The Long Awaited Catharsis: Divine Wrath has Arrived!

0:00 hello welcome to quacko thank you for being here today I am showing off all of the brand new characters bosses scenarios mechanics everything we have to play with because I just received an early copy of catharsis Divine wrath now for those of you that don't know already this is the big box catharsis I know it's an absolute Behemoth and there are two little solo starter Decks that incorporate into this entire system so you don't want to dive into the medium size the giant size you should check out at least the small with the Saga series catharsis is a game that was on my 10 games I want to obsess over and it was on there for a very specific and very important reason because this game unlike any other game I think I've played is packed to the brim full of some of the most mindblowing a cemetry the most mindblowing combination of Cooperative mechanics driven gameplay ever with compelling stories a effective challenge no matter if you're playing solo all the way up to high count multiplayer and uh an unyielding amount of potential combinations and opportunities to explore the game system I mean let me just show you this real quick so you get a quick sense of why I

1:30 am saying these things about this game this deck of cards right here is an image of two of the various characters you can play I Believe from this base game I think maybe they've Incorporated it backwards but I'm not even sure they have yet and on back of each one of these cards is a set of abilities if you're playing let's say two player three player four player with other characters at the table you can take your matching card and set it between you and your ally meaning that every single combination of characters every single unique character you have has their own unique way of playing and their own unique scenario they might be facing off against but on top of that if you're playing two players you'll have a unique pairing and unique abilities that go along with that if you're playing three players four players five players and so on and so forth every single one of these cards has new flavor text has a brand new title and has a new mechanics engine that's built off of and thematically accurate to the various characters and character types you might be playing at the table giving you more abilities to utilize and as I said at the very beginning maybe you'll start to believe me now an unyielding amount of potential combinations and ways to make this game Sing catharsis is a Cooperative driven game it's a yatsi

3:00 Style game similar to dice Thrones except I'll play catharsis whereas I'll only play dice Thrones if my wife begs me or my best friend is having a really bad day cuz I don't want to ruin another game by playing uh one that I really like with him on a day that's just you know terribly awful and no good dice Thrones isn't a terrible game but I don't like the fact that it's head-to-head with that yatsi style rolling and I always consistently historically lose it might be that I'm on a 15 losing streak with my wife Shir that has led me to be so uh blah about it but catharsis is one that sheir and I both agree on this game Dives head first into that dice rolling mechanics Engine with VAR variable Powers depending on what cards you flip for each character you're playing their own mechanics engine and their own little puzzle that you have to solve as you're starting to explore through whatever challenge it is you're facing sometimes it's a murder mystery other times it's a slog to the death and you'll be rolling Dice and assigning those dice to various different powers and abilities but instead of the head-to-head like you have in dice Thrones here you're working together or you're playing solo you're going to be fighting challenging for an attempt to claim well the grand prize the uh honor of the Gods themselves possibly restore this forsaken land into a little bit

4:34 maybe a semblance of what it was before the locked up deities started dreaming there's a world and lore and piles and piles of stuff to explore I've done other videos in the past where I started reading through some of that lore we're not going to do that here here I want to show you the new characters that are available in Divine WRA and talk to you about how they functionally work I'll try to make this video quick I've taken notes I've written down and read through all of these characters and all of these scenarios we might be facing off against and we're going to start having a little strategy guides and gameplay coming down the road now this unboxing video the Showcase Video and the strategy guides I'm doing are done solely because I'm excited about catharsis however a few of the game plays that we have coming up for full disclosure will be sponsored videos so keep an eye on that and we'll make sure to let you know when you know that's happening as well all right let's talk about our various different characters we're going to start with the lovely demon calexia I I should have maybe learned how to say their names well before beginning reading this but we have the lovely demon calexia calexia is a chaos oriented creature I should read a little bit of the flavor text and I will but I don't know if I'm going to do it for every single one this one's pretty good though calexia is a demon from the underworld known as the queen

6:05 of chaos she is revered in her realm as the most beautiful demon and feared by all she has stood since the start of time and she will be there at the end but she feels her control over chaos slipping and she Adventures Adventures to stop what steals her power so she's going to be gaining what's called demonic powers and abilities and the core structure like I said all of these are custom abilities you'll only have six of them in front of you depending on the characters and mechanics and yes that is a fly currently circling in the studio I'm not restarting this video though so leave a comment down below for the you know conveniently placed fly to get people to engage in the comment section I don't know I hired it it's a paid actor uh all right either way all of these abilities will be mixed and match so depending on what you're actually what you've actually drawn in front of you you're going to have various different abilities as well that's true for all of these characters depending on how they work kixa is going to work primarily off of dealing damage or or doing negative things to her own friends and allies the core system for her has to do with doing giant abilities doing beautiful wonderful abilities but those abilities have a siphon consequence and that consequence is going to potentially hit the other players that are around on the table that you're going to be working with so Cooperative is if you like a little bit of take that kind of

