The Darkest Cardboard: A Review of Darkest Dungeon (Patreon)

“Ruin has come to our family...

You remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial, gazing proudly from its stoic perch above the moor?

I lived all my years in that ancient, rumor-shadowed manor, fattened by decadence and luxury, and yet I began to tire of conventional extravagance.

Singular, unsettling tales suggested the mansion itself was a gateway to some fabulous, unnamable power. With relic and ritual I meant every effort towards the excavation and recovery of those long buried secrets, exhausting what remained of our family fortune on swarthy workmen and sturdy shovels. At last, in the salt-soaked cracks beneath the lowest foundation, we unearthed that damnable portal of antediluvian evil.

Our every step unsettled the ancient earth. Hideous, rotten aggressors assailed us from the shadows. We drew what strength we could from our companionship, but we were in the realm of death and madness! In the end, I alone, fled, laughing and wailing, through those blackened arcades of antiquity, until consciousness failed me...

You remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial? It is a festering abomination! I beg you, return home, claim your birthright, and deliver our family from the ravenous, clutching shadows...

Of the Darkest Dungeon...” – The Ancestor

"An ambush! Send these vermin a message: The rightful owner has returned, and their kind is no longer welcome!"

While working at Backbone Entertainment; Chris Bourassa and Tyler Sigman because friends, and during their time working for various studios they would meet up and discuss game ideas, but for a long time that was all they remained, ideas. However, in 2013 circumstances allowed them space and time to consider starting a new project together and they decided to take the plunge, forming Red Hook Studios in British Columbia and later launching a kickstarter to finance their video game concept they had in April of 2014. For the time, this kickstarter turned out to be quite the success story, the game concept which Red Hook put out there was one based around the concept of exploring dungeons with groups of heroes fighting with turn based combat.

On the surface that is a very standard affair for a roleplaying game, but Chris and Tyler took a spin on the genre by making the player develop a decrepit Hamlet and manage a roster of heroes who suffered not just from health loss but also struggled with the stress of the experience and could even develop various long term issues (expressed in the game as Quirks).

On top of this “maintaining mental health” twist, Chris Bourassa took a lot of thematic inspiration from the Cthulhu mythos, illuminated manuscripts from the 1500s and a highly stylised comic book art used by Mike Mignola amongst others. This art style uses a heavy amount of black shadow, creating a distinct and appealing style for the game. The final clinch in securing this game's part in history came from the voice acting of the disembodied narrator; this character, voiced by Wayne June was so well presented that his role was expanded and the Ancestor's commentary became an integral part of the game's experience. Many of his lines are immensely quotable and have deelpy seeped into pop culture.

The game was a huge success; garnering both positive critical and public reception and it has spawned numerous clones of both its art style and gameplay. Even board games like Kingdom Death: Monster can thank Darkest Dungeon for ensuring that the way was lit and the path was clear for them to offer their own spin on settlement development and rosters of semi-disposable player units. There was one moderate misstep during development where players were bursting down front rows to force enemy back rank units into the front ranks where they would be ineffective. Corpses were the decision that the designers settled on, temporary slot fillers that stopped this burst rush metagame and instead promoted the rank manipulation they wanted to utilise. Players initially despised this edition, but Red Hook stuck to their guns and I personally think they were right to do so.

My partner and I have both had wonderful times playing Darkest Dungeon both individually and separately, so when Mythic Games launched their board game adaptation of it in late 2020 I decided to back it. I am not going to go into details about the kickstarter and the issues surrounding it because I want to focus on the game itself rather than the shipping and company. I only mention it here to acknowledge that it has happened, it has impacted on the game's reception and the way that has been handled was not ideal for anyone. I hope Mythic Games can overcome their difficulties, reorganise and provide this game the support it and the players deserve.

Going ahead when I reference the Video Game version I am going to use Darkest Dungeon (VG) without the (VG) at the end I am referring to the board game version.

Components and Presentation

"Gilded icons and dogmatic rituals… For some, a tonic against the bloodshed."

With Chris Bourassa's iconic art available, Darkest Dungeon had a leg up in the process already, all that was needed was to translate it in a satisfying way and on this front the game has succeeded greatly. Of particular note are the miniatures, which are close to perfect 3D transcriptions of the game's original art.

The game is sold in two boxes, one for the miniatures and the second for everything else. Originally the game was pitched with a single box and I preferred the look of that concept, but I must admit that this change makes it easier to store on shelves. The Stronghold Box holds the miniatures and it is a well organised, efficient design that holds the miniatures well. The main game box on the other hand has a terrible storage design and left me looking for a third party insert in order to help set up quickly and keep things organised while on the table.

