Note: P&P means Print & Play (just in case someone here doesn't know)Download (.rar, 8 Mb, contains .doc files)
New in version 2: the illustrations are now complete. No changes to functionality. The cult cards which I forgot from the first version are added in.
First of all, I'd better credit my friend Spirit_Alu, who's doing the illustrations and the card layout design and various other visual stuff for the game. And she's doing a very good job at it too, if you ask me.
So, what's the game like?Cult Tumult takes place in the city of Magpieport. Different cults play a major role in citizens' everyday lives, and competition for followers between cults has always been intense. Players take the roles of cult leaders, and by commanding the characters, acquiring equipment, summoning monsters and making certain events happen, they try to become the strongest leader with the strongest cult. But things are not just that simple - nobody really knows who is who, so the characters from all the cults take orders from all the leaders, you have no idea who your enemies are, and finding out another leader's identity or being exposed yourself can make the difference between victory and defeat.
The game is for
2-5 players, takes around
50 minutes to play and the age recommendation is
10+. It's an extremely strategic game and the shuffle luck doesn't really seem to play an important role in deciding the winner: I have been playtesting this game for almost three years now, and you can count the games I've lost with one hand's fingers. I guess it counts as an Euro style game, though it's more flavor based than Euro style games usually are.
The gameplay is briefly something like this:
Setup: each player gets a random cult card, they are now the leader of this cult and they probably shouldn't tell others which cult they are leading. Also, everyone draws a card and gets 5 gold tokens. Also, the follower tracking board is set up, all cults have 7 follower points at the start of the game (the minimum is 1 and the maximum is 13).
1) Pick the characters you are going to use for the next three rounds (they are drafted, the one you pick last is the one you play first, in two player games you pick one and veto one every time). Pick them again whenever you run out of them.
2) When it's your turn: draw a card, play a card (any card from your hand or an equipment from the discard pile), use abilities, fight your monsters if you have any, set your character aside and play your next character, discard down to 5 cards in hand and receive or lose gold so that you have exactly 5.
3) When you play a card: if it's an event, it does something and then you destroy it (destroy = put in the discard pile). If it's a monster, it goes onto your board. If it's an equipment, you pay for it, then it goes onto your board.
4) When you use abilities: crazy stuff happens if you know what you're doing. Especially in the late game.
5) When you fight monsters: you check how much elemental power you have total (ignore elements to which the monsters are immune, double the elemental power from elements to which the monsters are weak), then you check how much elemental power the monsters have total (double the elemental power from elements to which you are weak), if you have at least as much as the monsters, you win, otherwise you lose. If you win, your character's cult receives extra followers and you put the monsters in your monster pile. If you lose, destroy the monsters, your character's cult loses some followers and you lose the top card in your monster pile if you have any.
6) When you have played enough rounds (depends on the number of players): the game ends, the cult cards are revealed to all players, and you get victory points for making your cult gain lots of followers, having lots of monsters in your monster pile, having lots of elemental power and having lots of cards in hand.
And then there's this Novice character card which makes the first player of each round play two turns so that the next round will be started by another player. You usually don't get to do much on the Novice turn, because the Novice doesn't have any elemental power and its ability is next to useless.
There are five elements: fire, thunder, earth, water and iron. Typically fire beats earth, earth beats iron, iron beats thunder, thunder beats water, water beats fire, but this only applies to the character cards; the monsters' elements and weaknesses don't follow a pattern - at least not one that I know of.
There are also five cults: Marossast, Assirrasya, Thrauhos, Chanast and Jiskilsa. Each cult has two elements that don't beat each other (Marossast has fire and thunder, Assirrasya has thunder and earth, etc. They're in that order). Also each cult has something that's typical to its characters: Thrauhos characters modify the followers, Jiskilsa has characters giving you tons of elemental power, Assirrasya has card draw, Chanast lets you trade cards for gold, and finally, Marossast has effects that would be labelled as "Attack" in Dominion. There will be a file telling about the flavor of these cults and their relations to each other in more detail in the P&P pack, but it's entirely possible to skip reading it if you're not into that stuff, because it doesn't have anything to do with the mechanics or strategy of the game.
And to finally answer the question I asked myself: it's pretty fun. It's a very light game in a way, but can also be pretty draining. It's light, because if you want to do something, it's usually possible to do it, at least to some extent, so you don't have to be stuck. And because the scoring is based on hidden information, even if you're losing, you don't know that you're losing. But even if it's possible to do what you want, it's often difficult to tell whether or not you
should do what you want, and sometimes the solution to your problems isn't very easy to figure out. "I don't always know what I should do, but when I do, it's damn complicated and results in a huge point swing". So I want to play this game often, but rarely twice in a row.
There's a typo on Magpie, it should be "without paying its cost", but I'm too lazy to change that now. It'll be fixed in the public beta release. Actually I find it a little bit silly that I just wrote this wall of text and am still going to keep writing more, but removing one letter from a card is too bothersome for me. But I'm still too lazy for that.
Designing process (tl;dr: yeah, this isn't the first version of the game. Actually I don't know how useful reading this will be if you haven't played the game, but since I wrote it, I'm not going to erase it.)
I started designing this game in November, 2010. Back then it was called
Kalevala-aiheinen peli (Finnish for "a game about
Kalevala").
I had originally gotten the inspiration after playing a game called Himalaya and shortly after that, randomly finding some old notes about a Kalevala themed Munchkin variant me and my brother were planning to do at some point. I was quite fascinated about Himalaya's moving mechanic; in it, you have to plan your movements 6 turns ahead and predict your opponents' movements, so I wanted to build an entire game around the same principle - before playing the game, you secretly guess which character is going to get the most "honor points" and then try to play the game so that your guess will be correct while trying to figure out what characters the other people guessed (in the current version, none of that sentence is true, so try forgetting about it). And then the Kalevala thing intrigued me enough to actually start building that game.
I got rid of the Kalevala theme last year, because I needed more design space and I had to choose between a Kalevala theme loosely connected to the mechanics and another theme tightly connected to the mechanics. I chose option #2. And that theme was like extremely generic and had absolutely nothing that would have made it unique, or even interesting. And this year, I came up with the concept of cults (might have been because of the Dominion card Cultist) and so far, it has been working out perfectly. Except that I'm not overly fond of the fact that the names for those cults are computer-generated, but I was lazy at that time and the names are actually pretty nice IMO. But still, some cards from the original pre-alpha test versions have made it to the current version - I think that some forms of Drinking Horn, Magpie, Shaman Fir
