Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
The Dark Souls board game is a brutally hard exploration miniatures game for 1-4 players. Prepare to die.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Deck / Bag Building
Add new pieces during play to improve the cards, tokens, or dice drawn later.
Grid Movement
Move pieces between adjacent spaces on a regular grid.
Cooperative Game
Players coordinate their actions toward a shared objective and win or lose together.
Dice Rolling
Roll dice to introduce uncertainty into actions, production, movement, or resolution.
Modular Board
Build the play area from interchangeable sections that vary between games.
Read the full game description
The Dark Souls board game is a brutally hard exploration miniatures game for 1-4 players. Prepare to die. The game features a "fast set-up, long reveal" mechanism that gets you into the game quickly and builds the location as you explore. The sense of danger is palpable as you discover new locations and the monsters that inhabit these dark places. The core combat mechanism and enemy behavior system forces deep strategic play and clever management of stamina to survive. Dark Souls includes numerous boss and mini-boss encounters — including one against the Dragon Slayer Ornstein and Executioner Smough — and utilizes an innovative behavior mechanism so that no two encounters are ever the same, thus giving the game near infinite replayability. —description from the publisher