Iconography in the game is clear, as is text, which is very helpful considering how mechanically busy this game can get. You are always aware of what everything is and where it is. But there are quite a few issues here and I can't overlook them, so we'll walk through each one in turn.

First of all, glare is a massive problem with the components. Sit at the wrong angle and large sections of the game disappear into white. Even at the right angle the texture on the components still picks out spots of white making everything look dusty even when it is fresh out of the box.

Then we have various component issues; the tuck boxes are completely useless once you sleeve cards (also tuck boxes suck in general due to how they rip and tear); and Mythic Games sell specific sleeves for this game so why they overlooked that is a mystery. You can get away without sleeving most of the cards, but the Initiative Cards absolutely should be sleeved, the ones I put on them are already scratched and worn from the few dozen games I've played. You can probably get away without sleeving the hero cards; but I felt that the curio, quirk, disease, monster decks and so on needed to be sleeved due to the black art style quickly showing wear and tear. There are also no sleeves for the weird dungeon layout cards, they could have easily been shrunk in size slightly so the boss card sleeves would fit, but instead they have no protection options available and take up more space than needed.

The game is riddled with typos; such as incorrect text on the Hamlet board, and important details are not placed on components where they would be helpful. Such as the Hamlet locations not having their purchase cost printed on them. The back of each upgrade tile there has nothing but black on it. One could have easily put the purchase cost right there.

So. Much. Glare.

The rulebook is also not particularly well done; it is jumbled, unclear and lacks an index. With better reminder cards things could have been easier to handle, but the reference cards we have are not even comprehensive, for example the room reference is missing the Lair entry. So between the typos and the bad rulebook it can at times be possible to get a bit lost on the specifics of certain rules and have to halt play while you fumble back and forth through the pages.

The hero boards are also absolutely awful. I have seen some of the ones used in the playtesting and they were so much better than than what we got in the end. They're almost completely useless because all they have are slots for the skill cards and the worlds hardest to read stress track. I don't know who approved that look but I am now seriously considering designing and having printed my own play mats printed so I can actually use them. I've ended up putting the playmats back in the box for the moment and use two coloured dice (white and red) to track the stress situation. It's reduced the footprint for the heroes and also stopped confusion over what stress heroes are currently on.

Before we move on, I just want to reiterate just how gorgeous these miniatures are; they are easily in my top 5 for board game miniatures, there are so few casting issues in them, the only one I can recall right now is that the Cultist Acolyte's left arm turns into a blob of plastic between it and the body.

Gameplay – Starting Out and Hero Selection

"Great heroes can be found even here, in the mud and rain."

I am only going to move through the rules explanation with a light touch; I often get bogged down in explanations during a written review and I want to try and avoid that. But we'll see, because I often need to go back and reference the changes between the Video Game and the Board Game.

You will start the game at the hamlet, choosing four heroes from a core game roster of 11 who are:

• Abomination
• Arbalest
• Bounty Hunter
• Crusader
• Graverobber
• Hellion
• Highwayman
• Jester
• Plague Doctor
• Occultist
• Vestal

Each hero is based around their video game counterparts and has a mixture of damage, healing, tanking and controlling skills. Some changes to the game's mechanics do alter how they play a bit, but on the whole you know where you are with them. I'd like to briefly note that it is a bit thematically off to get the Snake enemies in the core box but not get their linked hero (The Shieldbearer). It's not a dealbreaker though.

"He will be laughing still at the end."

Each hero has a suite of seven different skills and you get to pick three of them in their Rank I forms to start off. As the hero increases in level they will gain access to two additional slots. These skills work based on the position that the hero has in the party; and have varied ranges, numbers of targets and effects. There's a massive range of options and it allows for a huge stable of different party builds. Fortunately for veterans of the video games things are similar enough to transcribe strategies across and new players are covered with some suggested parties in the back of the rulebook.

Once you have selected your party, you will draw a randomised boss for the first act. This boss in the core game is always from the Ruins and they can be either the Necromancer, the Prophet, the Collector or the Fanatic. Originally the Collector and the Fanatic were not Ruins specific bosses, the Collector is a wandering mini-boss and the Fanatic comes with the Crimson Court and exists to target parties with too many heroes inflicted with the crimson curse. It's a reasonable compromise to move both of these bosses to the core game as it helps variety of experience, which is very important given that the core game otherwise only has one location to explore.

