Dark Souls Board Game Review & Ultimate Guide

If any single board game could be described as masochistic, it’s probably Dark Souls. It's brutal. It's violent. And you will almost certainly die.

But cooperation counts, doesn't it?

Read the full review of the board games Dark Souls below.

Dark Souls: A board game

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Challenges ahead: Dark Souls: The board game is about quick setup ...
Play as iconic characters: take on the role of a knight, warrior, ...

A brief overview of dark souls

Dark Souls is a prison-spider cooperative for one to four players based on video games of the same name. Your group of haunted undead must move from tile to tile, defeat monsters, and complete encounters as you prepare for the last boss.

It’s mostly a fighting game, not exploration . When choosing weapons and maneuvers you will need to have your own tactical hat based on dice attacks. And if he succeeds, upgrade your character and his abilities.

Like video games , it’s extremely hard to win. Luckily, if you die, you have more attempts to try again. But even then, there will still be a large order.

Variations and extensions

Dark Souls: Board game - an extension of the extended dragon boss

Fortunately, Bryan has already written an in-depth review of all the Dark Souls Extensions you need to be aware of.

Unpacking dark souls

In the rather intimidating Dark Souls box you will find:

miniature
- 4 characters
- 16 enemies
- 2 chiefs
- 4 mini bosses
141 treasury bills
36 meeting cards
15 cubes
80 cubes
106 tokens
9 tiles

One of the outstanding features of Dark Soul is its Miniature . The level of care and details are clearly visible, so if you want to collect decent miniatures, this will be a great addition to the collection .

The hero’s heroes and enemies are perfectly good, but the main characters here really take the cookies. Especially the protruding Dragon Slayer Ornstein & Executioner Smough is a real treat. While even mini-bosses like the demon Titanite are impressive.

The rest of the kit does not reach the same stunning heights. All the cards look pretty clean, but the themes aren’t necessarily important. While the tiles themselves are probably boring. Then again, I guess this is proof that this game focuses on all-round combat, not on discovering new and interesting terrain.

There are a lot of tiny pieces here. So be careful, otherwise you won’t just lose the game.

How to Play Dark Souls |

Setup

To create a dungeon to explore, randomly place six square tiles in any shape around a Bonfire tile. Bonfire tile acts as your safe haven or as a resuscitation point.

Then choose the mini boss you want to fight. The mini-boss you choose dictates the number of meeting cards for each difficulty level you encounter on each tile.

In the end, all the players choose a character and place a miniature on the Bonfire tile. Also, take the appropriate board of players that follows your character’s statistics, telling you your hero’s special abilities and starting equipment cards.

Winning and losing the game

Your client’s goal is to break through the dungeon and complete the meetings on each tile. When you defeat one mini-boss, set up the board again, but choose the main boss you want to defeat instead. If you are successful, your team wins.

Defeat is also very possible (if not, inevitable). If a member of your party dies, go back and start over. However, your game has a certain amount of experience, depending on how many players are in the game. These are known as Sparks.

If you run out of Sparks and the player dies, it's over.

Meetings

The bulk of the game consists of meetings. Your client moves from tile to tile through the dungeon. When you enter a new tile, the meeting card flips over and adjusts. Each has individual enemies, terrain and traps.

Players and enemies are activated to alternate in alternating order (IE. Player 1, Enemy 1, Player 2, Enemy 2, etc.). On the player's move, they can move and attack or attack and move.

Most actions, including movement, cost endurance. So you have to be careful how you decide to assign it, because if you run out of stamina, you die.

When it is the player's turn, the game moves to the next player. If you manage to defeat all the monsters on the tile, your customer wins and gets a reward in the "soul cache" that you can spend in the bonfire. If the character dies, your party is defeated and they must 'rest at the bonfire' (see below).

fight

The fight takes place with the help of dice, the success of which largely depends on the equipment you have - weapons, armor, spells, etc.

Attacks are carried out by first selecting the weapon / type of attack you want to make. Different attacks cost different amounts of endurance and will determine the amount of dice you throw and their extent (how many nodes need to be away from your victim).

Gamble the dice and no matter how many pips you spin, the amount of damage you deal is minus the block value of your target. Seizures can also cause several types of illness, such as poisoning or frostbite. It is also possible that the attack “pushes” the character to a longer node.

Health and endurance are measured on the endurance bar - health at one end, endurance at the other, and ten squares in between. Every time you run out of stamina or get hurt, add a square to a square. If all ten squares are filled, your character dies.

