Culdcept Saga -- Part 2: Santana Village
1So, while I'm feeling SUPER overly generous (out of weirdly misplaced "guilt" at having not had actual substantive content to upload until we got pesky title screens and stuff out of the way... pfft, weirdo...) and totally NOT going to burn myself out as a precipitated result or annoying consequence to anyone on the ol' subscriber feed, I'm also going to throw a gobbet of gameplay at you for THIS project as well. I know, I'm so great and wise and generous and attractive and humble and not at all self-deprecating and such. Nice!
That said... this should feel SUPER familiar if you bothered to watch the little side project where I bombarded people with the demo content in a slow drip-feed manner... because this is literally that same engagement, but it's got the context of what we'll generously call the "story" that led us to this fateful encounter... and I actually get to keep the cards I won as a result and move merrily along my way to further battles!
...the thing is, there's kinda a LOT of stuff going on here, and to the totally uninitiated, it can be an overwhelming amount of detail. I'd say the game interface itself doesn't exactly lend itself to clarifying the actual direct fiscal results of each move and where magic costs versus magic gains start showing up.
So, if you want the full breakdown of all the pedantic detail of how I even more haphazardly played this thing, I suggest the demo footage... and, far more importantly, the multiplicatively longer room for description of more time-constrained chunklets that begin... why, the very playlist I've created to contain both those and the full game's footage, to which this very video also belongs:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTTtba55vJStJ4jYyRUIikcUGTi3VZgW0
(feel free to skip around or ahead or over the entire thing and onward with your life as you wish)
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Most outsiders tend to term Culdcept as being the meeting of Monopoly and Magic: The Gathering. I suppose this is about an apt comparison as one might require as a total outsider to TCGs and strategy board games in general up through to someone who's only about as interested as required for this game's concept to pique their interest... but it really does a disservice to the game's core concept and mechanics to make that the end-all, be-all examination of what's going on when players take their turns.
For one, Monopoly kinda sucks. I'm sorry, but it does. It's interesting in theory, and certainly IS the entry point for many players' fascinations with board gaming at large, but it's not a very balanced or skill-oriented enterprise and is more prone to anti-strategic and under-examined play by everyone's neighbor, aunt, uncle, and cousin who thinks it's a fun idea to play for about five hours under a variety of ill-fated "house rules," because alarmingly few people bother to read the actual instructions, which are at least SLIGHTLY less liable to horrendous game breakdown of their own accord. (Sorry, you can pick up the shattered remains of your fragile childhood by the door. I don't know what possessed me to speak so harshly except for countless wasted hours in the scenarios I just described... probably won't happen again. Very soon, at least.)
For two, the TCG component isn't actually TOO outrageously complex. You move, you pay out of pocket to play a monster, your monsters serve as bouncers to convince other players to pay you when they land, and you can play monsters to decide to skip out on the bill and take that space for yourself to try to do likewise to extort your fellow players. Sure, there are spells you can cast before a turn, items to enhance your available actions at various junctures, and the cards themselves of all aforementioned classifications can have a bunch of rather unique and interesting wordings and effects on play, but the basics are pretty simple and the other interactions suss themselves out when various cards and their fine print get tossed at each other. See? Clear as mudcraft in defense mode while tapping your green mana to pay the retreat cost before you Digivolve into a real cardopoly champion on the Boardwalk!
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Naturally, a difference in familiarity makes all the difference... namely, I've played at LEAST the game you see here and the games from the demo footage... so, if anything seems at all confusing or sped-through (some of that is definitely due to the interface not letting you read enemy spells as they're cast and not showing the costs and dividends of actions affecting your total standing in real time), feel free to watch the other videos so far, complain about things, or maybe ask some questions. Whatever feels right.
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You crazy person! You read this whole description and/or want to learn more about Culdcept...for some reason! I can only assume this means you were somehow at least tempted to watch the whole video for some unfathomable reason. I'm going to try to avoid actually throwing too many of these down your eye-gullets at once.