Xbox 360 owners who may have missed out on the original Culdcept on the PS2 back in 2003 (and chances are, you did) – here’s your chance at redemption. Culdcept Saga retails for only $39.99 and is a blend of collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering, and “roll and move” boardgames like Monopoly and Talisman. If those comparisons spark even mild interest then read on because while this is not a revolutionary step from the old game, it’s certainly worth adding to your 360 library.

Let’s get this out of the way right now – the “story” in Culdcept Saga is cute, weird, and apparently written by (or perhaps for) a 12 year old girl. It’s like the writers from a Teen Nick show took a side gig to crank out the script and write the dialogue. You play a “Cepter”, magician of sorts who has the ability to use cards to do battle. The plot has a princess, a war torn land, some annoying thief Cepter who follows you around who you have to fight seemingly every other match, a weird dream storyline…it’s best just ignored. The best part about the story is that you can skip every bit of it by pressing the start button.

You are not going to play this game for the riveting story and voice acting. You’ll play it because of the gameplay and it’s here where the game shines. It basically woks like this: each map is a game board with various colored squares on it. These colors represent the four elements (fire, air, water, earth). There are other special locations such as forts which provide magic income and count as objective markers, shrines, magic fountains, teleporters, and so on.

Prior to each match you build your deck of cards, which changes as you progress through the campaign and you unlock the vast array of cards inside the base game. Each creature has a favored element – a Fire Giant is best used on a red square, for example, as it gains a hit point bonus. Some creatures cannot be summoned until you control a certain number of elemental squares---some require a card sacrifice to come into play, like the Wraith. There are a horde of creatures in the game each with various special powers like being able to attack first in combat like the water-born Deathquito, the ability to turn opponents into stone like the Medusa, or boosting strength based on the number of green cards on the map like the potentially devastating Branch Army. Some creatures are cheap fodder (like the Goblin) while others cost a lot of magic points to put into play like the fierce Hardrock Dragon. The mix of creatures is a strong boon to the game.

As you summon creatures into play you earn bonuses based on “chains” – if you manage to own territory on the map that is either adjacent or is the same color (or both) you boost your creatures’ ability, making them more difficult to remove from the map. Placing the right creature in the right spot is a crucial strategy because as players move around the board, the creatures that are already in play serve like hotels in Monopoly. If, for example, you have a tough as nails Storm Giant guarding a blue (water) space, and you have spent additional magic points to upgrade that spot, and another player lands on it and fails to beat the Storm Giant that player has to pay you a potentially substantial amount of cash. However, fail to keep the land and you lose the magic, so protecting high valued spaces with the proper creature is rule number one. Each game lasts until one player has earned the required number of magic points, so upgrading land and protecting it is vital if you want to succeed.

Combat occurs when a creature is summoned upon a space already occupied – and the battles all last one round of combat. It’s a very simple exercise. The attacker always goes first unless the defender has a special ability or an item that changes initiative. Each creature has a base strength and hit point total and if the attacker takes the defender down to zero hit points, the attacker wins. If the defender can win or survive, he keeps the space. Damage stays with the defender, however, so a viable tactic is to send in smaller, cheap creatures to whittle down a tough defender, sacrificing the fodder in the process.

What makes it tricky is the huge number of items in the game. These are also in the shape of cards and may be played before combat begins. Items can do all sorts of things from a basic boost to strength (a sword or an axe for example) or hit points (chain mail, or a shield) to providing elemental immunity to stealing an opponent’s item. Some of them are extremely powerful—and highly annoying if you end up on the wrong side of a battle because of one.