Culdcept Begins marks the return of the strategy, fantasy-Monopoly formula

Culdcept Begins is a long-awaited prequel to the Sega Saturn game Culdcept, featuring magic, monsters and a whole lot of dice rolls. In it, you duke it out against an opponent to gather magic and rack up enough points to clear the board,  by any means necessary with the help of creatures, items and a bit of luck on a race to the finish line.

I was invited to get my hands on Culdcept Begins last week. It’s a very familiar layout once you get through the tutorial and start to pick up on the fundamentals — balancing magic, casting spells, casting monsters and levelling up your territory… that’s because it’s built on basics that will be instantly familiar if you’ve played Monopoly. 

Culdcept Begins reminded me a lot of Monopoly. The placing monsters on tiles when you land on them, as well as the territory upgrading mechanic, felt quite similar, but beyond those fundamentals there were plenty of extra layers placed over the top:  systems such as the added card-based combat, which can be expanded on with spells and items, which allows you to resist paying a hefty tax for landing on a square or not.

The artwork for the characters, cards and world was great, featuring a wide mix of creatures, spells and useful items that were distinct and each offered various abilities to assist you in beating your opponent. With some deck-building and synergy to be made with the creature types that are available, there’s definitely a way to mix and match the perfect deck to give yourself the best odds of winning.

One thing that I did notice through the opening story levels is that the rewards for these early levels were not the same for everyone, even though the tutorial levels are heavily scripted to teach you how to play, the card-based rewards that you receive were effectively random meaning that the cards that I received were different to those around me. This was really interesting to see, as you often expect these games to be heavily guided for balance. It is important to point out that we were also given some starter decks before earning these reward cards, but each rewarded card came with unique abilities, stats and rarities.

With its myriad of deck combinations, an in depth story with unique and whimsical characters and an ever evolving board of chaos based gameplay Culdcept Begins is definitely a game to watch out for. 

Culdcept Begins is scheduled to release on the 16th of July for the Nintendo Switch 1 & 2 as well as for PC.