Board game designers Steamforged Games and CoolMiniOrNot have both recently announced deals with Bandai Namco Entertainment, publisher of the brutal Dark Souls and Bloodborne games, to adapt the brutally hard video games into board games we can die in (over and over again) from the privacy of our own kitchen tables. With Steamforged forging ahead with Dark Souls and CoolMiniOrNot taking on Bloodborne, we can expect each to be quite a different experience.
On the Bloodborne side, designer Eric M. Lang has tweeted a rather familiar looking box, saying the card-based tabletop game is already in the late stages of production.
For those who follow me and have gotten to know my silly codenames for games-in-progress, this is Project Dream. pic.twitter.com/fqoKqJwCQx
— Eric Lang (@eric_lang) March 16, 2016
Lang is a big name, having crafted games for such franchises as Star Wars, Warhammer 40k, Avengers vs. X-Men, Call of Cthulhu, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, and more. He even designed the award winning XCOM board game. He started tweeting about Bloodborne back in November, under the codename “Project Dream,” expressing his excitement about the project. He has also tweeted a bit about the gameplay, noting a 30 minute play time:
Bloodborne: risk management with a bit of groupthink, inventory management/upgrades and tactical play in an intense 30 minute card game.
— Eric Lang (@eric_lang) March 16, 2016
Lang explained that we’ll be looking forward to a card centered equipment and inventory management game in which players compete to collect blood in a manner fashioned from Bloodborne‘s competitive Chalice Dungeons. “You go out, you kill monsters, you take their blood. It’s a family game,” he quipped sarcastically in a recent interview with Board Game Geek. Players want to stay in the game as long as they can to collect blood, but run the risk of dying and losing all they’ve currently collected. Lang warns that players will experience quite a few deaths, an homage to the constant PC death present in the video games.
As far as Dark Souls goes, Steamforged Games just launched their Kickstarter for the adaptation earlier today to coincide with last week’s hype from the release of Dark Souls III.
They describe the game as a brutally hard exploration-based miniatures game for 1 to 4 players. In their Kickstarter announcement the company expressed the difficulty of narrowing down the field of potential bosses and minibosses from among all of the games. They were willing to say that the game will include Dragon Slayer Ornstein and Executioner Smough.
Like the Bloodborne card game, the Dark Souls game appears to rely heavily on a risk management system to simulate the video game experience. Reviewers at Polyhedron Collider who tried out the game said:
“However it does add a nice push-your-luck element, meaning that you could spend more stamina to push the attack but you don’t know how well it’s going to hit and it might leave you in the wrong spot once the boss activates. Again it feels like fighting one of the boss characters in Dark Souls, push forward and hit the boss as much as possible but know it’s going to leave you with very little stamina and open to a lot of damage.”
Let us know which bosses you hope to give you the old “YOU DIED” message.
Featured Image Credit: FromSoftware Inc.
Image Credits: Eric M Lang, Steamforged Games Ltd