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Say the words “Dark Souls” to any gamer and you’ll likely get one of two responses. Either an animated endorsement of From Software’s brutally difficult video game, a twisted love of its epic boss fights, cruel but clever level design and subtle snippets of lore interspersed throughout its worlds. Or else a blank “never heard of it” / a sheepish confession along the lines of “I tried to get into it once but, nah, it’s too tough for me.” When it comes to any Souls game, there doesn’t often seem to be much occupying the space between these two camps: you’re either a Souls fanatic who indulges in pixelated punishment or, for whatever reason, you’re not. Casual gamers beware. Heard of Painted World Of Ariamis? Well, you will today.
Dark Souls is quite simply my favourite video game of all time, for all of the aforementioned reasons and more. When I got my first proper job after graduating, I bought it with the money I earned from my first month’s pay. Bonfire lit! Since then I have played the entire catalogue including DLC offerings, have shelves of art books and strategy guides dedicated to its many worlds and was lucky enough to contribute a small piece to Keza MacDonald and Jason Killingsworth’s ode to Dark Souls “You Died”, a book chronicling every corner of the first game in the series. So it was with great excitement that I plunged headfirst into the abyss of Steamforged Games’ wildly successful (£3.7m!!) Kickstarter campaign in 2016, which sought to bring the world of Dark Souls onto home tabletops.
When my pledge finally arrived, I pried open the box to the sight of a paper insert declaring “You Died”, an all too familiar message in game that heralds failure. Barring the obvious trolling of players before they had even begun, the message was clear: herein lies death, so be prepared. And I was. But maybe for me personally, who cherishes the intricate and thoughtful design of the source material, the board game was always destined to disappoint.
Our group played it many times, willing ourselves to engage with its excruciating difficulty and forgive its shortcomings. We resorted to house rules to try to mitigate some of our frustrations, but ultimately better, more polished games came along which seemed more worthy of our collective free time. And so Dark Souls and its army of expansions sat gathering dust on my gaming shelves for years. The glowing embers began to fade, with no real reason to revive them….until now.
I was intrigued to see Steamforged not only announce two new sets of miniatures for Dark Souls: The Board Game, focussing on new enemies and bosses, but also package these as two new core game boxes rather than just pumping out more expansions. Flames flickering! But what impressed me most about this new content was that Steamforged had seemingly listened to the disgruntled bonfireside voices of the community and made some quality of life changes intended to streamline the experience. Bonfire rekindled! Once more I was stood before the fog gate, hopeful but uncertain of whether this latest release would be a little more worthy of the Dark Souls name (and our time).
Try. Die. Cry. Repeat.
Before traversing the white light on this new core set (I had been fortunate enough to procure a copy of the Painted World of Ariamis version, my favourite area of the video game), our group decided to refresh our collective memory and replay a game of the original version beforehand. Both to remind ourselves of the good: the miniatures, while not the best quality, look great on the table, especially when painted up.
There are still a few major bosses missing from the catalogue though (looking at you Taurus Demon, Capra Demon, Seeth the Scaleless, Quelaag, Gwynn!). The presentation and aesthetic of the depraved worlds From Software are renowned for is lovingly recreated as is that sense of peril. That death and failure are never very far away, and that success has to be orchestrated through a tense tightrope walk involving careful management of stamina vs health. And boss encounters: learning boss attack patterns like in the video game is relatively well replicated on the tabletop, and boss battles have that epic feel, especially if you geek it up to the max like us and play the Dark Souls OST when going toe to toe with the heavy hitters. Targeting and exploiting a boss’s vulnerable side to do double damage is also a fun mechanic that gives rise to such comedic cries as “Get him! His arse is weak!” There is definitely some banter to be had amidst the brutality of it all.
