The popularity of card-based strategy games has really taken off in the last few years. Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh! have all been tremendously popular as both games and merchandise. Culdcept takes the concepts of those games and fuses them with the land ownership aspect of Monopoly. Although it sounds like a strange mix, it really works surprisingly well…to a point. While Culdcept certainly has a lot of depth, and tactics play an important role in victory, the overly chaotic nature of the game often undermines the strategic elements and pure luck is too often a determining factor in a game’s outcome.
At first glance, Culdcept appears to be a very complex game. The manual, which can be accessed at any time, is pretty thorough and explains most aspects of the game fairly well, but the best way to learn the game is to just jump right in and learn as you go. After a game or two, you’ll have the basics down and everything else follows fairly quickly. The Story mode, which is really the meat of the game, does an excellent job of slowly introducing new concepts without overwhelming the player. The first match consists of a very basic board and has only one opponent. As the game progresses, the boards become larger and more complex with different paths to follow, and eventually you’ll face multiple opponents at once. After each match, new and more powerful cards are obtained that will be necessary in order to defeat the increasingly difficult opponents that must be faced.
Before each match, you must choose which fifty cards will make up your deck. Cards come in three varieties: Creature cards are used to defend your territories and challenge your opponents, item cards can be used in battle to give your summoned creature an edge in combat, and spell cards have a wide variety of effects. For instance, one card can make you or one of your opponents move a set number of spaces. Another can weaken any summoned creature currently on the board. Deciding which cards to take into battle is vital to your success. Each match takes place on something resembling a Monopoly board. The majority of the board is made up of red, green, yellow, and blue spaces. These spaces represent land that can be bought by any of the players.
A typical turn goes something like this: First, a card is randomly drawn from the player’s deck of cards. Only six cards can be held at any one time, so it is sometimes necessary to decide which of your cards will be the least helpful to you. If you are currently holding a spell card, it can be played at this point. Next, the die is rolled to determine the number of spaces you will move. If the space is unoccupied, you can summon one of your creature cards to defend it. If another player already controls the space, you must either pay the “toll” or summon one of your creature cards to attack.
Battles are pretty straightforward. Each creature card has a set amount of strength and hit points. A creature’s strength is equal to the amount of damage they will dish out. If your creature’s attack is equal to or more than the defending creature’s hit points, you win the battle and the land is now yours. If its attack doesn’t finish off the defender, it will attack your creature in the same fashion. If your creature dies, the card is lost (for the current match). If it survives, the card goes back into your hand. In other words, the attacking creature must destroy the defender in order win the battle and avoid the toll; just surviving isn’t enough. Of course, things are never as simple as they appear. Many cards have special abilities that come into play: Some only take half damage, while others always attack first, even when defending. Item cards also complicate things a bit; both players have the option of using an item card that they are currently holding. Some item cards increase a creature’s attack, while others add hit points. There are also item cards that completely nullify attacks from specific creatures and still others that reflect attacks back at their opponent. As you can probably guess, battles in Culdcept are never a sure thing.
The object of the game is to be the first player to earn a certain amount of magic, which acts as the game’s currency. Using spell cards costs magic as does summoning creatures to attack and defend. Magic can be earned in a number of ways. The easiest way is to simply make it around the board. Passing the castle (the first space) awards an amount of magic based on how many territories you currently posses. Later in the match, however, most of your magic will come from tolls. Each territory that you posses can be leveled up for a certain amount of magic. Leveling up land serves two purposes. First, it raises the toll that other players must pay if they land on it. Secondly, it strengthens the creature defending it, making it more difficult for another player to defeat it. As in real life, you must spend money to make money. Err…magic, that is.
As in Monopoly, owning multiple territories of the same color is advantageous. Owning two of the same colored territories gives each of those defending creatures a bonus ten hit points. For each additional territory of that color acquired, an additional ten hit points is given to each of those creatures. Summoning a creature of the same color to any given territory also grants a hitpoint bonus. A little planning can go a long way in strengthening the defense of your territories.
Culdcept is a colorful but fairly basic looking game. The majority of time is spent staring at the game board so there really isn’t much to describe. The animation during battles is a nice touch, however. For instance, a bat card will take a bite out of its opponent, leaving teeth marks in the card while an archer will shoot holes into his adversary. It may not sound like much, but it’s a nice change of pace from the otherwise stagnant graphics.
Culdcept has a nice variety of music that plays during matches. It changes frequently, too, so you don’t have to listen to the same song over and over again. Some well-placed sound effects also liven up the game a bit. Again, due to the nature of the game, there simply isn’t much more that could have been done.
On paper, Culdcept looks like a well-thought out and strategic game and, at times, it is. After spending some time with the game, however, you’ll soon realize that luck plays an enormous part. Everything comes down to the cards that are drawn. Luck is an inherent part of card games, but not having much control over winning or losing can get extremely frustrating, especially in the game’s story mode. This mode is basically a series of increasingly difficult matches. Your opponents, without exception, always have better cards than you do. Now, video games always pit the player against more powerful opponents. The difference is that in those games, you are in direct control of your fate. In Culdcept, you just have to hope that you get the cards you need and your opponent does not. Card and board games are fun when all of the competitors are on equal footing, but here, that just isn’t the case. I eventually defeated each opponent, but it simply meant that the dice rolls went my way, not necessarily that I played a good game.
The other main problem with Culdcept is that the game just gets too chaotic. In the beginning of the game, there are never any definites, but if you play your most powerful creature card, you can be fairly certain that it will win. Later in the game, however, there are so many powerful cards with an enormous variety of effects that nothing can be counted on. All too often a vastly powerful creature will fall to a scrub card because of some crazy effect from an item or spell card. The spell cards are probably more detrimental to the game than anything else. Some of these just give a ridiculous advantage, like being able to halve any creature’s hit points on the board before even entering battle. At this point, strategy is pretty much thrown out the window.
Culdcept’s saving grace is its multiplayer mode. Many of the game’s problems all but disappear when you’re playing with a friend. For instance, each player can import their own deck if they’ve played the single-player game, but it is really more fun to use the basic deck so that everyone is on the same level. This also means that many of the more powerful cards that throw off the game’s balance aren’t available, which, in my opinion, leads to a more strategic game. The fact that the game is just as much about luck as skill doesn’t change, however. I’ve spent dozens of hours playing the game, yet when playing with a friend who had only played a few times, I still lost as often as I won.
Culdcept is one of those games that you’ll either love or hate. Card game fanatics who are willing to accept that victory or defeat is often out of their control will probably enjoy the game a great deal. However, those of you who wish to have a greater hand in your own fate will likely be frustrated by the sheer randomness of it all.
