Dark Souls Board Game, The Sunless City, Launches On Feb 14
Dark Souls: The Board Game – The Sunless City Core Set launches in a little over a week, on Valentine’s Day. It is the latest in the Dark Souls series from publishers Steamforged Games, which are all based on the Dark Souls video games.
Dark Souls
The Dark Souls video game was considered brutal, with players expected to die time and time again as they attempted to discover the fate of the cursed undead. It won huge plaudits for its gameplay and fighting mechanics, but it wasn’t popular with all gamers, especially those that weren’t willing to take their time and master every fight.
Dark Souls Board Games
The original board game was published in 2017, and although popular with some gamers, it didn’t fare as well critically as the video game it was based on. It received a 6.5 on BoardGameGeek, although it did win the Best American Style Game award at the UK Games Expo. A year later, Steamforged Games launched Dak Souls: The Card Game which managed to rack up a 6.8 rating, representing a peak for the series, so far. Tomb of Giants and Painted World of Ariamis both launched in 2022 and both received 6.6 ratings. In comparison, Gloomhaven gets an 8.6 rating, so The Sunless City has some improvements to make if it wants to be considered a classic.
The Sunless City
The game is described as being a cooperative dungeon crawler for 1-3 players, which is exactly the same as the previous instalments. Steamforged Games claims it has refreshed rules based on player feedback and it can be combined with any other Dark Souls core board game to increase the player count to four people. In the box, you receive 15 miniatures as well as a variety of game boards and player boards, hundreds of tokens and cards, and 15 dice.
The game launches on February 14 and is available for pre-order now directly from the Steamforged website or via Amazon. Although there was a discount on the game last week, it appears to be back to full price, now, and with the launch imminent, it is unlikely to drop again.
Other Steamforged Games
Steamforged Games specializes in producing board game adaptations of video games. As well as the Dark Souls collection, they have also produced games based on Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, Gears of War, and even Runescape. Video game lovers are set to be well catered for this year, with the announcement of a Halo tabletop game similar to Warhammer, also set for release in 2024, from Mantic Games.