And also to reacquaint ourselves with the bad: Some bent miniatures (Smough has a floppy hammer…not a euphemism) and a less than intuitive rulebook for one thing, but the issue of fairness is the pain the size of Smough’s butt at the heart of what’s wrong with the Dark Souls Board Game. The video game, is brutally difficult but rarely unfair. Death usually comes as a result of a mistake the player has made.
Fault rarely lies at the feet of poor game or level design. Unfortunately the same does not apply to Board Game Souls. The board game is just as, if not more punishing than the video game, but not in ways that make the player want to keep hurling themselves into the meat-grinder or feel empowered to beat those seemingly insurmountable odds. For us, a game using the original rules would often descend into a 4 hour slog with very little to show for it on the other side. There are a few reasons for this: the treasure deck has far too many cards and so your chances of drawing a piece of equipment during setup that is actually useful are fairly slim.
Item cards may be either worse than your starting gear or require you to pump all the souls in New Londo into upgrading your character. And to do this, often there is only one thing for it: grinding. This is the process of repeating the same action again and again to achieve a particular outcome, such as to gain XP to improve stats. This is often the unglamorous but necessary side of the video game. We’ve all done it, but this mechanic just does not translate well to the tabletop. Video game grinding is often mindless and can be completed within a reasonable amount of time, depending on the end goal. There is nothing mindless about grinding the same rooms and enemies in the Dark Souls Board Game, turn after turn. Mind-numbing might be a better term. Or, if you’ll excuse the pun, soul-destroying, as even after a mega board game grind you still face the very real possibility of getting absolutely pulverised into dust anyway at the end of it all.. And it’s not a case of just reloading at the last save point and going again. Three or four hours flushed right down to Blighttown.
The Painted World Of Compariamis
And so with a bittersweet taste in our mouths we turned to one of the latest, more streamlined core boxes, The Painted World of Ariamis. We set up in my mate’s front room in Souls-like surroundings: a fire crackling in the hearth and a huge painting on the wall depicting a bridge, much like the painting through which the player enters the Painted World itself.
Initial impressions were positive: each individual encounter is now much more varied and interesting, as each encounter now has specific flavour text, objectives and rewards, rather than the rather arbitrary “just mince everything that moves” approach of the original game. Encounters are much snappier too and the new encounter tracker, together with the ability to create short cuts to reduce the need to have to redo multiple encounters after levelling up are all welcome additions. The result is that progress feels more tangible, both visually on the board and in real terms whilst playing.
Event cards are another new addition. One of these is drawn once the party has completed an encounter, either granting perks or making encounters harder. This adds an element of unpredictability to proceedings and if considered alongside encounter specific rules, there is much more variety than what the original game had to offer. Combat has also seemingly undergone some quality of life improvements, to make the whole experience a lot less severe.
You now recover 3 stamina at the start of your turn instead of 2, and other players have the opportunity to move one node when you are doing your upkeep phase, both of which ease the difficulty and quicken the pace of encounters. It is also much more likely that you will negate damage, as dodge and block rolls are combined. We were also pleased to see the Blacksmith’s item shop receive a bit of an overhaul, which goes some way to addressing the issue of the bloated treasure deck: draw 4 cards and pick 1, rather than the previous setup of draw 1, you’re stuck with that.
And finally, my weakness for miniatures once again took a battering from this box - while not the best sculpts, they do look very nice when given a loving lick of paint.
But for all the blessings this new box has to offer, in many ways the game still bears the curse of its predecessor, a curse that no purging stone this side of Lordran will be able to shift. Quality control seems to be a bit of an issue at Steamforged; we saw it with some of the minis in the original campaign and others; I know of some printing errors with the tiles in their Resident Evil Board Game campaign too, which came out much too dark.
In this case the issue is not with the miniatures but with the components. One of the dials to track boss damage was cut too tight, causing it to rip. Wooden damage/ stamina cubes have also been replaced with cardboard counters, a few of which had already started to peel away having been punched out not long before. We also noticed a few of the tokens had been misprinted and the text on encounter cards was very small and not the easiest to read. And to top all of this, the rulebook is still not the most intuitive, requiring a lot of tracking back and forward, sometimes to incorrectly referenced pages.
