DARK SOULS™: The Board Game | Answers to our Most Frequently Asked Que

Welcome back to the bonfire, Chosen Undead, and to our latest article discussing the new core sets for DARK SOULS™: The Board Game, Tomb of Giants and Painted World of Ariamis.

In case you’re joining us here for the first time, my name is Sherwin Matthews, and I’m the Lead Designer for Steamforged Games. In the past I’ve been fortunate enough to work on bringing several triple-A video game titles to the tabletop, including Resident Evil, Horizon Zero Dawn™, and Monster Hunter: World, and now I’m delighted to return to the very first video game adaptation I worked on—DARK SOULS™: The Board Game.

That said, before we get any further, if you missed our previous articles, don’t worry — you can find them here.

As DARK SOULS™: The Board Game players represent one of our biggest and most engaged audiences, we’ve unsurprisingly received a lot of questions regarding the subjects we’ve talked about in the last couple of diaries, and the new core sets.

With that in mind, although today’s article was going to discuss the new event system, I’m instead going to address the most frequently asked questions. Apologies in advance if you were looking forward to finding out more about events, you’ll have to wait that little bit longer!

Frequently Asked Questions

Having looked through the comments, there are four primary topics most queries seem to fall into.

Backwards compatibility
New campaigns
Mask of the child
Individual components

Backwards compatibility?

Firstly, a little more clarity around the revised ruleset, and how the new rules integrate with older copies of the game.

I’m happy to say this is surprisingly straightforward. One objective of the new ruleset, found in the Tomb of Giants and Painted World of Ariamis core sets, was to integrate with our community’s existing content as seamlessly as possible.

Obviously, for starters, we’ve worked hard to streamline the rules and provide clarity where there might have been grey areas pointed out by our community . But where we went further, we always revised with an eye on the first-edition rules, rather than replace and invalidate.

The result is that your existing models, tiles, cards and dice will all work with the new ruleset. Think of it as tweaks to the game engine, as it were; simply set up the game as you previously would have done, but play using the additional stamina recursion and out of turn movement during other character turns, combined defence rolls, revised terrain, and even, if you want, new treasure cards from the core sets.

There’s only a single exception to this, which brings me neatly to the next topic.

New campaigns?

A lot of our community have really embraced the new campaign system presented in the core sets, and are curious whether we have plans to release new campaign content for existing content.

The short answer is… yes! In Q1 next year, we’ll be releasing new encounter and event cards for the first-edition core set that will allow you to play campaigns using your existing heroes and enemies.

We’ll make these cards available for you to download for free from the resource section of our website. There will also be an option to purchase physical versions via DriveThru cards, a service that prints downloadable materials for you on demand, as we’ve seen several people ask if a physical version will be made available.

And remember, in the meantime, there’s nothing to stop you adding Megabosses to your Tomb of Giants and Painted World of Ariamis campaigns — they’ll fit in exactly like before, either replacing Gravelord Nito or Crossbreed Priscilla, or providing an additional challenge at the end of the campaign.

Mask of the Child?

The next topic is an unfortunate one, but also one I won’t shy away from, regarding the Mask of the Child treasure card in Tomb of Giants.

As those with long memories will no doubt recall, Tomb of Giants began life way back in 2016 as an expansion for the first edition of DARK SOULS™: The Board Game. When we came to revising and upscaling it into a core set, there were several already existing cards we knew we’d have to revisit and change, and Mask of the Child was one of them.

Unfortunately, I’m sorry to say despite this, it slipped through the net. The correct effect for the card is as it always has been — it gives the character an additional point of stamina recovery — but the rules language is incorrect, leaving a strange oddity that is a memento of the expansion past of the product.

Individual components?

The final topic we’ve seen a few questions on is whether it's possible to get components from the new core sets individually, such as the enemies and campaign elements.

The answer to this is no, I’m afraid. Some of our audience will already own the character models and some of the treasure cards but given both core sets introduce new bosses and enemies and their respective cards; new tiles, dials, and tokens; new encounter, event, and treasure cards; a campaign dashboard; plus a new rulebook with revised rules, most of the contents of both sets are actually brand new.

As such, releasing a stripped-down version of the core sets wouldn’t actually be dramatically different in terms of cost, which defeats the purpose of creating it at all.

However, it’s not all bad news on that front. Following on from what I’ve mentioned above, I’m pleased to announce we’ve just added the Tomb of Giant rulebook to the resource section of the Steamforged Games website, featuring the new ruleset.

You can find it here. Enjoy!

That’s all from me for now, but I’ll be back next time to discuss events during your campaigns.

Until next time, Chosen Undead.

Got more questions?

Hopefully we've answered a lot of your questions but for anything we missed, Sherwin will be hosting a Q&A on October 25th from 5pm-7pm UTC over on BoardGameGeek.

You can add your questions in advance by commenting on the thread here.

See you there!

Previous blogs:

Both new core sets are available to pre-order HERE, each launching on November 8th this year. The countdown is on, Chosen Undead!