Dark Souls The Board Game: Tomb of Giants, Core Game

Let me start off by saying that I don't blame the people who backed this game and are understandably angry about an incompetent roll out for a project they were passionate about and supported from the beginning. I personally cringed when I had all the expansions painted and ready to play before people who actually backed it got their product. That being said I definitely feel like that anger has partially infiltrated the reviews and general reception of the game. I will also say that the base game alone is a pretty hollow(no pun intended) experience. With only two main bosses to look forward to taking on, and no variety to the classes each run if you're playing with four players, the experience for me was playing one game to learn the rules, then playing it twice and having fun, but having little motivation to jump into it again. This gets into what is both a big pro and a con. Once you get the Darkroot expansion, and print out the sorcerer/dragonslayer mini boss, and add some mega bosses the experience is elevated immensely. The variety of enemies, additional class and items, in addition to a new final climactic challenge adds a lot more incentive for busting out the game as opposed to fighting identical encounters to fight either the dancer or O/S every time. Naturally the con here is that it requires purchasing additional product, but these are, for the most part, very reasonably priced right now. While my experience is limited with all these incorporated, I will say the mega boss we've fought was an awesome experience. The Stray Demon was a great translation of the in game fight, and its also great that SF made it a mini boss in the form of the asylum Demon as well. I will say is unfortunate the level four encounters incorporate a lot of the currently unreleased expansions, and the one that we could use from Demon was painfully easy with an endgame team as opposed to the massive and chaotic brawl I expected. It is great to be able to use some of the cool main boss items for these though. One thing that I think can be universally agreed that needs improvement is that the items have weird and often not thematic stat requirements- With many players you are able to dig enough to get to good stuff and jack characters up, but with smaller teams it can be an exercise in frustration. The grind I find to be a smaller issue. Once you are familiar with the rules you and your friends can breeze through trivial encounters easily. TLDR: The game is great and very thematic, especially when it comes to bosses, however you will need the expansions to have a reason to dust it off more than a few times.

*Received the package a couple days before estimate so kudos. *The game came in impeccable condition, everything packaged nice and tight. Minis are gorgeous, (plan to paint them some time soon). *I played the game with a couple of friends, had a 2 player and a 3 player session. My takes are the following: This is definitely NOT for everyone, I can entirely understand the negative reviews around the internet. The game is quite repetitive and grindy. HOWEVER. We had an absolute BLAST (especially in the 3 player game). The advancing, the pacing, the encounters (even though repetitive) are a challenge every time. You have to strategize and play around and even though the encounters are kind of same-y they can feel different every time. Boss (and mini boss) fights are awesome and really convey the feel from the video game. In a fight against the Dancer, even though she was basically (sorry the pun) dancing around, not really dealing any damage, it really keeps you on edge, wondering what's gonna come next, because sadly we couldn't memorize her moves for the life of it. I think that there is a TON of replayability to this, even with the repetitiveness. (found an app that generates random dungeons if you run out of ideas for campaigns or whatever, that includes whatever expansions you've got, and even has enemy and boss scaling and some quest features, so with that we are probably looking at months of weekly sessions..) Definitely going to get some expansions for this though for more variety and challenge. In the words of Yahtzee Croshaw: "The fans will like it!" and I (as a fan) totally agree. side note: The play time on the box is an ABSOLUTE LIE, as it takes way more than the suggested 90-120 minutes. first 3 player run took us about 3.5 hours of net gameplay to finish, so keep that in mind.

Let me preface this by saying I am a huge Dark Souls fan, so this review may be a tad biased. I bought this hoping for something closely resembling the actual dark souls game on tabletop that I could play with friends. However, what I got was something a little different. While certain aspects of the board game are similar, this really feels like its own entity separate from the video games that just kind of borrows from the intellectual property. With that being said, this game works and is actually very fun. The miniatures are amazing and everything is very well crafted. The game is set up so that you do not have to have a game master controlling the enemies so you can play solo or co-op with someone without worrying about making enemy decisions. This game is a bit rule heavy, so you will probably end up referring back to the rule book several times to figure out what symbols mean and how certain aspects of the game work. Personally I do not agree with some of the rules as it seems a bit luck based while the dark souls games generally revolve around skill and planning, so my group of gamer nerds and I came up with a set of homebrew rules to get rid of some of the randomness while still keeping the game difficult.

