Players: 1-4 (coop)
Works well with just 2: Yes!
Solo quality: Great
Age: 14+
Playtime: 60-90 min (per chapter)
Complexity: 7/10
Yharnam is a scary place, but if you can figure out how to be brave and clever enough, you might just get out of there alive.
Explore the town’s every nook and cranny, battle horrifying monsters, upgrade your weapons, and unearth layers upon layers of secrets.
Bloodborne: The Board Game is the ultimate cooperative dungeon crawler. Yes, you reveal tiles and fight enemies that pop up, but the comparison to other games in this genre stops there. The game is story driven, with each campaign comprising three chapters, and each chapter built around several different missions. One mission might be to investigate strange sounds coming from a specific location, which might lead to another mission about doing something with whatever revelation awaits there. Getting around is dangerous, with a variety of creatures (specific to each campaign) lurking around every corner. And time is of the essence! Players are afforded no more than 16 turns to wrap up a chapter, and quite possibly fewer than that, with each visit to the Hunter’s Dream (for revives and upgrades) pushing the turn marker one more notch towards extinction.
The game’s got a great card-based combat system (difficult choices galore), with at least six different attack modes unique to each enemy, and plenty of cool stuff to pick up along the way. It also comes with a pinch of deck building, where you can upgrade cards in your fixed 12-card deck, saving your progress from chapter to chapter until the campaign comes to an end.
Replayable? Very. Even though you might know what a campaign entails, you’ll still have some fresh branches left on the decision tree, enemies won’t spawn in the same places—nor fight in the same manner—and the town of Yharnam itself will reinvent its layout with each visit. The base game comes with four full campaigns, or 12 chapters in total, all completely replayable. Thirsty for more? CMON is printing expansion after expansion. There’s no limit to the carnage.
Game components are top notch, including miniatures that are amongst the best I’ve ever seen in a boardgame. And if you’re a fan of the Bloodborne videogame, then you’re in a unique position to appreciate (and frankly drool over) not only all of the lore ported to the cardboard incarnation, but also how they managed to make playing the boardgame feel like you’re fighting your way through the videogame.
Hats off to the designers.
Most easily forgotten rule: An enemy on your space or tile will pursue if you move away (move 1 space along the path you took).
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