This post is going to be a bit of a special occasion - I hadn't really foreseen myself reviewing games, but while I was unboxing and trying out my copy of Dark Souls : The Board Game (funded on kickstarter quite successfully) I found myself taking notes of my thoughts on production quality, materials, and rules. This was all intended for my own personal use, as references for do's and don'ts should I ever produce a board game or other game (which I would like to eventually), but it occurred to me that it was also, in effect, a fledgling review. Above and beyond that, I thought some of the things I was writing differed from other reviews I've seen online, and would probably be useful for prospective buyers of the game. I mean, I don't fancy many people are going to see my blog, based on the analytics, but if they do, hopefully they can see something useful here.
So, enough with the intro guff, on to the review!
This review will be divided into four broad segments. The first, Materials will cover all the tokens, miniatures, game boards, cards and wooden pieces that you will use to play the game.
The second, Rules, will cover the quality and presentation of the rulebook, its usability, and the overall impression before play for a new player.
The third, Gameplay, will provide my experiences playing the game solo and two-player, which I imagine will be the modes most people want to play a Dark Souls game in, as well as a discussion of those experiences and what they might mean for prospective buyers. It will also touch on the relationship between the board game and the original video game, which should be a useful touchstone for many who are interested in purchasing this game at the moment, as I imagine many will have come from the digital world.
Finally, I will summarize the review with some arbitrary scores, because people love those, and give some closing statements to qualify my conclusions.
Materials
We begin by looking at the materials provided with DSBG (which is how I will summarize the game's title from now, on for brevity), as these will not only be the first thing you look at when you open the box, but will also be instrumental in actually playing the game, so their quality is quite important to the quality of the game overall.
The first thing you may notice when the box is opened and the materials are exposed is that there are a lot of them! Organization will be key to keep your game from grinding to a halt as you search for a particular soul or wound token in the mound. I placed mine in individual, labelled ziploc bags that I was able to lay out in a logical manner after my first couple of playtests to make finding the required components at any point in time fairly smooth.
The packaging the materials first come in is of varying utility. For the cards, the flimsy plastic rack they come is is utterly useless, with no dividers for the various decks and no way to place it in the box so it does not tip or shake when travelling and ruin any sort of organization. For my purposes, I organized the cards into their decks and packaged each individually in a ziploc bag, as I mentioned doing above. For the miniatures, their racks are somewhat more useful. Being shaped to hold the pieces, they will keep the minis organized under most conditions, though due to the material they are made from (more on that later in this section) I refrain from pushing them fully back into their plastic racks, instead letting the packaging cradle them in place.
The wooden cubes, used for tracking the status and attributes of the player characters, are of good quality, being evenly shaped and smooth on all faces. The wood grain is visible through the paint, and lends them a pleasant aesthetic overall.
The cubes.
The dice, probably to be the most used items out of this box, are of varying quality. They come in four different colours, indicating three degrees of attack/defend dice as well as a dodge die, and have had their pips replaced with thematic symbols (an axe swinging on the green dodge dice, and swords on the other dice). These are required in place of other dice for gameplay due to the varied numbers of pips on their faces, ranging from 0 to 4 for the attack/defend dice, but can easily be replaced with result tables and ordinary dice if you are playing with someone who does not have the dice, such as in my two player trials.
When I mentioned the varying quality of the dice, this is specifically in relation to the coloration on their "pips." While most of them are solidly coloured, many are chipped and wearing away right out of the box. This, to me, does not bode well for their lifespan if they are to be used regularly as part of play, particularly since the chipping was most apparent on my black dice, the lowest level of attack/defend dice, and therefore the ones that tend to see the most use in play. The symbols on the dice faces are inset, which should allow repainting by the user, though I would readily argue that shouldn't be necessary straight out of the box.
The dice laid out for a photo. Chipping is evident on all the top faces of the black dice, in the foreground.
The cardboard elements are of decent make overall, with nice full colour and high resolution illustrations on them of the play areas, the characters, and the various token symbols. Their number, as mentioned above, may be daunting (though not if you've already punched out every token in the OGRE Designer's Edition - then you have truly seen the elephant as far as token punching and organization is concerned) but organization will alleviate the load somewhat. The lamination on some boards appears somewhat weak, as just from punching them out, I noticed that if you did not push them out in the right direction, you ran the risk of fully splitting a board in half, or, as I did in one location, peeling parts of the printed face off. Fortunately, in my case, this occurred on the back side of a character board, and so should never be visible to anyone. Good amounts of care being put in to punching the board elements should avoid any damage, but it is not hard to imagine the unfortunate who expects these counters to be as easy to punch and solid as those I've seen in other games punching one of the character boards and causing damage to the game before he or she has even played it.
