Game:

Culdcept Saga (2006)

Duration: 1:49:12

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1

Er, yeah... that's... the video runtime... ... ...I'm kinda scared now, actually. There's not even enough time spent faffing about exploring the menus to shave a bit of the "actual" gameplay down a bit.

To be fair, there are a couple of compelling enough reasons for that. For one, we've got a whole extra opponent to deal with! So, having to fight off the advances of not one, but two adversaries will indeed make it harder to just mosey about doing our own thing. For another, these decks we're using aren't exactly super enabling of cutthroat and advanced strategic gameplay, so naturally it'd take a bit for them to grind away at one another and settle the score. (Though some stronger cards with more interesting effects are indeed starting to creep into usage even now.)

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Seems the Colosseum's reigning champ doesn't much care for his lot in life... wait, Jo's about to earn freedom, but Markt's been doing this for ten years? What's up with that?

Plus, for some reason, Rilara's back! She wants some revenge, and seeks to rob us of Faustina's... paltry beginner deck... in the middle of this crowded venue with many spectators. I'm starting to think that she might not be all that good of a thief... and whoever heard of breaking IN to a place where Cepters are held in servitude and forced to battle publicly for popular amusement?

Let us fight, Cepter versus Cepter... versus Cepter... ... ...oh boy...

We ARE introduced to a new board mechanic, though. The concept of "Areas," much like Fortune Street's "districts"... and in a looser sense, Monopoly's "color groups"... although this is MUCH bigger and each could technically serve as a rudimentary board like the tiny Santana Village one on its own. It's worth pointing out that the "bridge" linking them is not voluntary. If you pass by it, you MUST cross it. As a result, it's more like a strange figure eight than two loops with a connector between them.

The important thing to note for the mechanics we've been made privy to is that value-building chains will not be reflected across areas, so you'll need to start them all over again on the other side of the board.

Of special note, however, Rilara HAS been upgrading her deck, and she's showing off some far crueler theft-appropriate cards, like the Bandit and the Thief. She's also giving us a crash course in exactly how Support can be applied... the Bandit is an extremely weak creature in combat, but it can add any other creature's stats to its own for battle by using it like an item, and whatever damage it can do in this way will aid its support ability of directly taking precious magic from its opponent's player. (Makes my earlier fumbling through creatures like Squirrine and Woodfolk that can use Support as well seem like child's play.)

Likewise, Thief has a bit of a nasty ability wherein if her opponent tries to bring in an item card for battle, she'll go ahead and take it for herself, which caught me totally by surprise because Rilara hadn't played one directly before that point. Yikes!

Unfortunately for Jo and Markt, this kind of play put her in a bit of an early lead... although having more players around made his Avenger creature much more powerful, it really didn't amount to much if nobody wanted to land on its space and do battle with it.

Otherwise, while I'd say this video is a tad on the long side, it's much more instructional than any prior ones (including, perhaps especially the four-player demo game I staged), just for the sake of providing a lot of examples of basic and intermediate play all in one spot... so I guess it's good that Rilara crashed the party?

The other big thing we get to see by virtue of the sheer length of this match is how they handle running out of cards in your book... I mean, we skimmed the rulebook a bit and it suggested as much, but seeing it happen is another thing entirely: all discarded cards get returned to the drawable deck and things begin anew.

The one thing I'm still not entirely sure of is how the music will occasionally change... it'd probably be more obvious what they're attempting to signal if we could see numbers changing in real time instead of hoping that we remember the before and after of each player's current Magic totals by the time we're next treated to a glimpse of the overall standings, huh?

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And... I guess this means Jo's a free wizard...thing... again? (For the first time since we've met?!) Free to... probably become some kind of sidekick to Faustina, and she'll certainly fawn over "the chosen one" until the end of our days. Great.

But at least there'll be card-based carnage ahead and left in our wake!