players might walk away from the game and not return to it. Something to be aware of.

There's more I could write about here such as terrain and how it offers opportunities like extra healing, damage or the ability to mount the monster. Or I could get into the various ways you can play the game from tank to control to support to damage. Or I could explain how some monsters put cards directly into your decks, making them worse for the duration of the battle (when you're knocked out the first time you get a wound card, but there's other cards that can be sent your way).

Primal is a deep and complex game which can be incredibly rewarding. It's not perfect, the balance between the various hunters is a little off and some combinations of hunters may struggle more than others, but what is here is something that feels both like Marvel Champions and also feels better than that game due to increased player agency and game transparency. You're not blindsided here, the game offers you space to learn, grow and predict if you are willing to pay attention to the monsters. It is absolutely an exceptional boss battler.

The Expansions

We currently have a total of 7 expansions, 1 for 3D terrain, 1 for sleeves and sleeved cards and the rest include game content. The terrain box is pretty much superfluous, if you like the idea then you'll have a good time with it. The sleeve box is pretty decent, it holds all the cards from the game and the expansions, though it is worth pointing out that there's not quite enough dividers to properly organise things.

Also the box has weird dimensions in that it isn't the same length/width as the base box. This means they don't sit well together on the shelf and that is a shame that could have been avoided. As such I think the sleeves box is decent, but not necessary, especially if you only have the core box.

(No good way to put these together, you can also see some of the expansion boxes in the background

The remaining boxes include game content and they break down into three that provide extra elements plus two monsters for each of those elements; we get Ice, Feather and Venom. As a warning my venom cards had some miscutting on the cards, but I have received replacements for them. I enjoy all three of these boxes especially how they were already baked into the core campaign path in a smart fashion. They feel like they always belonged and I would absolutely recommend them for second and later playthroughs of the campaign.

The Nightmare expansion offers two new monsters (one fire, one thunder) and also “Nightmare Monsters”; these are harder versions of existing monsters and the only shame there is we don't have nightmare versions of all monsters, only a select few. This is a fine box, but it is a little shallow in content and more something that you could pick up later on if you wanted.

The last expansion is Mount Havoc, this brings two new female hunters; one with a Heavy Gun and one with dual blades. Karah, the dual blade user, is frankly a bit over tuned and powerful, often the best thing to do when playing with her is give everything possible to her and watch her shred monsters to pieces. I won't explain how this is done, but there's a bunch of ways she can do this and honestly she's one of the few parts of the game I feel needs a balance patch. Heleren the Heavy Gun user is a bit more muted, perhaps even a little underwhelming in comparison to Karah, but she is still really satisfying to use.

Mount Havoc also comes with a mini-campaign that takes place after the main campaign's story; it's a nice idea in theory, providing a rogue-lite experience over a short number of battles, but the possible monsters here are extremely limited and that made it wear out its welcome a lot faster than I hoped. It has potential, but it needs support from a wider range of possible options.

Final Summary

Primal is a well designed, interesting and crunchy boss battler that uses its cards in a unique fashion, providing a lot of interplay between not just the players but also the players and the monsters. The “call and answer” design of the game's behaviour system gives a lot of room for some excellent play, I always appreciate a game which manages to make 'not attacking' sometimes the right choice for a player and Primal achieves this very well.

Add onto that a nicely designed campaign with secrets to uncover and branching paths not just in the base game, but also from tight integration with the additional resource types and you have a game which is well put together, making it a delight to play.

My only issues with Primal lay not with the game's mechanics, in fact I think this is an exemplary boss battler that is a joy to play. Instead it is the sheer size of the boxes and the difficulty in storing this game that cause problems. It is still sat on the floor in our gaming attic and I have no idea how to organise it in any reasonable fashion without getting some third party insert that will let me get the miniatures all into the core box with the cards held in the card/sleeve box. But even then, as noted above, the game won't look flush on the shelves because of the difference in dimensions between the core game and sleeves box.

Don't let that hold you back though, if you have the space for another chonky box in your gaming collection then there is a lot to like here and the game is different enough from both Kingdom Death and Aeon Tresspass to provide a fresh, crunchy experience that will wrinkle your brain in a satisfying manner.