Steamforged Games Dark Souls The Card Game: Core Game

While I've never played the Dark Souls video games or board game, I love the gothic artwork and story premise, so purchased this card game. I have played Bloodborne Board Game and was familiar with some of this games concepts regarding resting at the Bonfire in order to secure earned goods from winning battles. The high points of this game are the variety of battles, upgrading your deck by purchasing higher quality stamina cards, and facing the big bosses who take awhile to kill. I played a two player game which last about 60 minutes, and a 4 player game which lasted about 90 minutes. This game is fun and goes by quickly. Alot of creative thought went into making these big bosses unique and difficult to defeat. I really like the game, think it's definitely worth the price paid, and would love to buy an expansion if I can find them at reasonable prices. Con: My only con to the game was that the backs of the cards are not easier to separate and recognize, so I was confused when learning the game. This could have easily been fixed by adding different colors to separate Treasure cards from Transposed Treasure Cards, Levels I, II, III Enemy Cards and Player Decks. If you're unfamiliar with how this game looks and works, just pay attention closely to subtle icon differences on the back of cards, and of the little blue dots beside the treasure icon on front of the Transposed Treasure Cards.

Amazing game for any group looking to challenge the dark souls game in a whole new fun way. Game was in perfect condition on arrival.

Takes some time to learn the rules but YouTube tutorials were really helpful. Lots of tension and tons of fun! Dark souls enthusiast approved.

As a Soulsborne (Dark Souls/Bloodborne) fanatic, and avid player of tabletop games, I had to pick this up. It arrived on time, undamaged. I do have to condemn the packaging of the game, though. The packaging could be better, for the price. The issue I had with the Board Game (board game, not this card game) was that it had a lot of various kinds of loose tokens (and I mean, many, many token types), and all they gave you to hold them was a single ziploc baggie, which is a joke for the MSRP of $129.99. It would be annoying to dig through a tiny bag for a single token each time you needed it. Let me give an example. Bloodborne: The Card Game was only MSRP $39.99, but had slots for all cards and tokens that fit perfectly. This card game does not follow that, once again, they only provided you a ziploc baggie for all the tokens. The cards don't have plastic slots to 'lock into place', unlike the Bloodborne card game, but rather crudely cut sections of cardboard, that at time, are hard to get cards out of. Considering this was a complaint people had with the board game, you would think that the creators would fix it for their card game. (Dark Souls: The Board Game's creators are the same as Dark Souls: The Card Game) The game itself is fairly easy to learn, although setup and put-away time is pretty long, but the gameplay itself is fun, and filled with death, tears, and despair, just like dark souls. The art on the cards is pretty nice, although most of the items are icons from the game itself, or carried over from the Board Game. It's not very enjoyable for solo play, and I say that as someone who plays Dungeons and Dragons solo all the time. I play with a friend over skype, using a webcam to video-chat the game table. When playing with others, it's significantly more fun, and can get a lot more chaotic. The more players, the more complex and varying the gameplay can be, so with just one player, it's pretty boring and gets stale quickly. Combat is usually players scrambling into place for attacking and defending, and when a boss encounter comes up, if the players want to survive, they have to remember the boss's attack patterns (the bosses repeat the same set of attacks). Regular mobs can kill the entire party as well, if they're not careful enough, but are generally easier to get into position to counter. But that's pretty much Dark Souls, so I enjoy that mechanic very much. The box itself is nice and solid, along with the boards, sturdy and glossy, and let me tell you, it looks amazing on my game shelf. The cards and rulebook had a really nice new book smell, which is always nice. tl;dr- Overall, this was definitely worth the price, the gameplay is fun with multiple people. The inner packaging is poor, but isn't a major issue.

My order came on time and was in perfect condition. Really fun and easy to understand game, about 45-60 of play time excluding set up. It gives the feeling of tension and desperation of Souls games but in card form. If you like deck builders I recommend this game.

Bought the Dark Souls Card Game 2 weeks ago and my husband and I immediately had to order both expansion packs. I don't play the Dark Souls video games so this is a great game for me to enjoy something that my husband loves. Highly recommend to wives.

