Culdcept Begins: 7 Beginner Tips
Ryan has served multiple times on the jury for the Indie Cup awards, and has mentored many emerging writers in the games industry. He has covered some of the biggest releases of recent years, including leading the site's coverage of Baldur's Gate 3, Dragon's Dogma 2, and plenty of other massive RPGs.
Culdcept Begins is more than a simple board game that people describe as a Monopoly-like. It rolls dice, it moves you round a loop, it charges you rent when you land on someone else's square. Then it hands you forty cards, five elements, and a combat system where a weedy little goblin with the right item can gut a dragon, and the Monopoly comparison suddenly stops being useful.
Ten years on from the previous new entry, this series prequel is pitched as the friendly one. It still expects you to work out exactly what winning looks like, though, and most first-time Cepters spend a dozen hours discovering they have been playing the wrong game entirely.
How To Actually Win
Each map sets a target amount of magic, and you win by reaching that number and then getting your Cepter back to the castle. Both halves are important to play and plan around. Cepters who hit the goal and then trundle round the long way have handed the game to someone with better positioning.
The bigger trap is what "magic" means. Your total is not the cash in your pocket. It is your cash plus the value of every land you hold, upgrades included. Beginners hoard, sit on a fat pile of G, and lose to someone visibly poorer, because that opponent poured everything into territory that counts towards the goal and prints money every time an opponent stumbles onto it.
A good related tip is that on big, expansive maps, consider stacking your deck with spells that improve your mobility, such as Fly or Recall! More than once I've been beaten to the win simply by reaching the target magic point at the other end of the map from the castle, giving my foes enough chances to beat me there.
Build Chains Early
Lands of the same element, connected in a chain, multiply each other's value. Two chained fire lands are worth more than two scattered ones of different elements. Four are worth considerably more than that, and the tolls they charge scale accordingly.
One isolated level-one land is a mild inconvenience for whoever lands on it. Four chained lands, upgraded, are a toll booth trap that enemies cannot help but fall into. This is where your money should go before it goes anywhere else.
Every upgrade does double duty by adding to your total magic and by raising the toll.
The opening is when you have the least money and the most empty board, which is a cruel combination if your Book is top-heavy. Load up on cheap, frankly disposable creatures whose only purpose is to plant themselves on turns one through three and start generating income.
They will die, but that's the arrangement. A low-cost creature that holds a land for four turns has already paid for itself several times over, and if it eventually gets knocked off by something enormous, you have still banked the income and forced your opponent to spend a real card or two doing it.
Save your expensive bombs for the two or three lands that genuinely decide the map. Books stuffed with heavyweights lose the land race before their best cards ever hit the table.
Pick One Element And Commit
Mono-element Books with some neutrals, or a heavy primary with a small splash in another element, outperform rainbow piles at every level of play, and for three reasons that stack:
- Creatures standing on land of their own element get a health bonus, so your elemental garrison corners of the map are permanently buffed while a scattergun opponent's are not.
- Your chains stay dense instead of fragmenting across the map.
- Your summoning stays cheap, because off-element summons cost you.
A five-colour Book feels flexible in the deck editor but plays like wet cardboard. You will hold a fistful of technically excellent creatures, none of which want to stand on the land in front of you.
Your Book Needs More Creatures Than You Think
Forty cards. Around 25 of those should be creatures. Items want six to ten slots, spells four to eight.
New players consistently underweight creatures because spells and items are where the exciting text is, then stall out at turn six with no bodies to put on the ground. Creatures claim land, hold land, and take land back. Everything else is support for creatures doing those things.
Give each creature a job before it earns a slot in your book. Cheap grabbers exist to sit on terrain and earn. Walls have the health and the defensive abilities to garrison your best chain. Raiders hit hard enough to steal enemy territory. Utility bodies smooth over your rough draws.
Never Assume A Battle Is Safe
Both players get to play items during combat; attack and defence values are an opening bid, not a result.
A pathetic defender holding a strong shield beats a monster swinging naked. Your gorgeous 50/50 raider dies to a goblin with a spear if you commit without thinking about what your opponent is holding.
Two consequences follow. Keep defensive items in hand for the chains you cannot afford to lose, rather than blowing them on trades that do not matter. And when you eye up an enemy's obviously precious land, assume they have an answer, because they have known this fight was coming since they upgraded it.
You can check out a foe's entire hand at any time - use this to decide how aggressive or defensive you'll need or want to be during a clash!
Read Abilities Before Stats
Culdcept's skill ceiling lives in card text. First strike, penetration, regeneration, elemental immunity, conditional triggers on land type or dice roll: these decide fights that the numbers say should go the other way.
A 30/30 with first strike with a weapon beats a 50/50 with nothing, because the fight ends before the big one swings. A creature immune to your element is a brick wall you cannot climb regardless of how much attack you pile on. Build your Book by reading, not by sorting on stat columns, and take the extra few seconds in a fight to check what the defender does before you commit an item to it.
Break Their Chains, And Time Your Spells
You do not need the best board. You need to ruin your foe's. Capturing a single land inside an enemy's four-strong chain collapses the multiplier across the whole thing, which is often worth more than three fresh territories of your own would have been. Find the link, take the link, watch their economy fold.
Spells are how you do it when your creatures cannot. Flip a land's element out from under their garrison. Knock a chain down a level. Teleport their Cepter onto your most expensive toll square, or drain their magic the turn before they reach the goal. Each of these is a game-ender at the right moment and a wasted card at the wrong one.
Hold them. The pull to fire off a spell because you have it and your turn feels unproductive is strong, and it is how good spells become bad ones.
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