Designer: Alex Hall, Mat Hart, Richard Loxam

: Alex Hall, Mat Hart, Richard Loxam Publisher: Steamforged Games Ltd.

Category: Exploration, Fantasy, Medieval, Miniatures, Video Game Theme

Players: 1-4

Price: $120 at your friendly local game store : 1-4

Dark Souls: The Board Game is based off the action/RPG Dark Souls video game franchise by developer FromSoftware and publishers Sony and Bandai Namco Entertainment. The Dark Souls franchise spawned originally from the PS3 title Demon Souls. Dark Souls has three entries, both cross console and on PC, in the forms of Dark Souls, Dark Souls II, and Dark Souls III. The Souls series also includes Bloodborne, a PS4 exclusive, creating the series title affectionately known as the Soulsborne series.

Dark Souls is known for its heavy difficulty and steep learning curve. Characteristics of the series include dying from just a few hits, fighting huge and powerful bosses, and an intentionally vague storyline, requiring players to dig in to start unraveling the depths of Souls lore. The Soulsborne series has spawned a number of clones, called Souls-like games, including: Salt & Sanctuary, Lords of the Fallen, and Nioh.

Steamforged Games Ltd. took up the mantle of heading production for Dark Souls: The Board Game. Steamforged launched a Kickstarter on April 19, 2016. Becoming one of the most massively successful tabletop projects in Kickstarter history, Dark Souls: The Board Game raised nearly $5,000,000, unlocking dozens of stretch goals, and tons of extra content for the base game. Steamforged Games also publishes and releases content for their medieval-fantasy football miniatures game, Guild Ball.

Content Guide

The Souls series has a few questionably dressed characters, though they are entirely not present in the board game. Dark Souls: The Board Game has players facing off against the undead, powerful hollow knights, a gigantic metal demon, and other creatures. Though spirituality and other themes are tackled in the video games, the board game sticks to action, and doesn’t offer anything in graphic violence or questionable content.



Review

Dark Souls didn’t mean much to me when it first released in 2011. At the time, I was a meager pleb without the latest console, and a laptop that wouldn’t even run The Sims 2. I didn’t know the foils of jogging headfirst into the Capra Demon’s fog wall. If someone said Ornstein and Smough, I’d probably think about The Hobbit. In 2014, I finally gave in to my friend convincing me it was a good idea to spend $5 on Dark Souls: Prepare to Die edition. I started my first run of the game and came to a crushing halt in Anor Londo. I remember these dates because it was almost another six months before I picked the game up again due to sheer frustration and lack of “getting good.”

Since that point, things have changed. I’ve completed Dark Souls and the DLC three times now, along with two NG+ runs. I’ve also run through Dark Souls II and the DLC once, along with another run that’s currently ¼ through the game. Not to jump too far ahead, but playing the board game prompted a reinterest in the series, forcing me to break my code as a patient gamer (/r/patientgamers) and purchase Dark Souls III and the season pass.

Dark Souls has a way of drawing me deep into the atmosphere. Everything is thematic, from bosses to environments, to weapons, to Dark Souls lore youtubers . The story is never immediately apparent. You are simply dropped right into the muck. You carve your own identity in the series. Almost every weapon set can be deadly in the right hands. Invaders will usually crush you, but they might drop 40x boss souls worth 30,000 souls each. Furthermore, the game isn’t difficult in the sense that AIs boost silly advantages as you ramp the difficulty settings. Every death is your own fault. You learn how to dodge. You learn how to pace yourself. You learn from your mistakes, or you go online and complain about the game being too hard.

I don’t mean to review the gears behind the incredible Dark Souls series. However, I do mean to make it clear that despite what you read online, Dark Souls: The Board Game does an almost impeccable job of representing the video game series accurately on the tabletop. Unfortunately, this is both good and bad, though it’s more symptomatic of translating digital mechanisms to analog.

In Dark Souls: The Board Game, players choose the role of warrior, herald, assassin, or knight. Each is kitted with giant player tableaus, stamina/damage/stat cubes, starting equipment cards, and various tokens, including Estus flask. Highly detailed miniatures are given to each player, and they’re dropped right onto the starting tile: The Bonfire Tile.

This tile gives players access to limited bonfire visits via sparks. Andre the blacksmith is available to upgrade equipment. Players will also find their soul cache, where a shared pool of souls will be spent to upgrade stats or reveal new items from the treasure deck. Over time, this tile will be littered with many discarded items, making an inventory/storage house of sorts.

Setup includes players choosing a mini-boss to battle against. The mini-boss determines the difficulty of the other map tile encounters players will face on their way to the boss. Tiles are chosen, and difficulty-based encounters are placed face-down onto each tile. In a most tedious process, players will also shuffle special treasures from each of their classes into the treasure deck.

