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Game details Designer: Eric Lang

Publisher: Cool Mini or Not

Players: 3-5

Age: 14+

Playing time: 30-45 minutes

Price: $35 / ~£30 ( Eric LangCool Mini or Not3-514+30-45 minutes: $35 / ~£30 ( Pre-order, releasing November 11

Perhaps surprisingly, tabletop games based on video game franchises are not always terrible. Most, in fact, have a history of being fairly respectable. But not every video game needs a tabletop version, and video game fans should be wary of snapping up a board game just because it features their favorite digital world.

When I first heard that publisher Cool Mini Or Not was releasing a card game based on From Software’s beloved PS4 exclusive Bloodborne, I rolled my eyes. “Card game” isn’t the first place my mind would go if I were designing a tabletop game based on the white-knuckled, crushingly difficult third-person action of Bloodborne. Then again, I’m not award-winning designer Eric Lang.

Lang is not new to successfully translating video games into board games, and he has designed plenty of well-received board and card games based on well-loved franchises. Seeing that he was at the helm piqued my curiosity.

After playing the game, I was reminded why Eric Lang is a celebrated game designer and I am not. Far from being a lazy cash-in, the game is actually pretty great.



Chalice Ritual initiated

Bloodborne: The Card Game sends three to five players into a Chalice Dungeon, one of the repeatable (and sometimes procedurally generated) dungeons from the video game. In the card game, the “dungeon” is simply a deck of cards representing monsters and bosses. Make your way through the deck, kill the final boss, and tally up your score. The whole thing takes a breezy 30 to 45 minutes.

If you’re thinking that the game sounds like a cooperative dungeon crawl, though, you’re only partially right. You’ll need to work with your fellow hunters to take down the horrific monsters in the catacombs beneath the city of Yharnam, but make no mistake—this is a competitive game. There are points to be scored, and whoever gets the most of them wins the game and is freed from the dungeon. Everyone else rots in the depths for eternity. (Don’t lose.)

If you’re familiar with the video game, you’ll recognize the main source of points: blood echoes. Blood echoes come from monsters; you can think of them as health points that you collect when you damage an enemy. As you beat up a monster, it will spit out tokens like a burst piñata, and you’ll put those tokens on a space on your player board. A secondary source of points, trophies, is awarded to players who deal damage to a monster on the actual round in which it's killed. (Most monsters run away after one round, though "boss" monsters linger until you dispatch them.)

So two needs vie for your attention. You have to work with your opponents to do enough damage to kill each monster in order to collect its trophy, but you need to do more damage than your opponents so you can get the most points. You thus want to cut some of your friends out of the spoils entirely. Ideally, you’d like to see them die a horrible death.

Players start the game with an identical hand of five cards, which they can upgrade throughout the game. Each round, everyone picks a card from their hand, puts it face down on the table, and reveals it at the same time; cards are then resolved in player order. The simplest cards are just weapons that do damage to the round's monster, letting you take blood echoes from its health pool. If you’re sitting at the end of the turn order, you’ll have to figure out what cards your opponents could play and whether there will be enough tokens left for you to collect by the time your card resolves. If not, you’ll have to come up with another plan.

Some cards let you do damage before everyone else. One lets you see what card your opponents have chosen before you pick your own. Others deal damage to your fellow hunters or punish them for playing certain types of weapons.

Everyone can freely talk about the cards they plan to play during the round, and the discussions often end up sounding like the sort of polite, egalitarian-minded discourse you hear in co-op games. The monster has six health, and there are three of us—let’s all play a 2-damage card, kill the monster, and everyone goes home with a trophy.

But you don’t have to stick to your word. Play your 4-damage Kirkhammer instead, and poor old Nate, who sits at the end of the turn order, will be shut out of the battle completely. Of course, Nate might have seen your betrayal coming and played his Ludwig's Rifle, which lets him deal damage before everyone else, effectively short-circuiting your plan. But you could have anticipated that he would do that… and so on down the rabbit hole.

Bloodborne is a game about squinting at your opponents across the table, trying to puzzle out what they might play, and figuring out how to counter them so you come out on top. What cards are in their discard piles? How much damage can they do? What effects do their upgraded cards have? Why are they smiling like that?!

YOU DIED

Before players can attack a monster, the monster gets to take a swing at the players. One player will roll a six-sided die to see how much damage the monster does to everyone in the party. Could be zero, could be four. If you’re really unlucky, you’ll see this:

That little X in the corner means that the monster does 2 damage to everyone, but you'll also have to roll again and add the new number to the total. Roll another X? Keep on rolling. Although unlikely, it’s conceivable that you could go from full health (8 in a normal game) to dead in a single round. Hey, it wouldn’t be a Bloodborne game without the constant threat of swift and violent death in an uncaring universe.

As veterans of the video game know, collecting blood echoes is a precarious business. If you die in the card game—and you probably will—you respawn at the end of the round, but not before losing all your "unbanked" blood echoes. To bank your collected blood, you need to play the Hunter’s Dream card, which lets you heal up to full, recover your discarded cards, grab an upgrade card, and permanently store your unbanked echoes. It’s a powerful card, but while you’re resting, your opponents are busy racking up points.

Let’s say you have a mere three hit points left, and the monster for the round only has five blood echoes. You know your opponents can take the thing down, which would leave you out of the blood-and-trophy party. Do you push your luck and try to do damage, or do you bow out of the round, retreat to the Hunter’s Dream, and bank the echoes you already have? Taking a greedy risk is exhilarating, but just know that the table will erupt in cheers if the dice don't go your way.

Found in translation

From Software’s “Soulsborne” series (Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls 1-3, and Bloodborne) has amassed a large, passionate fanbase due in large part to its maddeningly difficult third-person combat. However much you want to rage-quit after a string of bad deaths, Soulsborne combat is all about pure player skill. You’ll never die because the AI did something unfair; you have only yourself to blame when you’re defeated.

The card game isn't afraid to shake things up. You can mitigate the luck of the roll with certain cards, but sometimes you're going to get hit and there's nothing you can do about it—an idea antithetical to the Soulsborne ethos. But here, it works.

Instead of trying to simulate the single-player combat the video game is known for (almost certainly a losing proposition), Bloodborne: The Card Game instead replicates the feeling of playing Bloodborne. The game is all about creating the sense of dread you feel when wading into a battle with a boss, knowing your hard blood-collecting work could be taken from you in an instant. Get cocky, and you'll be punished.

The player-to-player interaction is more specific to the card game, but it adds to the tension and high-stakes play essential to a game bearing the Bloodborne name. The game has some “take that” nastiness to it, which is usually enough to turn me off of a game. The way it's implemented here works for me, but if you absolutely can't stand being mean to your friends, this isn't the game for you.

I’ve played the game exclusively with people who have not played (and have no interest in playing) the video game. Almost everyone was surprised by how much they liked it. So Bloodborne noobs are certainly welcome, though they’ll need to be happy with—or at least tolerant of—the game’s dark, Lovecraftian horror setting. (This is a game that proudly parades around grotesque creatures like The Garden of Eyes and blood-caked weapons like the Saw Cleaver. You may want to skip this one on family night.)

The game is easy to learn and pretty simple to play. But as in many great card games, the complexity and fun comes from the fact that you're mostly playing your opponents instead of the game itself. Mind games, bluffing, sudden betrayals—all's fair in dungeon delving.

Bloodborne fans, this one’s safe.

Bloodborne: The Card Game will be released in November. You can pre-order a copy here.