It's a really fun board game and while luck plays a large part due to it using dices it doesn't feel unfair. The boss behavior decks is were this really shines with each boss fight playing differently from the last, namely the Dancer of the Boreal Valley and Ornstein and Smough fights. If you want to speed up gameplay then that's easy with a few simple house rules, the normal rules take way longer than the advertised 90 minutes. The miniatures are of excellent quality, I can't compare them to others as these are my first but comparing them to the quality and detail of similar priced model kits they are much more detailed and feel a lot sturdier. The tokens are of excellent quality cardstock. The map tiles are sturdy and have great artwork in my opinion. The cards are also of really good quality and you get a ton of them. My only complaint is for the number of cards you get they should include a better tray for them, the tray included wont keep them from getting knocked everywhere and mixed up.

If you love the Dark Souls series then you will love this game. Some how the makers of the board game really caught the feel of the video game. It is a very difficult game just like it's video game counterpart. For 1 to 4 players I can say that the difficulty ramps up substantially for each player that plays over the first. You pick your class out of the 4 that are available with the base game and you get a really cool board to use to keep track of your equipment and health. The board is modular so you place down new tiles for each room you venture into which then opens up a random selection of which enemies are in the room and where they are located. So basically you go in blind and have to learn your enemies attacks and movements just like the video game. You will die and when you do you start all over back at the campfire with all the enemies reset. The good news is that now you now where the enemies will be and how they will attack. And of course you gain a certain amount of souls (resources) after you clear a room that you can use to spend on new weapons or armor or spells. These come from a VAST selection of treasure cards that you also have to spend souls on to draw. Another aspect of this is that you also have to spend souls to upgrade your character's abilities to be able to use most of this new gear. The bosses you fight are very unique as they work totally different than fighting normal enemies. They each have their own batch of cards that you draw from that shows what their attack or movement would be. This is a revolving deck so over the course of the battle you can essentially learn the bosses movements and attacks and prepare for them. Once you get the boss down to a certain amount of health he will "enrage" which basically means that you have to add another even stronger attack card to the batch of cards you draw from for his attacks. Also you shuffle them all so you have to relearn his rotation. I can say though learning how to properly fight the bosses is rather confusing and can take many trial and error battles before you get it down. So beyond the fighting, what makes this game difficult? Well the reason it gets harder the more people play is because if even 1 person in your party dies, you all die. Everyone in the party goes back to the bonfire. Now that doesn't seem too terribly bad.....however there is another aspect to this that really ramps up the difficulty. Every time you die and have to return to the bonfire, the bonfire lose's a "spark". You only get 2 sparks for a 4 player game. Once you lose all the sparks for that bonfire, the game is over. You need to be realllllly careful on how you proceed in the game and be sure not to just blaze through it or you will lose very quickly. During a typical game you will go through 3 or 4 tiles (rooms) clearing out enemies collecting souls and then fight a mini boss. The mini boss is basically just a regular boss but it represents the halfway mark through the full game. After you beat that mini boss you will unlock legendary gear to be added to the treasure cards. After that you venture through 3 or 4 more tiles fighting enemies and then finally battle a final boss. At the start of the game you choose which of the 2 bosses you fight out of 5. So the game does offer some replayability in that respect. The box packaging is so-so. They have really nice plastic holders for the minis, however the bosses holders leave no indication of where or how they fit in......so beware not to just eagerly remove the boss minis right as you open the game as you will end up spending a good amount of time trying to figure out how to put them back in. Everything else fits in the box nicely though including the regular enemy minis. Speaking of the minis, they are extremely details and look JUST like their video game counterparts. The length of the game usually runs to right around 2 and a half hours. Your first game will always take much longer just because you are still learning all the mechanics.

