Cheer On ‘Aristeia!’ With the Upcoming Digital Version, ‘The Hexadome’
Cheer for your favorite Aristeia! champions to upgrade them to their full digital glory in The Hexadome.
Call me USA Network between 2005 and 2016 from the way I welcome all characters. My favorite games tend to be ones with interesting and fun characters with unique abilities. I’ve sunk thousands of hours in Team Fortress 2, and I had my time with Overwatch, as we all did.
This trend continued with Aristeia!. It’s a great skirmish combat tabletop game with delightfully memorable characters and some excellent ability combo potential. So, now that it’s coming to Steam, you know I’m going to be first in line.
The game is currently in its Alpha Playtest stages. Some assets are simple placeholders and who knows might get tweaked before the official release. Still, the gameplay is solid and the only bug I’ve run into so far was my own fault. So, let’s get to the show!
The Hexadome Overview
The Hexadome is a competitive, head-to-head, turn-based, skirmish combat game. The goal of both players is to earn victory points through controlling objectives. Each team is made up of 4 champions, each with unique stats, abilities, tactics cards, and ultimate ability.
Team composition is key in The Hexadome. Each of the dozen champs has a different role, but also their own tactics. These tactics are special one-time use bonuses that can grant status effects, bonus energy, renewing used tactics, and plenty more. Tactics cost Cheer to activate.
Cheer is a resource players gain as they take actions, hold objectives, or skip their turn to hype up the crowd. In my opinion, the main use for Cheer is upgrades! Spending cheer can upgrade every ability and stat.
Upgrades, People! Upgrades!
Upgrading an ability or a stat improves the rolls for that skill. Every ability requires rolling in order to determine the effectiveness of the ability. Rolling a 0 is a miss, and rolling a ! is a crit. Rolling a crit will add some bonus to the ability, as listed on the ability itself. Some abilities will even gain multiple crit chances per roll.
This same mechanic is used in attacks but contested against the defender’s Defense roll. The difference between the rolled values determines the damage dealt. So upgrading the roll for your attack is the best way to dish out those big hits.
There are also the Sponsors to win over. By holding secondary objective spots, one team can sway the sponsors to their side. At the end of each round, sponsors award benefits to whichever side offered them more promotions.
Scoring occurs at the end of each round. Points are awarded to whichever player has the most champions in the current scoring zone. After scoring, the scoring zone moves to a new location for the next round. The match ends soon as a player has 8 victory points or whoever has the most by the end of the 5th round.
Wishlist The Hexadome in Steam
As stated, I’m playing on the Alpha Playtest, so expect some changes before the final release. You can wishlist the game on Steam right now, and hop onto the official Discord server to chat with the burgeoning community (including myself) and maybe even some devs!
So far I’m having a great time with the game and see myself playing a lot more in the future. There is a competitive ranked mode, which I will likely be avoiding. But for those that got that dog in ’em, know there’s that for you.
More than anything, I’m already excited and looking forward to them adding more champions and just seeing what crazy team comps I can come up with.