The peeled sections on the backside of my Knight character board.
It is also worth noting that while no other element of the game requires assembly, the spinners for boss health and bonfire sparks do need to be put together, and the rules include no instructions to do this. You have a small ziploc bag containing the two halves of the plastic centre axis for the spinners, and the two halves of the spinners on sprues to punch out. I realized it fairly quickly due to having seen similar elements (pre-assembled, normally, or with a mention of assembly in the rulebook) in other games, but again, thinking of the new user picking this up, this may provide an obstacle to entry and increase the setup time and frustration.
The cards are, overall, quite well done. They are of good quality material and their colours are vibrant. All information is readily visible on their face. The only thing I have noticed is that, at least in my set, there was an error in their production. Where the rules state that bosses and mini-bosses should be differentiated by the symbol on their cards, a skull with a crown and a skull without crown respectively, my cards show the same symbol for both bosses and mini-bosses. This does not impact gameplay, particularly since I have my cards pre-sorted, but it is an error, so it's worth mentioning.
The Winged Knight, a mini-boss, and the Dancer of the Boreal Valley, a boss, side by side. Note the symbols at centre-left of the cards, both skulls with crowns, the symbol for bosses.
Now on to the miniatures. Those of you of like mind to me may have been most excited at the prospect of a slew of Dark Souls themed miniatures, not only for use with this board game, but potentially for using with other sets of rules, or even as tokens in tabletop role-playing games. The variety is exactly as advertised on the Kickstarter campaign, so you will not be disappointed there.
The miniatures in their plastic packaging
However, those same like-minded individuals will also probably be used to crisp hard plastic or pewter sculpts. Those will not be found here. The miniatures in DSBG are (likely relatively cheaply) moulded of quite flexible soft plastic, and all the hazards of this type of production are found here. This material also meant that punching them out of their packaging was a nerve-wracking experience, as I could feel the weapons bending even further, and glued-together elements wanting to part - hence simply nestling them in the plastic for organization, rather than pressing them back in.
Muddy or soft details, such as on Dragonslayer Ornstein's helm (contrast it to the detail on his breastplate)
Incomplete casting and warped weapons, such as on the guard of the Knight's longsword and the blade itself. If you look at the guard, you will see that the side facing the Knight is not fully cast. The same is particularly evident on my Hollow Soldiers, no two of which have the same length or shape of sword, though in that case the moulding bug will become a feature - broken straight swords all around.
Speaking of warped weapons, the umbrella this Silver Knight is readying to fire looks more like a limp noodle. Not up to the challenge today apparently.
Additionally, the models were cast in many pieces and likely glued together in the factory, so join lines are sometimes visible - they are normally strategically placed at joints in the model anyway, though, and should not be obtrusive to anyone not used to assembling their own miniatures.
The upside to this production quality, of course, is the cost. At approximately 120 USD for not only this set, but all expansions, my own purchase on Kickstarter was quite the bargain given the volume of miniatures I expect to receive. For those purchasing only the base game at that price retail-side, the deal is perhaps less good. I can only say that many of these imperfections can be mitigated with a few coats of paint and perhaps some weapon replacements, for those who know how to do it. If they are worth the trouble to you, you certainly can't go wrong with this for Dark Souls themed miniatures.
I should also mention that they are approximately 35mm scale, for those who are considering using them with other ranges, though because of their proportions they seem a bit lanky compared to other, more heroic 35mm miniature ranges.
The Herald, pictured between two Warhammer Age of Sigmar miniatures from my copy of Warhammer Quest : Silver Tower .Taking into account his bent knees, he seems roughly as tall as they are. Bonus internet points if you can identify the book they are posed on.
Overall, the quality of materials is acceptable for the board game, though I have doubts about the durability of almost all elements. Those of you who are a bit less picky, of course, may find absolutely nothing wrong with any of this. I leave it up to you.
