Dark Souls: The Board Game Review – Geek Gear Galore

At the start of the game, each player starts out with a character class and a fairly standard set of gear.

Players then decide on which mini-boss and boss they will be fighting which determines the encounter cards that will be placed on each tile of the dungeon.

Players need to work their way through the dungeon tiles that make up the game board, entering rooms which trigger encounters from which you cannot run until either your enemies are vanquished or one of the people on your team falls in battle (whereby which everyone returns to the bonfire tile).

During each player turn, one of your party gets to move and attack. However, on each enemy turn all of the enemy’s attack at once.

This means that the enemies get far more opportunities to deal out damage than the players do as individuals. Enemies even get the first attack on every encounter – forcing players to very quickly learn that blocking or dodging incoming damage is far more important than dishing it out (sound familiar to those that have played the video game?).

Players health and stamina is also crucially important in the game. Overreaching and spending stamina has its rewards, but it also adds little black cubes to the left side of your characters endurance bar.

Taking damage meanwhile adds little red cubes to the right side of your endurance bar.

If the bar fills up entirely you die.

This creates a nice amount of attention between being an effective combatant and not leaving yourself exhausted and open to a deadly counter-attack.

While needing to be wary of each players endurance bar is important, successfully completing an encounter will immediately remove all of the cubes as well as the ability to remove them by using an Estus flask (if you’ve got one).

Upon defeating a standard encounter, players earn two souls per player. All souls go into a central pool and can be spent on buying new gear and leveling up character stats upon return to the bonfire.

Player progression and spending souls is a tricky balancing act. When playing, I found that our group was frequently buying new gear only to discover that nobody had the stats to use it.

This was really frustrating for me, because getting to level up and put on better gear is immensely rewarding!

The quality of gear is reflected in game by the color of the dice you roll for combat – with blue and orange dice offering you more successes than the standard black dice.

Rolling these ‘upgraded’ dice makes you feel really really powerful and it also makes a massive difference to your survivability and your combat effectiveness.

Farming and player progression is incredibly important in Dark Souls – and without the correct player progression (and the scaling difficulty of the game), players can find themselves easily stuck on later encounters.

Luckily, like the video game, the encounters are a lot of fun so going over them again doesn’t really feel like much of a hassle.

As players grow more familiar with both the enemies and the player characters (each with their own strengths and weaknesses), they can develop strategies and approaches to encounters that will greatly increase the chances of success.

Dark Souls does offer some respite to gamers in the form of its generous movement rules. Players are able to choose which squares enemies will move to next – allowing pre-planning of which party member will suffer the next attack.