The boss will bring with them a global effect that impacts on the Hamlet and a separate one which impacts on the Dungeon. These add quirks and personality to the game while also helping make these bosses feel more looming and threatening to the players.

Once these selections have been made and the party order decided, two quest cards are drawn and the players will choose one of them. The card lists objectives, what kind of rooms will be randomised onto the Dungeon Layout (face down) and how much healing can be gained from camping. Finally eight provision dice will be rolled to determine what supplies have been brought along. In the Video Game one gets to choose what supplies you are bringing and we're going to come back to that later when we discuss curios.

Gameplay – Exploring the Dungeon

"Even the cold stone seems bent on preventing passage..."

In Darkest Dungeon (VG), exploration takes place via a node system where the player starts at one node and chooses one to move to. They then advance their party down the corridor sideways and can encounter various curios, traps or monsters while the light of their torches slowly fades and stress mounts.

In Darkest Dungeon each player rolls two exploration dice, these have 1 blank side, a rubble pile, a trap, hunger, light reduction and curios. These dice are super punishing and require clever management of resources to navigate; you need to decide in rank order from front to back how each hero is going to manage the threats facing them. Supplies can be spent, or otherwise stress/wounds are inflicted in most cases.

This can be further mitigated by the use of the scouting mechanic, before moving players can scout at the cost of 1 stress on each hero. This will reveal all adjacent rooms and also let players roll only one exploration die each when next moving. That's a good deal because on average the dice will roll more than 1 stress worth of damage, though when the prophet is the boss, this cost is doubled and it becomes a far harder choice.

Curios

Before we get onto battled I needed to highlight Curios in particular because the changes made here are not for the positive benefit of the game. In the Video Game curios are region specific and have a list of effects that occur if they are interacted with, however with the right supply spent, different effects occur. The given curios and what supplies are needed vary from one place to the next and one of the fun parts of departing for a mission comes from choosing how many torches, food, bandages and so on you are going to bring along. The length of the quest, the monster abilities and curios alter these numbers in interesting ways.

Having a pile of randomised provisions has altered this a bit, though one side on the dice is 'choose' and there are alternative rules in the book to help change this further. The interactions with curios is completely lost – any curio drawn either slaps a hero with between two and three bad things and the rest may be positives. Negative Quirks in particular are handed out a lot and four negative quirks is fatal for a hero.

This has made torches the most valuable supply item and also flattened out the decisions to be made when departing. While one could argue that it is to reduce bookkeeping; considering how complex and bookkeeping heavy the status token stacks are this is not really a great argument. I miss the extra flavour the curio requirements gave to the locations and I do think something was lost where it didn't need to be.

I'm not going to go into details about them, but I do like how Trinkets work.

Gameplay – Battles

"Such a terrible assault cannot be left unanswered..."

We've made it to the meat of the game now; and this is where the largest change to the game occurred. Designers Nick Niotis and Argyris Poungouras took some huge risks moving the game from the One Dimension position based combat into the Second Dimension and let me tell you this. They succeeded on a level that I don't think anyone could have predicted.

I have played a lot of miniature based combat games over the years and make no mistake when I say that this is one of the best I have ever experienced. Dungeon Crawlers can often fall into the trap of gameplay being either a)I have stick, I move next to monster and hit or b) I throw sticks, I stay away from the monster and hit or c) I cast my heal on a friend.

Darkest Dungeon's combat has a huge range of different options for the heroes, with some abilities being locked not just at a maximum range but also a minimum range, varied numbers of targets, multiple different status effects and massive synergies between various heroes. It's an absolute delight to play and adds so much to replayability that it can't be understated how engaging this all is. You can run parties ranging from a static group of healer/healer/damage/tank all the way up to unique concepts built around the Mark status effect or even “Dancing” which is where heroes move around in the ranks each turn, dancing about the board as they use their abilities to devastating effect.

"Great is the weapon, that cuts on its own!"

Once a room with a battle is entered, cards are drawn from the monster deck and placed on the monster party order until all spaces are filled. Monsters either fill from the back or the front depending on their combat preferences and they act differently depending on where they are positioned. Outside of the change that has them moving in two dimensions they act in a similar fashion to their electronic simulacra and operating monsters is very straightforward. It is worth briefly mentioning that heroes get to do two things in a turn instead of just one and that is another excellent update (monsters also do two things, but one of them involves movement to be able to use their skill).

Initiative has also undergone a significant change, in the video game it is determined by speed attributes; but in the video game it is instead based on party rank. The initiative deck is shuffled and a card drawn to determine which unit acts next, a gold bordered card means a hero unit and grey means one of the enemies. However, the order in which these units activate goes from front to back, so being in the front aggressive rank means you will go before any of your adventuring colleagues.