Rules
The rules are presented in a 38 page. full-colour manual, whose back cover is dedicated to a decent quick reference sheet (though I found in gameplay that it didn't quite cover everything I wanted to look up, and covered many things I wasn't particularly concerned about. Mileage will vary.) and whose overall theming and aesthetic is quite effective. Visually, the rulebook is a success, appearing accessible and maintaining the Dark Souls aura about it.
As far as the rules and their communication goes, the results are, again, varied (I'm beginning to sound like a broken record, I fear). Overall, the rules are fairly comprehensive, if only because the game is conceptually quite simple. Using the table of contents at the start, sections of the book can be found easily for future reference. The lack of a glossary or index, however, seriously hinders its utility as a reference during play - some gameplay elements are oddly sorted, and remembering which section they are in to find it in the table of contents is often slower than simply flipping through the entire book two or three times until the paragraph you're looking for jumps out at you.
There are many images, helping to present elements of play like the different information elements on cards or the way that miniatures can move, and this is very effective in making the rulebook accessible and easy to understand.
One thing that confused me, particularly given the lack of an index or glossary for key words, is the intermittent bolding of what are clearly meant to be key terms in the rules. For example, in one section, the words "change equipment" are bolded, but are found bolded nowhere else in the manual, and can't be looked up specifically, so why did you bold an otherwise unremarkable expression? Likely, they wanted to make sure that changing equipment in these rules meant something specific, but this is not made clear by the manual. It does not hinder understanding, but it does not help it either, and makes me wonder if perhaps the rules were meant to have an index after all, but it was cut for page count and the manuscript was not looked at again afterwards.
Gameplay
This is perhaps where most people will be truly disappointed by DSBG. I have seen it described in other reviews online as suffering from its fidelity to the video game series, but that is patently incorrect. If that were the case, fans of the video game, at least, would appreciate its mechanics and enjoy the slog. DSBG does not mechanically or spiritually follow from the video game, as far as I am concerned, and that is the reason for its weaknesses. If it were truly loyal to the video game, then the issues I will identify with its gameplay would not exist, really.
Prepare for many comparisons to the video game series, since #1 they are apparently the same franchise, since it's fair, and #2 the video games are an immensely better experience, and so can help us suss out what went wrong with the board game.l
Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the video game and the board game probably occurred at one of the first planning meetings for DSBG's creation. Someone likely said "people like Dark Souls because it's hard and they die a lot," wrote that on the white board, and it became the mantra for the board game without any understanding of how, exactly, the video game creates and manages its difficulty for a rewarding experience. The Board Game is also painfully aware that, yes, it is a board game, and board games use dice. Those of you who played the video game may have been curious about whether mixing random chance into the formula would work. It, in my opinion, does not.
Randomness is everywhere in DSBG, and dictates every element of your game. All starting weapons and armour use dice that can potentially result in a null effect, no damage inflicted or blocked, and dodge dice only have a 50% success rate. This means that a slew of bad rolling can (and did, regularly) mean that no matter how much strategy you think you're employing, no matter how well you've learned the enemies' moveset (not difficult, since they perform the same action turn after turn) you can die to a hollow soldier after both of you whiff for six rounds with full damage block followed by 0 damage inflicted. This, as you may have guessed, is not a satisfying gameplay dynamic. Quite the opposite.
When you have randomly blundered your way to success in an encounter, you are rewarded with Souls, the experience points and currency of the DSBG. This reward is the same no matter what encounter you do, so get used to receiving only enough Souls to perform the initial upgrade to one attribute or to acquire two random items from Andre the Blacksmith. Players of the video game will now say "well, if you're good enough, any equipment or any attributes are fine for getting through Dark Souls." Sure. They would be if your skill had anything to do with this game. Attributes are necessary only to let you wield newer items. They do not impact your rolls or performance in any way. The only things that do that are your equipped items, which makes good equipment essential to being able to succeed.
Do note that I mentioned that all loot is random up above, so enjoy the game where you get nothing but gems to enhance your starter weapon that has no upgrade slots.
Your equipment determines how well you can dodge, how much damage you can do, and how much you can block. However, it does none of these deterministically, either. All of this is based on chance. With armour that provides you three block dice, you can still be hit by an easy attack and have your plans thrown awry simply because you rolled no successes.
Yes, these are the realities of dice-based board games, but they do not mesh well with the spirit of the Dark Souls games, nor do they provide any sort of fun challenge within this game as designed. All they do is frustrate you when they fail, and permit you to keep playing the game when they succeed.
