Bloodborne – The Board Game

• 1-4 Players
• Recommended age: 14+
• 60-90 minutes
• RRP: £110 (but you can realistically find it for around £70-80 at most online or brick-and-mortar gaming stores, including the mighty Wayland Games)

OVERVIEW

Originally funded via Kickstarter back in 2021 with a monumental campaign that raised over $4 million, Bloodborne is an immensely challenging dungeon crawl-esque board game from CMON based on the hugely popular FromSoftware video game.

In the game, players take the role of Hunters, working together to help uncover the hidden mysteries of the city of Yharnam and beyond. The focus here is on a blend of “engrossing storytelling and punishing strategic combat”, and it all comes together really well for the most part. The base set features four distinct Campaign Decks, each featuring their own unique setup, rules and monstrosities to vanquish. Each chapter of the selected Campaign has a main mission that needs to be completed, and several sub-missions (or “Insight Missions”) that also need to be completed in order to progress with the story.

There’s a pleasing level of variety to these missions, from slaying beasts to use as bait to draw out larger monstrosities, to escorting bewildered townsfolk to the “safety” of Iosefka’s Clinic.  Everything is done with a ticking ‘clock’ in the background however, with each turn advancing the tracker, leading to frequent “resets” of the gameboard and, ultimately, the failure of the main mission if the Hunter(s) take too long.

Before starting, each player selects a Hunter with a unique weapon (Saw Cleaver, Threaded Cane, etc.) and associated playstyle, and assembles a deck of basic stat cards. These cards can be upgraded to more powerful versions as enemies are killed and Blood Echoes (essentially XP points that can be ‘spent’ in the Hunter’s Dream portion of the game) are collected. The board is expanded in a random fashion from a Campaign-specific deck of tiles as the players move through the streets, and the exact nature of the mission is only revealed as the Hunters make their way through the campaign deck, making for a tense, exciting experience.

COMBAT

Combat is tactical and, pleasingly, not entirely random. No dice rolls here, with each enemy picking from a series of pre-determined attacks and abilities that can, as the battle continues, be countered and gameplanned for. Each non-boss baddie has three different attacks or abilities that can be utilised, and with a little tactical ‘card counting’ it’s possible to predict what’s coming next and react accordingly – a vital part of the overall strategy, particularly given the Hunters’ limited ability to parry or dodge incoming damage. For example, sometimes it makes sense to save your dodge and take a light hit on one turn if you know there’s a massive torso-sized brick coming your way on the next!

As you might expect from the video game, combat is very much front and centre here, and upgrading your initial basic deck becomes absolutely essential if you’re going to survive for more than a few light skirmishes.  It helps that the system itself is fairly enjoyable though, and there’s a nice synergy between different Trick Weapon types, each of which has to be transformed to its different “version” periodically in order to keep using them.

Each round, the Hunter plays one of their Stat Cards onto their Trick Weapon dashboard to ‘activate’ one of their three attack types, each of which has a specific speed that determines when it lands. As with the game, the speed of each attack matters significantly – there’s nothing worse than winding up for a massive, high-damage blow only for your enemy to sneak in a quicker attack and drop you before it even lands. Thankfully, the mechanics are fairly intuitive and within just a few rounds of combat you’ll be hacking, slashing and dodging like a tricorne hat-wearing ballerina of death.  Stat Cards also allow players to parry, dodge, heal and even stagger their opponents, potentially leaving them open for a more powerful coup de grace.

Boss combat is a slightly more involved affair complete with a higher health pool and more complex and potentially devastating abilities. Also, as anyone familiar with the video game source material will expect, they also have multiple “phases” and their own unique ‘Boss Action’ deck that works in a similar way to the standard ‘Enemy Action’ deck – albeit with some brutally high damage levels and effects included.

 

DIFFICULTY

It’s worth mentioning that, perhaps fittingly, the solo mode is absolutely rock solid, with a punishing level of difficulty that will likely lead to some initial frustration, particularly as a result of the Hunt Track (more on that below). In fact, one of the main community suggestions to overcome this obstacle is to “two-hand” a pair of Hunters for the solo mode, which is admittedly a little tricky to begin with but soon becomes a rewarding experience. It’s here however that one of the main flaws of the game shows up – the co-operative aspect of the gameplay is practically nonexistent, with very little interaction between individual Hunters and not much in the way of tactical flourishes to employ other than “pile onto the same enemy” or “split up”.  The ability to ‘kite’ enemies is a potentially interesting wrinkle, but doesn’t add a huge amount to 99% of interactions – at least not in any of the games I’ve played to this point.

HUNT TRACK

As I mentioned above, one of the more punishing parts of the game is the ever-ticking ‘Hunt Track’ clock that moves on every turn, bringing with it board resets and, eventually, death (like, real death rather than “You Died” death).  One of the more challenging aspects of this mechanic to balance is the fact that each trip to the Hunter’s Realm to level up takes you an additional step down the track, and with improving your basic stat cards being absolutely essential to survival and progression, it all becomes an (impressively authentic) game of risk and reward that fans of the video game will be all too familiar with. Press on and try to grab another Blood Echo while risking death and being reset back to zero, or play it safe and cash in as early as you can? It’s a fun mechanic for sure, if a little frustrating to begin with.

MINIATURES

As you might expect from CMON, the miniatures are of an incredibly high quality, packed with gruesome detail and perfectly mirror the stomach-churning designs of the video game source material. You get a total of 37 minis in the basic box (4 Hunters, 28 standard enemies and 5 bosses), and while each campaign only utilises a relatively small number of them, they look fantastic on the tabletop. Oh, and as you might expect, the hulking Cleric Beast is the unquestioned highlight, as you can see below:

REPLAY VALUE

There’s a solid amount of content in the basic box, with four Campaigns each broken down into different chapters, each of which (more-or-less) represent a solidly-sized gaming session of an hour to an hour and a half. At the time of this review, I’ve only played through the first three-part campaign “The Long Hunt”, which replicates the early portion of the video game as the Hunter(s) navigate Central Yharnam en route to a meeting with the aforementioned Cleric Beast, the first boss that a lot of players will have encountered in the game.

I would imagine that subsequent play-throughs of the same campaigns would diminish the impact of the deck-based storytelling (or the ‘surprise’ factor, at least) while simultaneously reducing the difficulty level as players will know what to expect next and how best to overcome the various challenges the game throws your way. For players thirsty for more content though, there are several expansions available, from straight-up campaign boxes like Forsaken Cairnhurst Castle and the Forbidden Woods to gameplay variant add-ons like Chalice Dungeon and Hunter’s Dream.

SUMMARY

While it’s not without its flaws, Bloodborne: The Board Game does a great job of capturing the thematic brilliance of the FromSoftware video game and bringing it to the tabletop with a real flair. Not overly complicated for the most part, but with just enough depth to keep things engaging through multiple play-throughs. If you’re a fan of the source material you could definitely do a lot worse than picking this up, and while the main box is certainly on the pricey side, the plethora of high-quality miniatures should definitely soften the blow somewhat.

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The writer of this piece was: Craig Neilson-Adams (aka Ceej)
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