All of this is really disappointing to say the least, especially when the game retails at an eye watering RRP of £109.99, which for me puts it in the premium category but with much less in the box than the original. We agreed that a rulebook with less full page game art in favour of accessibility would have been more welcome, as well as a quick reference sheet for each player.
Gameplay is definitely better than before, and I have to applaud Steamforged for actively seeking to take community feedback on board. But old problems persist. It’s still possible to get stuck in a loop of not being able to beat a boss with underpowered gear, making it necessary to farm souls to upgrade. Even after all of this you may ultimately not draw anything overly useful from the treasure deck to help you progress. The process is tedious and time consuming but when there is a real chance of none of that effort actually paying off, it’s still very hard to take. We wondered whether a tiered approach to buying gear would grant more options early in the game and reduce the need for grinding. Even with some of the game’s more gruelling combat mechanics nerfed slightly, some encounters are still horrendously difficult, especially if you’ve been unlucky drawing decent inventory equipment from the item deck.
We hit a wall with one particular encounter in which heavy hitting enemies piled in on the player with the aggro token before they could have a second turn, causing automatic failure for the whole party. The party was still on starting equipment too, as nothing we pulled from the deck and into the inventory could be used without significant upgrades to our characters, which would have necessitated more grinding of souls and loss of bonfire sparks (the game’s way of determining how many times you are allowed to retry after a failure before the definitive game over). I’ve wanted to hurl my console controller through the TV before whilst playing Dark Souls, usually because I’ve come within a millimetre of success and have been pulverised, have gotten greedy looking for that finishing blow or have just panicked.
In the case of the Dark Souls Board Game, the same blood boiling frustration comes but often as a result of being a million miles away from victory. The sense of hopelessness is palpable. This is typified by including the “Deprived” class as a character straight out of the box. For those unfamiliar with the “Deprived” - it is a class literally clad in rags and for only the most masochistic of players. Armour protection is negligible and weapons are laughably simple. Including it as a starting class feels mean; it seems to go against and actively counteract the raison d’etre of this new box which was to make the experience a bit smoother and more forgiving. Maybe it’s unreasonable of me to expect board gaming in my limited free time to be fun as well as challenging.
“If thou hast misstepped into this world, plunge down from the plank, and hurry home” - Crossbreed Priscilla
In the end, we aren’t really sure what to make of Dark Souls: The Board Game in any of its forms. With this new box we were in no way expecting Ariamis to be “peaceful, its inhabitants kind”, as the Lady of the Painted World, Priscilla assures us in the video game. As many seasoned Souls players will know, there are two ways out of Ariamis: fight or walk away. With this version of the Painted World, I suspect that many players, both new and returning, will ultimately opt to plunge off the plank in frustration and move onto other gaming conquests rather than stay and fight, despite the game’s many redeeming features.
We love the source material, the miniatures look great when painted and the tension and grandeur at the heart of the combat does replicate that of the video game quite well. But, inconsistent component quality aside, the core experience still feels very punitive, despite some improvements intended to actively address this. The changes are definitely welcome but the game still feels unbalanced and unfair at times. And this is where the video game and board game are still painted worlds apart. You can’t help but feel that Steamforged consciously tried to make the tabletop version as punishing as the video game but this has ultimately come at the expense of fun.
As we packed the game up, we pondered whether we would ever get the game out again. I’m not sure, and that makes me kind of sad, if truth be told. With so much out there vying for our time, patience like bonfire sparks is only finite. The flames of this particular bonfire are burning low again, the embers growing cold. When you first meet him early in the video game questing knight Solaire of Astora ponders “The way I see it, our fates appear to be intertwined.” When it comes to tabletop Souls, I really wish it were that simple.