7:35 in your Cooperative games it's advised that you should be strategic and coordinate with everyone at the table but if you play like me you're going to go head first into the most powerful ability possible potentially kill your friend of the process but you just might take down the hundred-year-old Dragon so it's probably worth it I think she also has what are called demonic Powers so the more demonic abilities she gets as she deals more damage as she takes more actions the more she might be able to summon and put into play either in front of her or another player what's called a demonic power these are going to be extremely powerful extremely violent and probably also potentially extremely damaging as well so that's her let's talk about durka dur durak Durock I'm going to get some of these names wrong please correct me down below grammatically precise and you can let me know exactly how I should be saying them this is the devoted now another thing they've done is they've taken a note of how complex the characters are to play and how well they can do solo so Kia is a complexity level for ability to Solo four she can stand her own pretty well if you're a decent player dur Hawk however is a very well-rounded character he can stand on his own five out of five so he is a strong character who can survive VI even if you play him solo which is one of the things I'm planning on doing dur Hawk's family was wiped out by

9:07 the Trinity The Joint Forces of the humans dwarves and gnomes who view the Orcs as an infestation into their world she lived as a nomad for years before she found a church that took her in her respite was not long shortly after becoming a priestess the church was set Ablaze by an unknown party killing every member present except her dur Hawk walked out unscathed and with Divine eyes ready to crush the forces that bring pain to her and others lives she is a powerful mixed style player so she has a lot of abilities that give her a lot of various ways to play whether you want to be doing powerful aggressive attacks playing a little bit more support or biting your time for a big attack down the road you can see from some of these titles Shield my friends Divine wrath Whirlwind Divine strike there's a lot of good flavor text and story with each one of these cards okay on top of that I wrote down that she's going to be gaining what's called Divinity as she gains up to 10 potential Divinity she might just be able to summon the goddess herself the deity that uh Durock uh durok worships when she summons the goddess her Divinity will tick down but she'll get a moment or two to be as powerful as possible so time it well use it well you know work work well with the team that you have around you on the table and when in desperation or at the exact right moment summon the

10:38 Divinity summon the goddess and lay waste to the battlefield gauze gauze is the next one one of my favorite pieces of artwork actually gauze is a lovely wrestler such a cool mechanic system with this I'll tell you the mechanic then I'll read the flavor text the core mechanics engine for gauze is going to deal with cards that have a top and bottom action but the top action doesn't exhaust your card when you utilize it instead you're going to be adding uh markers to that top action allowing you to build up how strong your bottom actions ability will be and you can see your bottom action has some numbers next to these actions 2 three and six you need to have bidden your time long enough that you can take full advantage of Bone Crusher and the Great Wall of gauze the Sun and the Moon the body Shredder the crowd pleaser she's a wrestler so the core system here is going to be by doing small minor moves building up your reserve and your stockpile of careful actions until finally you do big bold actions that exhaust the card expel whatever uh forget the exact term for it but what whatever stamina you've built up and hopefully break an arm leg or three in the process so gauze has top abilities don't exhaust adding pressure to the cards and then you finish them the core mechanic system for gauze is going to

12:09 deal with timing so we have highly aggressive well-rounded and balanced and now gauze is all about timing ability to solo is only a three it's getting a little bit farther on that end of maybe not being the best Solo solo level character gau's father was a famous Grappler known as the Green grapp Goblin but despite being the best in the world he was never famous gauze made it her goal to become the world's greatest wrestler like her father and she succeeded she quickly Rose through the ranks of the wrestling world as she beat every Challenger despite her small size after she defeated the 8year reigning world champion she disappeared from the fighting world will she return to defend her title or is she seeking greater challenges we all know the answer to that she's seeking greater challenges her father wasn't famous she doesn't need to be famous she want to go out she wants to protect people she wants to save the world she also wants to pop some heads so you know give her a giant Duck or give her you know a murder mystery that she can solve and potentially squeeze the life out of everyone at the party it was the butler I knew it all the time you'll get this reference later on in the video you can literally play through a murder mystery in Divine R it's pretty cool all right luia the tinkerer come here luthia let's see what she does this is a big old pile of cards so there's the artwork for her she has Cobble abilities and luthia the tinkerer is going to be built off of a system that allows her to start creating

