Culdcept - What we can learn from computer 'board' games

I've been playing a lot of Culdcept, a Playstation game which combines Monopoly with Magic: the Gathering. Though it really is basically a board game, playing it without a computer would get to be a bookkeeping nightmare. Here is the gist of the game for those who haven't heard of it:

Like monopoly, you roll a die, move around a board, and take control of various spaces. When someone lands on your property you collect 'rent', and there is a benefit for controlling multiple properties of the same color. Unlike Monopoly, you also have a deck of cards which you use to cast spells and summon creatures- which is how you take control of the properties. Furthermore, instead of paying the rent, you can summon a creature and fight for control of the property.

The bookeeping involved in keeping track of the stats of the creatures in play would probably get out of hand for a tabletop game, and on the PS2 it's easy to have multiple maps and strange die sizes. The interesting points about this game which might carry over into the design of a 'normal' tabletop board game are as follows:

Variation of 'Roll and Move'. Many of the boards in the game are not unidirectional. Each board has one or more Towers which you must touch before 'passing go', but the path you take is not necessarily pre-determined. Whenever you get to an intersection you choose which way to go. In some maps you can make loops all day long and never return to the castle (a strategy which can be used with certain cards to some effect). This is the element that can make a Roll and Move game a lot more interesting than the circular track board of Monopoly. Depending on the board there can be varying degrees of control over where you land, even with the random die roll. Also, there are spells which affect the die roll- setting it to a particular number, or rolling 2 dice instead of one for example.

Incorporation of ccg aspects in a board game. The game has a large number of total cards, but you use exactly 50 for your deck. Thus the deckbuilding and metagame aspects of Magic work right in, but there is a single, finite set of cards so it's not the case that you have to keep buying cards in order to keep up. I suppose it could be, but as a computer game the card set is static. On the Playstation you don't start with all the cards, rather a select few, and new cards are obtained as you play games (even if you lose). I could see this aspect used in a board game in different ways... players could build decks out of the cards (using whatever deckbuilding criteria they agree on), or players could be dealt random cards to use as a deck (maybe that's the same as there being a single common deck that all players draw from).

Play 1 card per turn. Before the die roll you are allowed to play 1 spell card. After the die roll and move, you are allowed to play 1 creature card, either to attack another players property or claim an open property for your own. Alternatively, you can upgrade any of your properties you passed that turn. This would be instead of playing a creature. During combat you can play 1 item card to improve your cretures stats or have some other effect. So during a turn you can play up to three cards total, depending on where you land and what you want to do. You draw 1 card at the beginning of the turn. This system makes it difficult to orchistrate complex combinations of cards which will win you the game. Similarly, enchantment type cards override each other (only 1 effect is in play at a time), so it's relatively easy to disrupt someone else's combo without using cards specifically geared against it. In many CCGs there are multi-card combos which can win a game outright, but in Culdcept the limited card play is more interesting.

Finally, the resources. You pay for all of your cards and rent out of a single pool of 'money' called your Magic Power. There's another important value which is your total assets. When you pass go with the minimum total assets (set at the beginning of the game) then you win. Your magic power is part of your total assets, so playing cards eats into your chance of winning. Obviously some of those cards will earn you more than their cost in value, like upgrading a property (which is akin to building houses in Monopoly). The idea of using VPs as a resource is not new at all, I just wanted to note that Culdcept uses it, and that I like it.

If there were two things I had to complain about in Culdcept, they'd be the imbalance in the cards (something we as designers have a lot of control over), and the lack of color specific resources. In Magic, blue spells cost blue mana, red spells cost red mana, etc. In Culdcept all creatures cost the same mana, though some require you to have a creature on the correct colored land in order to play them. My problem with this is in deckbuilding. There's no real penalty to throwing 1 or 2 Green creatures in your otherwise Red/Yellow deck because not only will you always be able to cast them, but in fact there will always be Green properties to put them on (putting a creature on it's colored property increases it's toughtness in combat). This is a minor complaint really, and many types of cards exist that can promote using single colored decks, or decks without certain colors, etc.

So what can we learn from this? Hopefully it offers some insight as to what can work in a card/board game system, as well as what might be too complex for the tabletop. If nothing else, maybe it'll get you to try out Culdcept which is a pretty cool game on it's own. I wouldn't mind seeing it adapted to a real board game.

- Seth