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Trade one with another, and even perhaps the devil himself, to build a mighty city of the middle ages by any means necessary. Will you risk selling a piece of your soul for bountiful rewards? Or find some other means to outpace your rivals.

Deal with the Devil is a deeply thematical euro game set in a fantasy medieval era. Each of the four players takes on a secret role of a mortal, a cultist, or even the devil. Due to the asymmetrical roles, players experience the same game but with different game goals every play.

During the blind trading phase, players can offer their resources in exchange for money from another player. The Devil will tempt mortals with goods for a piece of their soul, while the cultist’s nature is to sell his soul easily. Only the accompanying app knows who is trading with whom.

But beware! Showing off how well you are doing can attract unwelcome attention and the suspicion of other players. It also may pique the interest of the Inquisition, which is eager to punish those who cannot prove their souls remain intact.

There are many dynamic strategies to experiment with across each playthrough. Will you sell pieces of your soul early on to boost your city-building prowess at the risk of future punishment from the Inquisition? Or will you carefully manage loan and debt repayment while waiting for others to inadvertently reveal their nefarious nature? Every choice has a consequence, and each role has its own unique strategic approach to explore.

How’s your poker face?
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Some of you may know that Under Falling Skies started as a super minimalist print & play game – only 8 cards and a handful of other components. Even back then, it offered surprisingly high variability. But with the retail version…we went pretty crazy. The small box weighs over 1,400g (over 3 pounds), and it’s packed with cardboard from top-to-bottom.

Most of the content is presented through a four-chapter campaign. You reveal new stuff as you progress, similar to a legacy game, but nothing gets destroyed. You can combine all of the unlocked content in standalone games, or you can go through the whole campaign again as Rachel does.

Thanks to how the campaign is generated, it offers a different experience every time you play through it. Before each game, you prepare two piles. Each pile contains a city being attacked, a scenario presenting a new challenge, and a character that joins your team. You choose one of the cities you’ll try to save, while the other city is automatically lost to the aliens…

So, after finishing the campaign for the first time, you’ve actually only tried about half of the content. When you generate the piles in this manner, even if you prioritize what you haven’t seen yet, you will need to play the campaign up to five times before you would try every piece of content at least once. And I am not even talking about different combinations. It’s a very different experience evacuating civilians from Mexico City with the help of Colonel Jackson Moss, than doing the same in Montreal with a reporter Samantha Legrand. If you add in the stronger sides of cities and characters, the adjustable difficulty, advanced sky tiles and other features, you are looking at a number of combinations in the order of millions.

I am really sorry, if you were looking forward to the next Semi Co-op comic, Rachel might not be available for a while…

Tomáš Uhlíř, designer
Czech Games Edition

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