If you’re looking for something new to play on Switch 2 this week, you’ve got more options than you can handle. Denshattack!, D-topia, Moss: The Forgotten Relic, and more lead a busy week for indie games. Dig deep through the stack of new releases, though, and you’ll find an unexpected retro revival in the mix: Culdcept Begins.
I can’t blame you if you’ve never heard of Culdcept before and think I’m making something up to mess with you. The long-running deckbuilding series is about as niche as games get. While Culdcept Begins is meant to serve as an entry point for new players, its existence still begs for a crash course in 30 years of gaming history.
Developed by OmiyaSoft, the series made its debut in Japan on Sega Saturn in 1997. It was a genre hybrid that combined deckbuilding and RPG elements into a dice-based board game. It quickly got an expanded PlayStation port in 1999, and a proper sequel, Culdcept Second, for Dreamcast in 2001. The series didn’t make its way outside Japan until 2003, when Culdcept Second received a localized PlayStation 2 port.
Its history after that point was a little sporadic. The series got an Xbox 360-exclusive sequel, Culdcept Saga, in 2006, which was published by Bandai Namco. Then the original game received a Nintendo DS remake in 2008 called Culdcept DS, while Culdcept Second got an enhanced 3DS version in 2012 simply called Culdcept. (Got it?) The last installment in the series came in 2016 with Culdcept Revolt on 3DS.
So, what exactly is Culdcept? In the simplest terms I can muster, Culdcept is Magic: The Gathering meets Monopoly. It’s a digital board game where the goal is to move around a board via dice and collect enough gold to meet each level’s cash goal. You collect a chunk of gold every time you pass the starting square, but there are plenty of ways to get money as you move. Using a deck of cards, you can summon monsters on tiles that act as toll keepers. When an opponent lands on that tile, they can either pay up, or try to battle your monster with one of their own. Losing the battle means they have to pay the toll, but winning allows them to overtake the tile with their own monster. The strategy comes from strategically placing monsters of similar elements to form chains, upgrading tiles to take more gold, and crafting a perfect deck of monsters and spells.
Culdcept Begins, which is available now on Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, picks up where the series left off a decade ago. The fundamentals of the board game are the same, but there’s even more of an emphasis on lore. As a relative newcomer to the story, I can’t say that the narrative is much of a friendly entry point. I was quickly introduced to the concept of Culds and Cepters before being whisked off to an academy and then thrown into a vague global conflict steeped in history that’s a bit inscrutable at first.
That’s fine, because the real meat of Culdcept Begins is in its deceptively deep board game. It seems simple enough at a glance, but there’s a lot of nuance to master even in the earliest battles. Tiles are split into four colors, each representing an element. Your deck contains monsters with those same elements. Placing monsters on their corresponding tile gives them a buff, and you’ll get a chain bonus for having multiple monsters on the same colored spots. You can create lucrative toll booths once you decide when you spend gold to upgrade monsters or change terrain to a different color, extending your chain even further. After the first few battles, it felt like I’d barely even begun to crack the strategy.
And Culdcept Begins demands a lot of strategic thinking. Though you’re given two pre-built starter decks early on, those won’t get you very far. I had to start subbing out cards even in the first few chapters to stand a chance in economic warfare. That meant subbing in tools that could boost my monsters’ attack and defense when attacking, and making smart use of spells to control the battlefield. A spell that sets the next dice roll to eight, for instance, can either be used to advance my character towards the starting point to nab a chunk of gold or I can cast it on an opponent if I know that they’re eight tiles away from one of my monsters. The deckbuilding can be a bit overwhelming when you’re juggling 40 cards of various utilities, but it is wide open in terms of creative thinking.
The catch to all of this is that there’s a fair degree of luck involved that can make Culdcept Begins’ story mode a pain to get through. You can build as clever a deck as you want, but you’re still ultimately at the mercy of dice rolls. If you just happen to roll poorly every time, landing on enemy monsters rather than on tiles that let you upgrade your own, there’s not much you can do. Spells can help mitigate that, but I’ve had long missions fizzle out thanks to a few bad rolls right at the end.
Culdcept Begins won’t do much to extricate the series from its cult status, at least not based on the few hours I’ve tried so far. It remains a niche idea that struggles to find a perfect balance between chance and strategy. The storytelling is a little dull, and the art style can be very hit-and-miss. (The cards look great, but the toon characters? Not so much.) Even with those caveats, though, it’s a well-timed comeback. Deckbuilding games are more popular than ever thanks to the mainstream rise of Magic: The Gathering and indie games like Slay the Spire. The world is arguably more ready for Culdcept than ever before. Culdcept Begins doesn’t fumble that opportunity, delivering the strategic depth needed to draw in newcomers looking for a fresh challenge. The Sega Saturn era lives on in 2026.
Culdcept Begins is available now on Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. A PC version is set to launch later this year.