This allows for some advanced strategy; while you will not know how many monsters act before a given hero you do know the order your own units will act in. This can let a Bounty Hunter mark a monster before the Arbalest lines up a devastating sniper shot. It also has the added impact of rewarding front row healers, because they get to go earlier in the turn each time and ultimately end up getting to take more turns than their back row counterparts. This is especially important in the case of the Crusader, who had one major drawback in that he was very slow and tended to go last. This downside is now lost and unsurprisingly the Crusader is an absolute beast of a unit. I'd even tentatively call him the overall best unit in the game as he can do everything.

"These nightmarish creatures can be felled, they can be beaten!"

A great tweak that this game has is limiting the number of rounds the heroes have to clear all the enemy units. Stalling can be a common tactic in games like this with so many controlling options. So forcing the players to complete the battle within four rounds is a really smart move. It means that the players have limited time to heal up wounds and stress because they also need to juggle removing their opponents.

Status effects on the other hand are a little wonky. While they add a lot of crunch to the combat and I think they are superb. This is not a light system to get your head around. Status effects not only vary in effect, but they can also create stacks of multiple tiles. You then have to keep stacks dealt from each source separate, and at the start of a units turn you need to deplete all the stacks by one and trigger their effects. It's a lot of work and easy to make errors with. Especially when you also need to remember resistances (which reduce the amount of stacks inflicted by one), and that bleed/blight come in not one, not two but four different types. With multiple players you can share out this load by making each player responsible for handling certain status effects, but the mental load is huge.

I love the crunch of this system, but I do think that it could have been simplified a little, especially in the case of bleed and blight. However, if you are a fan of super crunchy combat, Darkest Dungeon has you covered.

Gameplay – Returning to the Hamlet

"Welcome home, such as it is. This squalid hamlet, these corrupted lands. They are yours now, and you are bound to them."

Outside of boss quests (and timing restrictions), players get to decide when they want to end a quest and return to the hamlet. Completing goals and clearing rooms provides experience and glittering gold. Both of which are vital to a successful campaign. Gold can be spent on healing wounds or stress (another change here is not automatically healing wounds when returning to the hamlet), or buying provisions, curing diseases/quirks and buying trinkets. XP allows heroes to upgrade their level or their skill cards. Level increases tend to improve passive defensive statistics and mobility in addition to gaining a skill card slot while skill card upgrades will help improve the quality and power of hero actions.

Before any actions are taken; players will draw a Hamlet Event Card, this provides some unique affect and also tells the players how many days they have before it is time to embark on the next quest. In party rank order a player will put their hero onto a Hamlet location, blocking it from any other hero also using it that turn. The Caretaker also blocks one location randomly each day and players can alternatively use their Hamlet Skill. These Hamlet Skills are based on the camping skills from the video game and they vary in quality from poor to good with some being very situational and others being something you want to use almost every time.

This loop repeats until the third quest, which is when the Act boss will be faced. There is no retreat from this one and the battle against the boss (once they are located from their random position on one of the edge rooms in the dungeon) continues until one side comes out victorious. If it is the boss, then game over, if it is the heroes then that is a success and we move to the next act.

Gameplay – Hero Death

"Madness can take many forms, but none so contemptible as man's belief in a mythology of his own making."

The death of a hero is particularly well handled, at the end of the battle where they died one of the waiting hero tokens is spent from the Stagecoach area of the hamlet, the hero gains XP equal to the amount recorded with the stagecoach (total XP gained so far) and gets to spend XP (no gold costs) to take two advances to either their hero card and/or skill cards. It means a player who died doesn't have to sit out an entire dungeon, but deaths in the late portion of a campaign do find the arriving hero to be a little outclassed at times.

If there are not enough waiting heroes left to replenish a party back to four heroes, then the campaign is lost. Additional waiting heroes can be gained by upgrading the stagecoach.

Gameplay – Bosses & Monsters

"Triumphantly I watched as he tore his eyes from their sockets and ran shrieking into the shadows, wailing maniacally that the end was upon us all."

A short bit on the four bosses and the monsters in the core game. The monsters are split between common monsters who appear in all locations and Ruins specific monsters. They are further subdivided into act levels (I, II and III) plus a separate group for the Darkest Dungeon's two quests. The mix in the core game is fine, but the saturation of bone enemies makes bleed strategies a little weaker without expansions. This will of course change as the expansion locations are released.