Dark Souls the video games have carefully crafted levels, where loot is strategically placed and enemies are specifically selected to reward exploration, to test your skill as a player, and to provide choice in how to advance through an area. In the board game each and every one of those features is up to chance, which leaves... what exactly for the player to do?
Overall, rather than reminding me of a challenging but exciting role-playing game, this reminds me more of those old games where you play a submarine or bomber crew (for example https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1032/b-17-queen-skies), and just roll to see what happens to them over and over again. The major difference here is that those games, at least, generally had some choices for the player to make. In Dark Souls, you have a degree of choice as to where you will move, but if you want to hurt the enemy, you move towards them, while avoiding where their friends will go as much as possible to limit how many people are hitting you. Prepare to determine an optimal strategy the first time you enter a room, determining where to move based on the enemies' single action, then try that room over and over until you stop rolling 0 damage so that your plan can actually work.
The Boss battles suffer from the same thing, so while I would like to say that they are exciting and interesting (and the boss deck mechanic is genuinely fun, at first), frankly, sitting around for two and a half hours fighting the same boss while dodging the same attacks in order to go in and probably inflict no damage is not the definition of a thrilling game experience.
via GIPHY
Okay, I think I've gone over the fact that the game is entirely random and robs the player of any agency in the outcome enough. Let's move on to some other comments, then sum up.
This is a personal preference thing, but Dark Souls the video game is in many ways a solo experience that can be enriched by playing online with friends or strangers, but does not suffer by being enjoyed alone. In DSBG, solo play, even with their bonus Souls to get you started (which may enhance your stats in anticipation of items in the future without improving your luck at all now, or buy you random items... which may or may not be useable by your character without stat enhancement...) seemed almost impossible. You cannot disperse damage, so every enemy rushes towards you, pens you in, and hits you (and the odds are they will hit you) and you get to roll one attack every time every enemy goes through their cycle of rushing and hitting you. Excellent. My hopes had been up for a game I could throw down on a table on the weekend and get some fun out of, but that does not seem likely.
Of course, since the game generally involves rolling until failure then repeating the exact same things again hoping for different results (oh, hey, didn't see you there Einstein), good luck getting any friends who hate fun and have nothing better to do with their day to play a second game with you.
Summary
All of this comes together to what many other reviewers have said : Dark Souls is a boring board game, at least with the rules as written. This is not, however, because it is "too true" to the source material, but rather because of all the myriad ways it differs. Where Dark Souls is a carefully crafted, fair experience with interesting lore and beautiful environments to experience, DSBG is a fully random experience of trudging through tunnels towards a mildly more interesting (for the first half hour) boss fight.
If it were a video game, DSBG would be a roguelike, and not a good one like Dwarf Fortress' adventure mode, or Dungeons or Dredmor or something either. Random tunnels, random enemies, random attack results, except instead of being processed in milliseconds while you mash the arrow keys you need to fish around for tokens and roll dice and spend fifteen minutes+ in that one fight.
However, there is a glimmer of hope - If you just want DSBG for the materials, they are of an adequate standard, and I can think of no better or more cost-effective way to get Dark Souls miniatures at the moment, particularly for the bosses. This all means that the game is ripe for modding, and I intend to do just that. While the greatest weakness of the game is its rules, there are no board game police saying I need to ever follow them again. With tweaks to the loot deck, encounter structure, and damage and stamina management, I am looking at a far more playable, and potentially even faithful to the source material, version of DSBG. If they work out for me over some playtesting, I will publish my homebrewed rules on this blog for you to enjoy.
DSBG is not the worst board game I've ever played, but the best thing to come out of it was that I started playing the video games again. If you like painting minis and want to have a toolset to tabletop some Dark Souls themed stuff, this may be the box for you. If you actually want the Dark Souls experience, spend the cost of the board game on a used PlayStation 3 and Dark Souls the video game (or, if you have the console already, pick up Dark Souls 3 - probably the best of the bunch).
All that said, I hope this gave you a fresh perspective on Dark Souls : The Board Game. It may come off as scathing, but I hope that you can see there's something constructive there too. As I mentioned at the start, I started writing this as notes for myself on game-making, and perhaps it'll give you something to think about for your own homebrew games and how to manage the player experience in those too.
I look forward to seeing your comments on the subject below!