13:40 new mechanics engines as she plays so you'll see level three I'll flip them on the back so you can see them here we have well level two teddy bear level three teddy bear level one reloader level two goggles level two Bike level three grenade level one belt all of her cards have a series of three potential upgrades and so as you play with her as you take actions you're going to be able to Tinker you're going to be able to upgrade your cards so instead of exhausting and getting rid of cards when you take damage or try to survive you instead are going to be slowly adding to the reservoir and the skill and abilities that you have a long drawn out fight or a long campaign where you can build up your uh you know various different pieces of technology and utilize them to the best of their ability is going to be a compelling way to play her this is going to be all about strategic growth when are you going to flip your active character card to potentially get enough to upgrade one of your abilities but losing one at the same time a lot of decisions to be made here luthia mother was a forest elf and her father was a human the two were deeply in love and as lovers do had a child but unbeknownst to the father when elves give birth to a non-elf the Elven parent dies upon their child's birth giving their Elven Essence to their child Lu's father did his best but was very focused on his inventions as a substitute for his Lost Love Leading to luia learning about his craft she now

15:11 loves creating the craziest objects so her core game engine her core game system is going to be getting these Cobble points these Cobble points can then be spent to upgrade your decks of cards a long strategic play is key for her and she's very simple and very playable solo so a good place to start if you're starting to dive into this you're starting to learn some mechanics engines one of the best things to do with catharsis and it kind of goes against reason right you'd think you'd want to play a wide variety of characters but one of the best things to do is to sit down with a core character learn how they work and then start running them through some of the engines because it's going to take you a few games to even figure exactly how each one of these core mechanic systems functions and runs we have Sor 10 San the Wind Dancer where are you Soren here we are okay sorten the Wind Dancer has what I think might be my favorite mechanic yet introduced in Divine wrath I'm not sure but I I really like the concept I haven't played with it yet so I can't say that it's you know perfect but every single one of these cards has a top uh not a top a front and back ability some of them are up in the air like Gone With the Wind some some of them are on the ground like take off what lies Beyond City Dash so on and so forth as you play with the Wind Dancer you have to be taking a series of flying then

16:41 Earthbound or Earthbound then flying back and forth between your abilities and you'll be able to flip your cards as you play so you'll have different abilities that are coming and going in play that are active as you explore these mechanics but because of that and because of the way you have to actually take them this is a big programming engine setting the board up so you can jump back and forth so you can launch up into the air strike heavy land on the ground defend yourself and continue moving quickly like that and it doesn't just follow for that round or that turn you have to keep that sequence of play up permanently whatever the last thing you did was you have to do the opposite next time so the Wind Dancer is all about playing back and forth Soren and his wife were one day writing poetry and practicing a famous whip Dance For an upcoming play they were performing for the sky Temple when a storm so dark it blacked out all light passed through the temple through the storm was only a few moments and the winds were no worse than normal sorten found his wife was gone he flew from the sky Temple and swore to himself he would never stop until he finds his missing wife so this long lost desperate lover trying to find his sweetheart we have a few that came from the mega a pack characters expansion we have Ember hoof The Brew Maiden Ember hoof The Brew Maiden is going to be focused on well drinking if you want to sit down and play this game with a few good brusis or

18:11 you know oldfashioned made next to you this is the character you're going to want to play she has a series of various different drinks that she can utilize and she can share with other players but a consequence comes with these so we have cheers bottom up Brewfest cyber Wizards wine fiend Fusion Fizz Burrow's benevolent breu the more you drank according to her the better off you are so as you're well drinking the drinks that she gives you you'll get bonuses according to how many of them you've drunk but every time you drink one you'll also have to end up rolling a dice at the beginning of your Round And if you roll more the than the number of drinks you have you'll lose all of your bonuses and all the drinks will disappear back into her deck she has a little bit of a buffer she's built up a decent alcohol tolerance some would say she has a problem but really she's just focused on helping her friends for her uh let's see here the biggest thing for her is cooperative play she's going to be very focused on working with other players around the table uh giving them and supporting them as much as possible so if you're a player like me that likes getting into a game but when you have a lot of players that are being very aggressive you don't mind taking a step off to the side and playing very cooperatively she's going to be the perfect one one for you she can be soloed too which is very interesting to me I don't know how that's going to work but I'm I'm compelled Ember hoof is the owner of one of the most famous pubs in the world normal folk and heroes alike come to enjoy her unique drinks in her

