By Giovanni Colantonio Published Jul 16, 2026, 12:00 AM EDT Impressions The cult-classic Culdcept series is back
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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.
Image: Neos Corporation 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, b…