Pros- it has new gameplay features that make the game more engaging and every encounter uniquie. Example is encounter cards can have specific rules and extra rewards for completing trials like (break all barrels and you can refresh your luck token). Also some encounters can use 3 game tiles and you just have to survive to the end of tile 3 instead of having to kill all enemies, Stuff like that. They also added a new event deck that you draw as rewards and can apply to future encounters to add a little challange or suprise bonus. emample: (next encounter all enemies apply poision, but you get 2 extra souls per player) (Next encounter you can re-roll an attack or defense for free) Cons- the loot deck is the same as the DS core set but with the the class specific loot from the Characters expansion. Also it technically is cross compatible with old sets but all the new encounter cards are only for this set. Its not like the old expansions where they have cards that incorprate other enemies from iron keep or deeproot depths Etc.

This is an awesome set that changes the game up from the initial core set. Unfortunately my thief came broken but from other sets this would have been a duplicate so I was not too broken up about it.

One of the problems with the original Dark Souls Board Game was that the non-Boss combat got repetitive masking the only interesting part of the game the Boss fights. These new core sets change all of that by making the fights up to the boss interesting. They are essentially mini-games and not all of them are to kill everything. For instance, you may be asked to go hit several levers and then make it to the exit, with a condition for extra goodies if you complete it in 6 turns or less. Additionally, some rewards give you specific items from the drop deck. Secondly, after completing an encounter you will draw an Event which may give you (or the enemies!) a bonus for the next Encounter or even a free stat upgrade. One of the neatest things as well is that some of the Encounters modify the enemies, spicing things up. For example, one I played earlier made a normally squishy Rat into one with 10 health, along with a little flavor-text as to why. Things like this have brought the game to the next level.

alles gut

Acheté pour du solo, Steamforged Games a vraiment respecté le jeu vidéo et son univers. Système bien ficelé de comportements des ennemis permettant aussi bien le jeu solo qu'en coopératif. Le principe de Rogue Lite a lui aussi été respecté, où notre personnage va devoir mourir pour pouvoir remporter le combat final (à savoir progresser, mourir et conserver ses "gains" et recommencer pour améliorer son personnage suffisamment pour dézinguer le big boss de la campagne. Ce principe peut rebuter certains joueurs car cela demande plus de temps de jeu et surtout une répétition des combats dans les différentes salles traversées, mais cela a le mérite d'être un des points phare du jeu vidéo éponyme. En bref, Dark Souls donne un vrai challenge au(x) joueur(s) et la qualité du matériel donne vraiment envie d'y retourner (note : les figurines plastiques méritent d'être peintes, rien qu'une sous-couche basique leur rend nettement plus honneur). Une très bonne surprise en ce qui me concerne.

Excellent quality miniatures and components. Added rules like shortcuts, exploration track and encounter scenarios make the game a lot more dynamic.

Had to eat one of the pieces for a dare cause I died first. Ended up in ER. But apart from that it is an amazing game. Everything is really well made and easy to understand.

Da 1 a 4 giocatori che saranno alleati contro il gioco stesso. I nemici semplici seguono dei pattern predefiniti, i boss hanno un mazzo di carte da mescolare che crea il loro pattern di combattimento. Pedine mozzafiato, tutto fatto con materiali che danno idea di durare nel tempo. Molte carte, pedine e segnalini, praticamente impossibile da giocare in uno spazio inferiore a 1,5m quadri. PERMETTE DI GIOCARE IN SINGLE PLAYER. La confezione fa la sua figura, tutto ben rifinito. Nelle foto allegate si possono vedere le 4 schede dei personaggi e le carte equipaggiamento. Unico "problema" riscontrato: Il corriere non ha trovato nessuno a casa e ha ben pensato di mollare il pacco sul cancello alla portata di chiunque, capite bene che con un oggetto dal valore di oltre 100€ non è che sia una cosa molto piacevole, per fortuna non è successo nulla.