I must say right off the bat that I'm a big, BIG fan of the Dark Souls series of video games, and I decided to jump in and see what the whole card and board game fuss was all about. But were my hopes rewarded? Let's find out as I discuss five key elements of the game with my respective ratings: PRO, 5 out of 5: COOPERATIVE PLAY. While the game can be played both solo and cooperatively, I really like the cooperation aspect of it when you have 2 to 4 players. In the actual battles themselves, players have to coordinate who's going to take hits from which enemies, how they're going to move around the battlefield, who's going to defeat who with each enemy having different weaknesses that will play to the strengths of each character, etc. The game does turn structure in my personal favorite way in that everything is integrated. For example, I can take one of my actions, then the other player can do two of theirs, and then we have to cooperate together and discuss everything to make sure the timing works out just right. MIX, 2.5 out of 5: TACTICAL MOVEMENT. On the positive side, I like that the movement on the board is very tight, and the rules are very simple: You can attack enemies in the same column as you, but the ways in which the enemies attack, the way that taunting works and taking hits for other characters . . . I think all of that works out really well. But on the negative side, tactical movement can sometimes seem too obvious in what players should do, and they also don't fully capitalize on some of the elements they built into it. I will note, however, that one of the two expansions available for the game adds traps to the board which make tactical positioning more important and interesting, but it's not quite enough for me just with the core game here. MIX, 2.5 out of 5: ENEMIES & BOSSES. On the positive side, resolving enemy turns is super quick. They basically just attack with a really simple way to figure out who they're going to hit, and there's a pretty nice variety between the enemy types (some having a ton of armor, some having really high damage, some being placed in the back, some in the front, etc.). Also, for the big boss battles, I like how they each have a unique A.I. deck of what they do. I also like the boss variety in general: They each have some kind of quirk or tweak that makes their boss battle feel different than the others. But on the negative side, for the bosses, they'll often move when their card is flipped up and sometimes (especially in solo play) will just move to a place where you can't reach them for a few rounds, which leads to dead turns that are never fun. There are also some missed opportunities here. For example, enemies can deal out one of four status effects, but they're all almost virtually identical. They basically all cause one damage, so it feels like the designers could have spent a little more time differentiating between those damage types. MIXED PRO, 4 out of 5: CHARACTER DECKBUILDING & LEVELING UP. After each encounter, you'll get souls to buy better stamina cards, which basically power your weapons and armor, and you'll also get new items. I like this two-pronged approach to leveling, and I also like how you'll have to balance them in order to get the right kind of stamina. This leads to choosing whether you want to use some great weapon or whether you want to splash in another color into your stamina pool. But where this upgrade system might fall flat for you (mainly in co-op mode) is if you play the same character multiple times and you have other people who can take the items you can't use well. In that case, you don't have the same tough choices of leveling that you do when playing solo, and it might become kind of rote and obvious (i.e. you take everything that's blue, and I take everything that's yellow; no choices needed). MIX, 2.5 out of 5: CARD PLAY & DEAD TURNS. You know, this game reminds me a lot of Pathfinder: The Adventure Card Game in that your deck is your life, and you'll have cards that can either stay in your deck or go to your discard pile depending on how you use them. And this is where the positives really come in here: You do have interesting choices on whether you want to spend more stamina and hang onto a card, or get rid of it and hope that another card comes up, even though it may not be the right one. But on the negative side, and this could be game-breaking for you depending on your experience, sometimes you'll just get a hand full of stamina cards and have absolutely nothing to do with them. Now although they have a mulligan rule that somewhat helps with this, you can still have a terrible hand for multiple turns in a row. This is even more annoying in co-op mode when you have to wait for everybody to do their stuff while you just stare at your cards like an idiot. Let me tell ya, it's not a lot of fun when the randomness strikes you! FINAL SCORE: 3 out of 5. I have to say that I've had a somewhat complicated experience with Dark Souls: The Card Game. I was enthralled during the first few games I played, but every time I played after that, it felt a little more samey and a little less exciting. Now I do want to say that I only played with the core game, and I hear that both expansions make the game tougher (which it sometimes needs), make the tactics more interesting, and allow for more combos. So if you're willing to invest in all of the stuff (or at least one of the two expansions), then I think the game will have a lot more legs for you, and I think I'll enjoy it more as well. But the really tough thing about recommending this game is that it's not at its best with co-op or solo. Solo has the better deckbuilding where you have to make tough choices about what you want to keep, but co-op has the better tactical play where you actually have a lot of characters to deal with on the board. In solo, everyone just attacks you, so it's not that interesting. Overall, I still think Dark Souls: The Card Game is a lot of fun, and I recommend that you try it. But whether you should buy it? Ehh, I'm not really sure myself. I want to try out the expansions and see how many legs it has, so it might be worth it with the expansions. By itself, however, I don't see only the core game staying in my collection for long. Happy gaming! This is Dr. D, and I'm out!

My husband loves this game series. I am absolutely horrible at video games. It was a great way to connect and for him to teach me about the game without having to frustrate him with my horrible video game skills.