Darkest Dungeon: The Board Game

I have put honest working hours into Darkest Dungeon on PC, and I still count it among the best at what it does: brutally difficult, exactly as it ought to be. Mythic’s board game captures a great deal of that grubby, anxious atmosphere. It has flavour by the bucketful.

At its centre, your group faces the monsters, each encounter asking the party to get on top of danger before danger gets on top of them. The original’s feel is present; the characters and enemies have the right sense of weight. Yet in our game, fighting the monsters was oddly, tediously easy. Perhaps it was the particular mix of heroes and enemies. Perhaps. But Darkest Dungeon is not supposed to pat you on the head.

The campaign asks you to set up, clear away, then set up again, and it is desperately fiddly, especially if you are teaching it at the same time. The group has to carry that burden together: keep the pace moving, live with a table full of stuff, and remember all the little obligations that are never quite as little as they look. Then somebody dies magnificently and the stories begin. That is when the game really wakes up.

It has its moments and, with the right group—one that laughs at heroic deaths rather than chasing flawless play—it can make for a very good evening. It does not unseat Sword and Sorcery as my first dungeon-crawler choice, but it is a faithful, atmospheric trip back to Darkest Dungeon, provided you are not tryhards.