Without much in the way of a tutorial, players are shoved into their first encounter. It can be quite brutal, à la the digital counterpart. The encounter card can spawn traps, barrels, hollows, and more. Within moments, players determine starting positions and are immediately attacked by whatever enemies spawned.

Combat is full of fast-paced decision making. All enemies will activate first, followed by the first activating player, then enemies, then the next player clockwise, and so on. With only a single turn between many enemies’ turns, players must plan ahead, ending their turn in wise locations, so as not to be the target of many attacks.

Enemies activation feels a bit involved at first, but after a full play of the game, moving enemies becomes almost second nature. Each enemy has a card detailing their movement and attack patterns. An archer might lock onto the player who has aggro, firing a 4 damage physical attack onto that player’s node. In this case, all players on the node are affected, so each player can choose to roll defensive dice to try to block some of the damage or attempt a roll. A failed roll will result in full damage taken, and sometimes you’ll need to hit multiple symbols to dodge more powerful attacks.

A player has a few options on their turn, some mandatory, and others optional. A player can recover a bit of stamina, walk onto an adjacent node, switch weapons to and from their pack, and attack. Depending on their weapon, players have options between heavy and light attacks. It feels thematic, as in the video games; you will lose more stamina for a heavier or two-handed blow, but deal far more damage. Players can also dual wield, which actually ends up a powerful choice, but means lower defensive values, so they are more likely to take extra damage.

Players must always walk the tightrope of balancing stamina and damage. In a design choice decried by the online community, players die if their stamina/health bars are ever filled with cubes. Players place red cubes from right to left, symbolizing damage, and as they take actions, place black stamina cubes from left to right. Once these meet, either by their own foolish doing or by taking another hit, all players fail and must respawn at the bonfire. As another effect, the players lose a spark, and once they’ve run out, will lose the entire game if another player falls. It’s akin to playing as a summoned sunbro in the series and having the host player fall in combat.

Of course, players can mitigate their losses by downing their Estus flasks, which wipes the cubes from their tableaus. After each encounter, players will also wipe their boards, so the mechanic feels mostly thematic. The long trudge to the next bonfire is translated into players being unable to refresh their flasks and other tokens until they use another spark to do so. Players have heroic actions that grant a special ability, alongside a lucky coin that allows re-rolling a single dice. The game puts you on the edge of your seat, where one bad dice roll can ruin the adventure, killing everyone, and sending the party back to the start. Every encounter refreshes, meaning you’ll need to work your way through the enemies again.

Players start the game very weak. You all have a few starting items based on your class. Completing an encounter grants a fixed number of souls, which can be spent to upgrade stats, which allow equipping better weapons and armor. Paying a soul at the bonfire will let your team reveal the top card from the treasure deck. This is a thick stack of cards that resembles the lottery more than any Souls series mechanism. You’ll pray for armor that lines up with your class, but probably draw another spell or shield you don’t need. Eventually you might draw a class-focused weapon that pairs well with your current arsenal.

Boss battles are hidden behind the fog wall. Inside, players will duel against their chosen boss. The boss uses a deck of action cards, some of which can be revealed by examining tombstones along the way to the battle. Fighting a boss is substantially different, and in my opinion, the meat of the game.

Each card details how a boss will target and move around the chamber. In addition, bosses don’t always target single nodes like regular enemies. Bosses will sometimes swing wide, hitting everything in their arc. Sometimes they’ll even attack twice in a row. Bosses will sometimes leave open a weak zone. Players can actually move onto a boss’s node and sidestep around it, rolling an extra black dice if attacking the weak spot. This can be deadly, however, as the boss might then target that player and drag and push them around, hitting for huge amounts of damage.

Boss fights are absolutely reminiscent of the video games. The titanite demon raises its long staff and shoots electricity at a player. Ornstein jumps high into the air, landing on the player with aggro. The bell gargoyle tail whips enemies behind and around it. Players will also find themselves reenacting series hallmarks by rolling and dodging enemy attacks. Or maybe trying to tank it with heavy armor and shields.

The boss deck doesn’t shuffle during combat, so players will learn the order of the bosses’ attacks, allowing them to better dodge and know their opponent. Over time, after a certain amount of damage has been dealt, heat up cards are mixed in, which shuffle the deck, and add an extra powerful attack to the mix. Boss battles are tense, and the mechanisms make it that way.

Everything I’ve described up this point is half of the game.

In the most bizarre of design choices, once players have trudged through and defeated the mini boss, the game resets itself. Players keep their goods, but now select a big bad boss, shuffle in new treasure, setup new tiles, and setup new encounter cards… Then they do it all over again. Granted, you’ll be more powerful on this run, but you’ve already spent 2-2.5 hours, and you’re only half-way finished with the game at this point.

This is my beef with Dark Souls: The Board Game: The time spent playing the game feels drawn out to make thematic connections with the video game series. This is a glaring issue with the board game.