19:42 role as bartender and a Head Brew maen she has heard millions of stories Ember Hof found that the stories offered inspiration for creating new drinks but she's soon tired of creating drinks off of a secondhand story now she adventures and drinks her way on her quests to create the ultimate drinking menu we have Lumi the ice elf Lumi the ice elf is going to be another heavily Cooperative player it seems like for this expansion they focused quite a bit on some of the co-op play she is going to be slowly developing ice crystals that she'll be sharing with other players around the table this ice will be a decent defense for them it'll be building on their cards protecting them and making their costs potentially lower and more well easily accessible however for her to do her most powerful abilities she has to then expend that ice and that ice is fragile as well so there runs a risk of taking away something that people have been using to well as a guard or as a shield from losing some of their cards or using their abilities more effectively to do your more more powerful attack or leaving it on their cards until they make a categorical error on their own and all the ice and the resource that you desperately need shatters into a million million nothings highly Cooperative uh not very soloable it's a one I think that means it's impossible but I'm not sure unlike her sister is El's skilled necromancers who have no computations let me know when you can notice the Delia down below about raising the dead lum's heart was more

21:14 pure she didn't want to control the dead but help protect people from dying unable to find like Minds among her kin Lumi moves South she wanted to experience other cultures but felt her Elven nature trying to adop adapt her as she traveled as a result she uses her magic to maintain a frost Aura preventing her body from transforming and then finally the last person that I have in terms of my notes Here we do have a few other characters it looks like they've slipped in but we have sunna sunna the enchantress she is going to be focused on raising the dead she kind of has a mob of of zombies or of THS that'll be following her and she's extremely Charming the interesting play with sunna is she's going to have characters on the board that are creatures THS that she can use and use as buffers to you know avoid attacks and she'll have a series of powers as well she'll have both Decks that she'll be drawing from Powers will let her utilize her THS more effectively THS however are necessary for her powers to be useful at all she's not going to get her hands dirty so you strike this really interesting balance when you're playing with her of how often do you utilize the THS to block damage and take some hits how often do you use her own special ability to prevent that that damage from coming across and how many cards do you have that are utilizing powers in order to use those THS verse how many THS do you have active on the playing board so you can make sure you always have something useful now she'll never be out of play I know it sounds like she might because if you lose all

22:44 your THS what are you going to do well she has a power that'll let her bring one back but one is often not going to be enough sunna possessing an innate Charisma effort effort effortlessly influenced people even without relying on Magic as she matured her charm found its way to the local Lord weaving him into her control until a mishap with magic occurred destroying the Lord's mind ascending to power fulfilled a childhood dream yet the monotony of rulership prompted her departure convinced of her Destiny Beyond a govering mundane Village she sought a grander scheme so those are the core characters from Divine wrath and the uh upgraded expansion we do have a few other characters here that I have not had the chance to read about or explore and of course we have all of our giant decks and our champion cards to boot more ways to vary and make this as asymmetric as possible we have George hendel and flaz and bog this looks like a toad uh and this looks like some type of hero George and Kendall okay so I don't know how these work I haven't read them before and I uh don't quite know how they incorporate in it is chapter 2 and chapter 3 though so maybe these aren't even characters or creatures maybe these are people that were fighting in one of these stories the forest Adventure possibly very well could be okay we have our enemies the

24:16 new bosses you have to face we have the Thousand Eyed Dragon giant stack of cards here beautiful dragon and this is going to be a unyielding unending fight to the death there's no refresh there's no Camp there's no healing along the way this is a slog prepare for the attacks do whatever you can to keep your party alive and continue fighting until only one person is standing on the battlefield well or a group of people the likelihood of that is very low though you're probably going to win this with one person alive struggling for breath bleeding out of like all of their orasis we have a battle with fate battle with fate is going to be a battle that has you constantly trying to predict where you're going to be going next you have various endings boss effects and all the different places we might go we have airships we have labyrinths we have Arenas we have the world boss we have the Paradox we have uh what else we have we have cyberpunk here you're going to be doing your best to read the events that have just happened and how they resolved so that you can predict where you're going to end up depending on what you've been able to predict prct and how prepared you are for that final battle well that'll determine just how challenging and the unique nature that it takes so a little bit of randomization that you do your best to control we have the ice elf leech Lich this is going to be wave after wave