Rest at the bonfire

If you are defeated, your client should rest at the bonfire. This restores the resources and health of all your characters. However, you only have as many options for this as explained above. You also need to reset all the meeting cards and come back and do them again!

Bosses

Players close meetings to strengthen their stats, upgrade their weapons, and collect armor and spells, all to prepare them for boss battles.

The bosses act a little differently than the other enemies. They have several behavioral maps that need to be processed at each step to overcome them. Everyone sees the boss acting differently.

The boss divides your tile into four areas or arches that affect how your characters can move and how attacks are carried out.

If you manage to beat the mini and the main bosses, your party wins the game!

Your first Dark Souls game

Honestly, on your first Dark Souls game, you’ll probably lose. Poor. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn some good lessons from it.

It is important not to think that the best approach is as soon as possible. Your time in jail in front of bosses is a time of preparation. With it, you earn a soul cache and pay to upgrade your characters and objects. You may even decide to rest at the bonfire just to have more skills.

When it comes to rules, there is a simple mistake we can make if we forget to apply the thrust condition or effect if the target blockade or stat resistance has reduced the damage to zero. It is still a hit, even if it takes away nothing of health, and the target will still be poisoned, frostbitten, or consequently pushed back.

The only way a unit can avoid condition or pressure is if it manages to avoid an attack altogether.

Advantages disadvantages

Advantages:

Super tactical caterpillar dungeon
Interesting combat mechanisms
Cooperative and one player
Amazing thumbnails (described above)

Weaknesses:

Very focused on the fight
Hard to win
Only four game characters

Unlike many dwarf spiders, you will spend your time playing Dark Souls mostly in the heat of tactical combat (or dying!). Players who just want to smash a few skulls and cheat on the battlefield will have a lot to chew on here, throwing you a meeting card after the meeting.

This continuous action can become very exciting. However, if you’re more of an Indiana Jones type, you’d rather secretly explore a dungeon and discover artifacts than get involved in endless chaos, you may find it getting older pretty quickly.

In my opinion, however, the mechanics of the combat system fully justify the propensity for violence. It provides a great tactical experience. We will approach each meeting differently, depending on the strengths and weaknesses of the enemies that arise. You will need to carefully choose the best weapons, attacks, items and strategies for this job, while effective movement will play a key role in how your client will have fun.

Also, the endurance stick is really a great balance, which means that the combination of health and endurance decides the fate of your character and not just HP. After all, it’s pretty imaginative to be able to deliver multiple deaths with a single blow, with multiple limbs cut off, but you still have the stamina for agile attack (unless Monty Python’s Black Knight , of course).

But the boss battles are where the fight really stands out. The uncertainty of behavioral cards means that your customer must be completely attentive and ready to adjust the plan at all times. And bows of movement are also an interesting addition.

It is worth mentioning that Dark Souls, obviously similar to the parent in video games, sometimes feels almost impossible to win. So be prepared to lose. Luckily you have the opportunity to go back to the bonfire and try again. This nicely mimics a checkpoint for video games, resetting everything back to what it was, and giving you a chance to hone your tactics and try again with one last look.

Dark Souls can be replayed mainly due to the large number of cards available, as you can compose very differently each time you play. These are central to the game and it’s wonderful how you can replace them instead. Still, I’d rather have more than just four characters.

Finally, most cooperatives can usually be played as a single player — sometimes simply by taking on the role of two characters — but these rules often end up being tackled more than subsequent thoughts. Praise Dark Souls for including rules in the single player version.

TL; DR

Not one for kids, Dark Souls is as wild as it is impossible to win. At heart, it’s cooperative lakes, but the emphasis is primarily on combat.

Your team has to work through a series of conflicts, upgrade their statistics and weapons during the process to prepare for a battle with a big boss.

The chances of you coming out alive are slim. Due to the complex combat mechanics and tactics, this is a brilliant table adventure. I just hope you like to lose.

Conclusion: a verdict?

Dark Souls is a bloodthirsty game of brutal but tactical combat. In fact, it seems more like a series of intense fights than a typical angry-spider game and is a good novelty in the genre. Long tunnels, monologues, and mystical riddles have been sacrificed in favor of in-depth combat mechanisms that might have prevailed in the wider system.

Especially miniature lovers will find a lot of pleasure. The care and detail invested in the models of the bosses means that Dark Souls stands with its head and shoulders above many similar releases.

It is simply impossible to escape the fact that Dark Souls is a very difficult game. But don't let that deter you. Loss - or should I say dying - is only part of the experience. And if you somehow managed to win, it’s all the sweeter (I imagine).

Dark Souls: A board game