Game:

Culdcept Saga (2006)

Duration: 43:20

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1

So let me see if I can get this straight...

A boy sells himself into slavery to provide for an entire village... he turns out to be a special flavor of the local "wizard" type dealie, able to summon power from cards... the slave trader suddenly agrees to pay MORE money for him after the transaction is already complete...

He then sends his prized new pet wizard-thing off to fight for the amusement of a crowd, even though he only borrowed cards from a mysterious girl and therefore has none of his own, since he didn't even know he was magical... said girl catches up and is given unrestricted access to him and conspires to help him win fights with those same cards in the hopes of somehow earning his freedom.

On that note... ... ...poor, poor Koenig...

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In the meantime, let's fiddle with some options, but not TOO much, because I have a feeling that a lot of the cards we picked up won't actually be that useful as one-offs in our deck until we have enough shored up to formulate some more complex strategies...

You can't really tell from what we see here necessarily, but I'm also grappling with trying to figure out what the shorthand notation for the deck composition means.

Specifically, it gives the number of unique types of cards of a certain category in a deck, then the total number of cards altogether of that type. For instance, it contains 10 fire element creature cards in all, specifically two apiece of five different types. (Two Red Goblins, two Gas Clouds, two Minotaurs, two Creeping Flames, and two Phlogistons.)

This starter deck design incidentally shows us that the cards we're likely to see in play are far more effective if it's not just one of them... heck, we barely see too much centralized strategy with only TWO of each card in circulation. Mostly, it seems that we're just getting a sampler platter of cards to toy around with, and they happen to revolve around the Fire and Earth elements, with some non-elementals thrown in besides.

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(Story advances at 4:40)

I honestly grappled with Faustina's words, both in their nonsensicality and their unintended hilarity. I will refrain from giving an actual line-by-line riffing, as that would bog us down in a bunch of needless details that we should probably just skim past.

Important notes: Jo is totally a golden boy. Faustina is a creeper who's apparently been watching him for awhile now to make such bold and sweeping statements about his character. (Also Jo is part jester now.)

...to say nothing of the sudden generic lizard-man that's appeared before us. How does a cepter such as he feel about summoning Lizardman into battle? (Does this mean that the Fighter cards we play summon actual humans instead of generic creatures that merely take on that appearance? ...I guess they DO call them "creature" cards rather than "monsters"...)

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(Gameplay begins at 9:33)

You might recognize this particular board layout as the one from the OTHER bit of play I did with the demo for this game... y'know, the pretty insane bit where I played all four possible "characters" (clearly four different customizations of the player character) with all four of the sample decks provided.

You can watch THAT video here, if you wanted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_VOWA-NNwk

The nature of play makes it a bit difficult to understand the immediate implications of moves as they're happening... you can check a creature played to the field if it's still there when you regain control, but discerning what a spell card did to you when it was played is a bit more difficult, since it'll immediately scroll away. The only really optimal way to read a card's effects is while it's still in your hand, and that obviously doesn't help you with opponent-held cards, which you can nevertheless see briefly while in their hands anyhow. (There's also the matter that the card data you get in-game is a somewhat pared-down and simplified version, lacking the extra information we could see while we were examining some as spoils or in the book editor.)

Basically, though... this board is bigger... and has forks... so... technically, this means there's less inevitable direct conflict and more opportunity to mess around with the lands you stake out yourself. It also means, like in Fortune Street, that depending on its location relative to the forks in the road, some spaces are hard or even nearly impossible to force your opponent to step on, so investing in land improvement will be a fair bit more of an important decision that will rely on your ability to consider the possibilities of your opponent's actions.

It's also a bit less claustrophobic and confusing with only two players on it, but I can definitely see it as an important step in educating new players to feed them a situation like this with far fewer distractions than I arranged during the demo...