The main issue lies with the way the monster deck upgrades when you move to a new act. The higher level monsters are just shuffled into the deck and all of the previous ones remain. This results in a high variance of monster power, you can often find yourself wandering though batches of Act I monsters and slaughtering them without much challenge or you can hit the high end of the bell curve and land in the lap of a full party of Act II monsters on your first battle. This issue becomes even more pronounced in Act III. What was missing here was a curated deck for each act, something that Darkest Dungeon (VG) did here was upgrade the earlier monsters to higher level versions. Darkest Dungeon could have also achieved that with more development time and testing of upgraded variants.

The bosses on the other hand do scale correctly; they have a version for each act and all of them play differently. The Collector leans on his Adds (additional units) and they work like a twisted adventuring party, the Fanatic marches around throwing people at his pyre where they take horrific damage if they do not escape, and if they smash the Pyre down then he starts to lay around with terrifying skills. The Necromancer summons bone minions to its side while the Prophet and his Pews play out in an interesting 2D version of his e-fight. They are all fun and challenging to fight and represent a real bundle of successes. The Darkest Dungeon bosses and enemies are also brilliant, they provide a real challenge and an excellent capstone to a campaign.

Mini-Reviews

"The gateless gate. A maddening aperture to realms beyond human understanding."

While I might review each expansion separately, I have no intention of reviewing the following items solo, so as a bonus here is a quick review for each.

The Dark Tapestry Playmat

If you are playing with 3 or 4 players this playmat is servicable; it's not so great at two players and honestly it falls apart when playing Solo. If it had been two divided mats that could be rotated to change the orientation and if it had an actual Hamlet section things would have been better. I think you can pass on this one and wait to see what turns up in third party offerings.

Musketeer

She's another Arbalest; however instead of having her unique Skill Card Names, she still has all the Arbalest skill names with the Musketeer iconography. I know she's a reskin, but c'mon. You can probably pass on this one unless you really love how she looks, because unlike in Darkest Dungeon (VG) she doesn't even get unique trinkets.

The Darkest Organiser

This is a decent storage option for the tokens and dice, but it does not help alleviate the problems that the core box has in respect to ending up being a pile of cards in baggies. It is very good on the table and a quality product, it's just not a substitute for a good insert.

The Heirloom Chest

The Hamlet Board has the same typo that the one in the core box has, so you're paying a premium for an incorrect double layer board. I like double layer boards, but it is disappointing to get a luxury upgrade with a typo.

The replacement chests and room tokens are nice, though if you are going to paint them, do so before putting the stickers on them and be aware that unless you are really precise with your painting you'll probably end up marking them with variations in your paintjobs.

The coins are pretty awful to use, but they look very pretty and I do like the backdrops which were great for photographing the scenes you see in this article. However I ended up switching back to the token forms for all the above options so I don't see the value here personally.

The Future – What I Would Like to See

"The twisted faces of the damned, piled high, and cloaked in malice."

If Mythic Games can recover and get onto their feet I would like to see a follow up campaign that provided fixed printings for the various typos/errors and a new cleaner rulebook. But most of all I want to see an expansion of this game experience to increase the game to six acts (same as the video game version), provide upgraded versions of the various low level monsters and expand on the curio/provision system to provide the crunch and details that I want when deciding what to do on departing. I would also like to have the heroes in the game sold in a second separate box with alternative colour schemes on the card are (this is in addition to the Darkest Heroes box) so parties with 3 or 4 of the same hero could become possible.

However, a capstone epic campaign experience that turns this from a 6 to 8 week gaming experience into one that takes multiple afternoons over a month would make me very happy.

Final Comments

"Can the defiled be consecrated? Can the fallen find rest?"

Darkest Dungeon is a flawed product, but underneath all the various issues I have brought up (and more besides) sits one of the best dungeon crawling systems we've seen in the history of the genre. The battle portion is has so much bite and crunch to it that it is satisfying enough that you can overlook or forgive some of the oversimplified portions such as Trinkets, Curios and the shortness of the Darkest Dungeon portion itself.

The miniatures in this game are gorgeous, and the artwork is absolutely incredible and I do hope that this franchise is returned to at least once more before the inevitable Darkest Dungeon 2 adaptation arrives on a crowd funding platform near to you. If there were not so many unforced errors and issues in this game I would be rating it a solid 9/10, but as it stands I've had an excellent time in my two dozen or so campaigns and I'm about to go back and start a new one as soon as I finish writing this. Can you hear that on the wind? That voice? It's calling out.

“Ruin has come to our family...” – The Ancestor