Cults! Overview Pt. 3

So the standard beginning of a game of Cults! goes like this:

1. Choose a cult leader.
2. Choose 2 of their 5 tenets.
3. Grab tokens to fill your resource pools and your heat.
4. Begin capturing locations or playing actions to increase your resource pools.

The main loop of the game is in capturing locations to improve your ability to shuffle resources around until you can meet the conditions of your objective. You are also trying to prevent your opponents from becoming more resource-mobile in order to prevent them from being able to meet the conditions of their objectives. Each resource limits the others in some way though, so it also becomes a balancing act between the 3 resources as the game forces you to make up for any excess by punishing unbalanced resources.

I heard pictures were good for blogs, so here's a cult leader card mock-up from before Heat was a mechanic. 

Your primary mode of exerting influence in the game is through your cultists, which are both locked down by your supplies and your fervor. Focusing on raising fervor leaves you with a deficit in supplies, which limits the actions you can take (many actions require an investment in supplies). This slows down the beginning of the game, which should help differentiate your cult leader's play style from the others. If you're playing Symbion, then for most of the early game you'll be choosing locations and playing actions that help increase your cultist pool or reduce your heat. If you're playing Berthold, you'll be prioritizing fervor over your other two resources, and will most likely be more willing to eat the Heat cost that most action that increase fervor demand.

Even though, as the game progresses, your starting values won't be as important as the decisions you've made in the game, your initial range of locations and actions will be very tightly constricted by your starting resources. Amy & Roald and Berthold both have a high number of starting cultists, but each face a different problem with keeping it high. Berthold loses cultists from his first turn onward because of his low fervor, but Amy & Roald keep their cultists at the cost of gaining 2 heat per turn (1 at the beginning for not feeding their cultists and the heat everyone gains at the end of their turn). I hope that these early game differences will make sure the late game is always diverse, as players look for ways to overcome their leader's defects in their first few turns.

That's the rough sketch of Cults! There's not a lot of content, just a set of bones and a couple dozen cards, but I think that the resource exchange loop and the actions cards provide a stability that gets interrupted fairly often by the event deck, which should lead to dynamic, unpredictable games that don't feel completely chaotic.