The Dead Cells board game isn’t the first tabletop title to take inspiration from a video game, nor is it the first to try to mimic the feel of a roguelike. I have one – Sanctum – This is so clearly indebted to the Diablo series that it makes me wonder if they weren’t charged with copyright infringement. But this seems to be the first official adaptation of a roguelike, an interesting choice. The Dead Cells video game has garnered praise for its speed and demanding combat that board games simply cannot replicate. So designers, including Antoine Bauza, seven wonders Fame – you’ll need to focus on something else.
Check out Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game on Kickstarter.
what’s in the box
We played a prototype of the Dead Cells board game, which wasn’t finished, but had everything you needed to play the first two levels and bosses. Each level has its own board and goodies tuckbox, containing tiles to place on the board, his two decks of monster cards (regular and elite), and a small deck for treasure and blueprints. The boss has a reference sheet and playing cards.
There are also several boards used to track game state. One for combat, another annex board for treasure, and his third is an inter-biome board that allows players to purchase upgrades between biomes. This is notable for actually having a sleeve attached to the board, making it easy to save upgrades between games. There are various tokens to track things like health and loot like cells and gold teeth earned while running.
Each player gets a decapitation board with three game stats, brutality, tactics, and unique upgrade paths for survival. They also get a deck of combat cards. Since players move as a group, he is the only miniature that can track his progress on the board in the game. This is an impressive tabrex from Beheaded. It’s worth noting that the player board and cards have some very striking cartoon-style art of decapitated characters in action.
rules and how to play
Again, this is a prototype, so the rules are subject to change. But as it stands, this is a fast-playing co-op game where you have to work together as a group to get through as many biomes as possible. Players jointly decide where to move their figures through diverging paths on his biome board, encountering features represented by treasure, monsters, merchants, and other shaped face-down tiles. Some paths require the group to have access to certain runes before they can pass.
Reaching consensus on group decisions in cooperative games can be tricky, and the genre as a whole suffers from a problem known as quarterbacking. In this matter, groups tend to sway with the most experienced, or perhaps the loudest, players. To counter this, Dead Cells crowns one of her players as First Player, making them the final arbiter of all decisions. The crown rotates at regular intervals with an icon that can be flipped on some tiles. The first player can also receive certain treasures and deal damage in monster encounters.
Combat has another innovative feature that makes co-op fun. It takes place over 3 rounds. Monster cards are placed in various slots around the player, and each card has his three action bars that indicate what the monster will do that round. Most of the time, this is direct damage, but it can also shield other monsters or inflict conditions such as poison or bleeding on the player. A player’s battle card will have the same three bars on him with different actions, but in addition to monster battle icons, equipment and loot can also be used. This is the only way to pick up the loot promised on his Encounter tile. But here’s the kicker. The player chooses a combat card individually and he can discuss only one of his three actions on the card.
This can be a mechanical, mechanical battle in the delicious chaos of uncertainty and keeps the quarterback from dominating the situation. Overall a very clever and clever system. In addition to the nuances of which icons to discuss when choosing actions, some encounters also require planning to overcome. Bleeding and poisoning are particularly vicious, so ideally you’ll want to kill those monsters early, before unwanted icons reach the round. However, some attacks are limited in range to certain slots, which makes the water muddy. The range of tactical options available to you is also expanded by using the equipment you find and the abilities you gain as you increase your three stats.
However, combat has some weird design quirks related to player count. Players must play a total of 3 cards. 3 players is fine. It’s also nice to play Solitaire where your choices intertwine in interesting ways with solo random cards from his deck that represent a sentient swordsman. But with two, it simply becomes less fun because one player has to play two of his combat cards, covering more bases. And he does not play one player at all when he is four, instead gambling a bit to see if he gets an ability boost. These wrinkles are likely to be smoothed out as the game is revised for release, but for now, he’s much better suited for 1 or 3 players than 2 or 4 players. Excellent.
Even if the combat works well with the right number of players, you’ll find that it’s no substitute for the fast hack-and-slash of video games. However, like the original, you should work with what is available. Instead, Dead Cells wisely chose to do a long form homage to its parent title with an interbiome board. Just like in video games, the starting character isn’t strong enough to go through many biomes. If any of the characters die, they must discard their equipment, reset their abilities and start over. But before that, you can spend the cells and blueprints you find.
Blueprints are powerful items that add to your treasure deck in the appropriate biome, giving you a chance to find them on subsequent runs. Cells, on the other hand, can be spent on useful things such as permanent mutations that provide continuous buffs at the beginning or during the run. You can also buy stronger combat cards to incorporate into a player’s deck, or toss them down a well for random effects that aren’t always welcome. In this way, the group unlocks new abilities over time, making combat more interesting and the possibility of going deeper through different biomes.
It’s a great way to give your board game a roguelike feel, but while you’ll gradually improve your understanding of your abilities and how to best use them with repeated play, it has its drawbacks. Setting up each biome board is a bit tedious, but if you only do it once, it’s fine. But sometimes I have to do this several times in one run, and then the game has to reset and start over, which feels like a lot of work for a relatively lightweight game. The administrative overhead is the speed bump that undermines the addictive feeling of wanting to jump right in and try again, the driving force behind spending all the time you can immerse yourself in your original work.
where do you go back
Dead Cells deserves credit for trying something new in terms of video-to-board adaptation. The concept of pushing players into repeat runs with a slow drip of rewards is novel and works really well. It’s just a shame analog has to reset the deck and tiles every trip. The co-op effort is less innovative, but still very welcome. Because too many games seem content to just let the quarterback run the show when needed. It’s very light for the package and promotes a sense of speed, but it also feels repetitive. It relies heavily on the temptation to unlock new baubles for your next run in order to create awareness of diversity. Yet, in many ways, that’s what the roguelike experience is all about, and Dead Cells evokes that very well.
