We recently bought Culdcept Saga for the Xbox 360, and have been having a lot of fun with it. It’s essentially a cross between Monopoly and Magic: The Gathering — you roll a die and move your piece around the board, claiming (or contesting) territory with monsters that you cast out of your hand of cards. Like Monopoly, you can improve your land (raising the tolls you gather), and there’s also a “color affinity” mechanic where creatures gain combat bonuses when they are on land of the same element as the creature. You can use different items and different spells to affect the “strategic board” as well as individual combats. At the end of each match, you earn new cards with which to build your deck. Both skill and luck come into play in the game.
I can easily recommend this to anyone with an interest in collectible card games. There’s actually a demo available on Xbox Live, although it doesn’t show any of the deck-building mechanics — you have to use one of four prebuilt decks in the demo. We played the demo quite a bit before the game’s release earlier this month — thankfully, the full game is just as engrossing.