Usually, the world-changing events that accompany a game’s cataclysmic threat hit at a rapid clip—weeks, days, or even hours. Double Fine’s Massive Chalice, though, takes an opposing route. Yes, there’s a potential apocalyptic threat—the monster-spawning primordial chaos dubbed the Cadence—but the key to defeating it is just to survive for 300 years while the titular magic cup charges up enough to clear away the menace. A war effort on that scale requires not a single plucky band of heroes but generations of fighters bred, trained, armed, and commanded by an immortal ruler.
Your time as leader alternates between turn-based battles and building up your society. You start with just five heroes from three classes but need to quickly construct a deeper roster by erecting keeps where you can retire fighters from your front lines to produce your next generation of combatants. It becomes an exercise in eugenics, as you try to find fertile heroes with favorable traits to pass on to their progeny. Heroes of different classes that crossbreed create hybrids, so a crossbow-wielding hunter and an explosive-flask-slinging alchemist can produce a trickshot who shoots bombs at long range.
Building your army and support system is all about trade-offs. Intuitive heroes can be sent to the Sagewright’s Guild where they speed up your research, but you’ll often want to keep the sharpest heroes as combat alchemists and send the Sagewrights people who are just smart enough but too old or sickly to be useful on the battlefield. Once you’ve established a keep, the rulers that live there must be of the same noble line, which means that when one of your regents dies of natural causes you have a limited pool of replacements to choose from. You’ll have to figure out what traits absolutely disqualify a hero from being allowed to breed and which ones you can live with. You might not want a generation of slow or nearsighted heroes, for example, but having melee fighters be dimwitted is just fine.
Prioritizing what to build or research is especially important early on. I rebooted my society once because opting to not outfit my forces with healing items resulted in too many combat deaths. A few of the technologies you research are direct upgrades to the equipment you already have, rewarding you with gear that can be great but also dangerous to your own allies like crossbows that will fire through anything in their path and armor that erupts in a burst of damage when the wearer is hit. The best pieces of equipment actually come from using heroes repeatedly in battle, which can give them the ability to gift their family members with a relic that will grow in power as it’s handed down from generation to generation.