Darkest Dungeon is live (Delving deeper into darkness)
Update: Darkest Dungeon: The Board Game has launched on Kickstarter and the campaign will run for 17 days. There are two pledge options: the core game, and the core game plus the Crimson Court expansion.
Our preview post below was published on October 15.
Darkest Dungeon: The Board Game is a 1-4 player cooperative dungeon crawl game in which a party of heroes is trying to clear a mansion from the horrors that reside inside. It is the board game adaption of the popular video game by the same name, and it will launch on Kickstarter on October 20.
Darkest Dungeon is a campaign game, and your ultimate goal is to reach the final stage, the Darkest Dungeon, and defeat the boss. Before you get there, you will have to go through a series of quests with their own mini-bosses. At the start of the game, you will choose your heroes (the Vestal, the Crusader, the Plague Doctor etc.) each of which comes with different skills. As the heroes gain more experience and level up, they also gain more skills or improve the ones they have.
When you embark on a quest, you first set up a diagram of the dungeon rooms. For example, you may be told that the dungeon has 6 rooms 2 of which are empty, 2 contain treasure, and the other 2 have monsters. You will take the associated 6 room tokens and randomly place them face down on the diagram so that you won't know which room you will enter as you go.
The most important aspect of the gameplay is choosing the stance (aggressive, defensive, ranged, support) of your heroes and where they will be positioned. The stance can be changed when you move from one room to another. The room tiles also indicate how many minis can stand on them and which stance both heroes and monsters can take.
On a hero's turn, you can do 2 actions: move, use a skill or interact with the environment. When you use a skill to attack, you roll a D10 and inflict damage depending on the result. Once you clear a room of the enemies, you can proceed to the next one. Heroes also gain stress over the course of the game which they can heal when they visit the hamlet in between quests.