25:48 of zombies remember how that lovely I self was talking about keeping people alive and protecting people well this is the actual nature of the ice elves they do none of that they don't want to keep people they don't want to protect people they want to send wave after wave of Undead hordes into your doorstop to try to rip you apart from tail to snout so be prepared for a unyielding battle along with that instead of failing because you lost morale you're going to be freezing to death instead so if you want a different way to die a different losing narrative and you think you know frost bite on Mount epis sounds like an interesting way to go out that's going to provide you every up opportunity you've ever looked for we have the unders City Crab this is a very interesting one because it is kind of like a giant game of treasure hunting and I love that idea I get a little bit of Moana vibes from the artwork going to be honest about that I will probably be singing as I play and there is treasure all over the place but you have to make a determination as to how fast and how far down you go vers how many pieces of treasure do you pick up and carry with you treasure is going to be lovely I mean let's take a quick look at one of them right now we have burning armor and depending on what level you are or how deep you've gotten in you're going to be getting more advantages based on that armor being equipped you're going to be dealing damage with it you're going to be protecting people with it it's nasty it's gross it's horrible it's also wonderful and if anyone knows me when it comes to playing Cooperative games I will always go for the treasure now I'm

27:18 a team player too I'll kill people on the way I'll deal damage to the best of my ability but if there's a treasure chest in Gloom Haven I'm sorry I'm making it to the end of the match or we're replaying the scenario it's just kind of how it is so the crab I don't know sounds really compelling to me I like the idea of treasure hunting I'm for sure going to get distracted on the way though and the city's going to collapse on my head because they've been burrowing underneath it we have the murder mystery the murder mystery is one of the ones that I think I'm confused about and also extremely intrigued by you can already see the cards are completely different it's like you're playing a big game of Clue except that game of Clue ends with an epic boss fight fight that was determined based on who you figured out was the actual villain this is like a Choose Your Own Adventure story of Epic Proportions where depending on how you solve the mystery and what Tales you spin along the way battle determine if it was the butler or the maid or the Widow who decided to kill them all you know is the doors are locked you're stuck inside and you need to murder whoever it is or all of them I don't know why we don't just to solve the problem with lots of blood or less blood I hear a lot of them are political figures probably shouldn't uh you know probably shouldn't leave with a giant cacophony of fluids just flowing through the front door okay that's the last one that I had however I have two more in this box like I said I'm not sure if the

28:51 other two cards that I showed are from these I'll have to look into that they don't look like characters to me so we have the unders City Crab tracker here murder mystery tracker here ah yes the forest Adventure is going to be what incorporates with those other two cards has to be because it says chapter three right here and we have a lovely little duck with horns we have a lovely giant Flamingo yes it is a subtle reference to the uh lotted quackalope but and and West who actually soest Todd uh is a exhibitor at their Booth about as often as he can he also loves this game and loves the people and the team behind it either way uh the forest Adventure is going to be a chapter based Forest story where you're doing your best to I think find and steal some golden goose eggs not entirely sure about that and then we have this rotten Behemoth of the thing where's the title card for this I mean it's absolutely ugly but I don't know I don't know where the lead card has gone it probably aha got lost in here the Forgotten God might be some of the coolest artwork in this game yet I think that's absolutely beautiful and terrifying and also I want to know what this story is All About Now all these stories as well have various different endings assuming that you even make it to the end and you can actually win so this is all of the asymmetry that exists

30:22 here in Divine wrath that that doesn't include the fact that we can incorporate the sagas these little chapters that we can mix in or any of the original characters original bosses and original storytelling options on top of that we have uh lots and lots of Nice Dice to use but if you noticed all these Graphics have unique Dice and all of this art has a potential for Unique playmat so if you love catharsis you can One support the Little Indie creators as much as possible by purchasing all these extra little bonuses and add-ons and also support the artists that went into creating all of this by purchasing playmats that well make your game and your table beautiful okay there we have it it's a quick overview not a quick overview that's a long overview a detailed breakdown I'm going to be diving into all these characters I want to do little strategy guides where I work through the cards talk about the ones that I think are strong ones that you might want to Mulligan if you're playing a little bit of house rules and maybe not using some of them and some of the combinations that I find along the way also if you've watched to this point point I really want to know what do you want to see me do first right now I'm leaning towards doing a solo game here today and I'm thinking potentially H I really want to do the alcoholic but I think that'll be more fun with more people so I'm thinking potentially going head-to-head against the uh unders City Crab and doing so

31:52 with dur durak the devoted trying to you know hold on to my religious uh ways and only take the treasure that speaks divinely to me it is still all of it that that is that is the correct answer but we won't tell we won't tell anyone it okay thank you for watching thank you for being here whatever the case though whatever you do remember to do the important thing tell me another game that has more asymmetry than this because I don't think I know I know of one I don't I don't think I do also do the math how many unique combinations is possible in this it has to be Millions maybe billions I mean with the amount of cards and the amount of varying different ways you could actually combine them I mean it could be a unending amount of possibility all right we'll see you later bye