Darkest Dungeon: The Board Game

I have put honest working hours into Darkest Dungeon on PC, and I consider it one of the best in its genre—precisely because it is maddeningly difficult. Setting aside the well-known Kickstarter issues that troubled backers, I found the KS retail edition at a very good price, and my first impression was that Mythic had made a very faithful adaptation. On the table it produces flavour by the bucketful and genuinely feels like Darkest Dungeon, rather than just a dungeon crawler that borrowed its name and artwork.

At its core, it is a campaign dungeon crawler: you set your party of characters against monsters, and the group tries to make it through its encounters. That is where I found my main objection. The monster-fighting felt boringly easy to me, in complete contrast to the PC game that I remember consistently and gleefully grinding me into the floor.

I cannot rule out that the particular combination of monsters and characters we got was responsible, so I will not present this as a final diagnosis of the balance. Still, the campaign rhythm did not pull me in: the setup and teardown between sessions felt desperately fiddly, perhaps also because I was doing it alongside teaching the rules. From what I experienced, interaction is mainly about managing the party together against the encounters, rather than players trying to hinder one another.

Even so, it has its moments, and when the table clicks with the right group, it can produce stories. Damn it, Ancient, you left early—we would have written two books about your epic deaths. It does not dethrone Sword and Sorcery from first place among my dungeon crawlers, though. I see it as a game for a particular group that wants to enjoy the theme and its disasters, not for tryhards looking for the video game’s merciless challenge.