Dead Cells

So what is it?

If you’ve ever played the Dead Cells video game, you already know it’s a fast, brutal, and addictive rogue-lite experience. Every run is different, death is expected, and the gradual character improvements that endure from one run to the next are at the core of the experience. I have put countless hours into it on our Switch and I still love it.

Translating that kind of snappy action and meta-progression into a tabletop format is a tall order, but Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game gives it a really good go, making smart decisions on where to try precise emulation and where instead to recognise the inherent differences between board and video games.

I have been completely hooked and played Dead Cells a lot: mostly double handed solo, a few games with the specific solo mechanics, a couple of times as a two-hander and once each with three and four.

How does it play?

At its core, Dead Cells is a cooperative, card driven, dungeon crawler with strong rogue-lite elements. You’ll be exploring procedurally generated biomes, fighting enemies, unlocking gear, and trying not to die too soon.

Each player takes on the role of a “Beheaded,” the same disembodied protagonist from the video game.

The party moves collectively on each biome board, choosing between different routes and flipping tokens along the way to uncover events and combat. The different shape of tokens indicate the type of event you might face, but you’re often not quite sure what you will get.

You’ll have your own unique deck of action cards-things like attack, dodge, mark and poison -that you’ll use predominately to fight in enemy encounters. Each card has up to 3 actions – a maximum of one per round. Likewise, each Beheaded has a different asymmetric theme and a different player board which will track in-run upgrades to stats and abilities.

Combat itself is time limited: you’ll play a total of three cards per round (regardless of player count) and there are typically three round per combat. It’s also side-scrolling: 3 slots ahead of you for enemy cards and one behind. As enemies are dealt at the beginning of the encounter from that biome’s enemy deck you see what each of them will do in each round. Each has its own behaviour pattern, which keeps the game strategic rather than swingy. Combat is a puzzle – you are trying to maximise damage to gain loot from kills, while minimising injury, because if any one beheaded is downed the run is over.

After each fight or room, you’ll usually get some kind of reward-cells (the game’s XP), gold teeth, gear, or blueprints. Then, between biomes, you’ll enter a short meta-progression phase where you can heal up and unlock new equipment. And after every few biomes there’s a boss fight, which follows a similar pattern, but without the time limit and with a special boss deck, boss card and particular rules.

Initially this is likely to spell death, but then it’s a rogue-lite – death marks the end of the run but also the time to invest cells into long-term upgrades, and this is where the magic happens. Cells are spent on pulling cards from the bottom of any one of 4 upgrade decks. What might you get? Upgraded action cards to add to character decks; party buffs in the form of mutation cards that are slotted into a board which acts as a save mechanism; new monsters to add to biome enemy decks – to name but a few.

Any good?

It’s simple, exciting and super satisfying. The resultant deck-building is lean and manageable, but with enough variety to keep things spicy as unlocks accumulate over the course of multiple runs.

Like the video game, this carry over of progress from run to run-new weapons shuffled into your gear deck, mutations’ permanent boosts, and better action cards means over a few games your character starts to feel like a real powerhouse… until you take one risk too many and die horribly in the Clock Tower. But never mind – more cells to spend and time for another run.

All in all, plenty to love. Though the game is not without one or two problems. The rulebook is not great. It’s not the worst I’ve seen, but it’s definitely more confusing than it should be. It tries to cover everything in a linear way, but ends up burying important details in odd places. Expect to flip back and forth a lot during your first couple of plays, and also to refer to the player aids, which are good up to a point, but have some iconography missing and other iconography that’s not addressed in the rulebook.

Once you understand the flow, though, the gameplay is smooth and surprisingly fast-paced for a dungeon crawler. Turns zip along, and combat simplicity keeps downtime minimal. But getting over that initial hump takes some patience.

Also the meta-pacing of the experience is perhaps a bit wonky: brutally difficult to start with and at the mercy of enemy card draw combinations, after a (fair) while the normal encounters can feel a bit of a cake walk. Not the boss fights though – oh no!

Finally, there is the matter of player count. For me, phenomenal as a solo – I like to control the puzzle – excellent with two and then progressively slightly worse with three and more so four. In combat you play 3 cards even with 4 players, so someone effectively sits out each round which is a bit weird. If your group likes co-ops, great – it’s still smashing – but for me 1-2 is the sweet spot.

Art is a cartoonification of the video game’s 8-bit graphics style and is gorgeous. Production quality is strong and design choices are thoughtful and effective. There is plenty of replayability – with side quest style feats to complete as well as the main run to defeat the three bosses. Once all three are done you could keep going, though I decided to stop; however I reckon that was the best part of 40 hours, over many happy evenings.

So, should I buy it?

All in all then I would argue that Dead Cells is a real hit: super evocative, snappy game play and a brilliant XP system which had me playing multiple runs in an evening. Loads of content but without overstaying its welcome – either in a session or across the campaign. Definitely worth your attention particularly as a solo / 2-hander.

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