In the video game series, one will die to a boss, only to spend the next five minutes running back to the battle, dodging enemies, and picking up lost souls. However, what makes it work in the digital world is the time spent returning to the conflict is usually spent dwelling on your mistakes. Somehow, the Souls series pulls this off extremely successfully, but it just doesn’t translate well to tabletop.

There is nothing more disheartening than spending two hours building up our stats and equipment for the mini-boss, then breaking down that boss to two health, only to have it slam one of our players for huge damage, and the player rolling incredibly poorly, causing us to lose the battle, and start over from the beginning. A single boss battle usually takes around a half hour. There’s lots of tactical play and table talk. Players have to play smart to win, but they can still get smothered by a random card draw, or a totally random bad roll.

I don’t mind dice rolling in dungeon crawlers. It’s part of the ameritrash genre and it’s definitely embellished in this game. I think Dark Souls: The Board Game would benefit from some combat overhaul, perhaps taking notes from Gloomhaven. Deterministic combat, where players have a general idea of what to expect in terms of damage output and blocking output, would make Dark Souls: The Board Game very successful and gratifying. Dice rolling adds excitement, for sure, but it can be so frustrating. After all, you learn how bosses move and attack in the video game, doesn’t it make sense to spend a fixed amount of stamina to dodge an attack without worrying about a die that might complicate the success of your action?

In terms of production quality, Steamforged has done the IP right. Each miniature has beautiful detail. Each boss figure is meticulous in sculpt and accuracy. Tiny armor details are accounted for. The player characters all stand ready in combat stance. Each boss is titanic, and every grunt feels satisfying to hold and move around the board. Moving bosses during their push attacks is simply delightful as you carry your puny character along with it. Charging silver knights into combat, wielding their slender blades is a nerve-wracking experience.

Each weapon, ring, and suit of armor not only bears in-game artwork, but also thematic prevalence to boot. Cloranthy rings assist with stamina. One buckler can be equipped even with a two-handed weapon. Lighter armor allows you to roll more dice for dodging. Heavier armor gives you better dice to roll when blocking. Players will have a shot at equipping boss-related equipment as well, or even weapons that can cause poison or bleeding effects.

The rulebook is also very good. It’s easy to follow, and lays groundwork for understanding combat and game mechanisms very well. Players can opt for a short campaign, featuring three missions, played over the course of a few sessions. I believe players can carry over some stats and souls, as well as weapons and armor collected from fallen bosses.

While I like the content in the box, I’m not sure that it’s enough to keep the game re-playable. In fact, when looking at the vast selection of stretch goals that will ship to Kickstarter backers, the core game feels skinny. You have two bosses to choose from, and four mini-bosses. That’s not a lot of content to keep the game interesting.

What makes the core game harder to swallow is the $120 price tag.

I’ve played and purchased plenty of miniatures heavy games, but I’m a little flabbergasted by the cost of this one. I can justify $60-80 for a copy of Blood Rage. I was okay paying $80 for my copy of DOOM. $120 for a couple bosses seems iffy to me. Stretch goals will ship invader expansions, summons, additional armor sets, more enemies, and more bosses. If anything, I wish I bought into the Kickstarter for all the amazing Dark Souls miniatures.

I’m worried for the accessibility of Dark Souls: The Board Game for those casual gamers who backed the game because they love the video game series. It’s a bit heavy and quite long for most. My subset of friends that have played includes a few diehard Souls fans, and some who didn’t know much about the genre.

One friend couldn’t stop talking about how thematic the equipment and combat worked in the game, but didn’t care for the long journey back and forth from the boss to bonfire. Another friend outside of my gaming group only plays simple social deduction games and said the biggest challenge was learning the game. They hardly played up to the mini-boss before quitting to pick it up another night because of the length.

If Dark Souls: The Board Game is your sole dive into the board gaming hobby, I can maybe see it being successful for some groups. If you are a diehard Souls fan, but you aren’t familiar with modern board games, I would take a bit of caution before dropping cash on this. I don’t want to say it’s going to flop for you, because I might be wrong, but try to get a demo or something at your local game store. I can easily see this game being a highlight for some friend groups who leave the game out and play once a week, this being the only game they get together to play. If you look past some of the kinks and love the theme enough, this might be an excellent choice for your group.

For myself, it’s much too long. It has some design problems that don’t carry well from digital to analog, though it’s pristine and wonderful to look at. There are other dungeon crawlers I’d prefer to play, though my heart belongs more to the eurogaming side of things, so the game is already at a bit of a disadvantage for my affections.

The big kicker for me is the stretch goals and expansion content I’ve missed out on and will need to shell out big cash to pick up as Steamforged continues to fill and finish backers’ orders. I would love to see how these different add-ons function and how they might affect gameplay. For all I know, one of these expansions could resolve most of my issues and make this a no-brainer for ameritrash gamers. As it is, you really should try before you buy.

A review copy of Dark Souls: The Board Game was provided by Steamforged Games Ltd. in exchange for a review.