Dicebreaker Recommends is a series of monthly board game, RPG and other tabletop recommendations from our friends at our sibling site, Dicebreaker. This month, the team go on the hunt in one of the best video game board games around – Bloodborne: The Card Game.
The Soulsborne series has had a mixed showing on the tabletop so far. Arguably the series’ most popular entries before the release of Elden Ring earlier this year, the original Dark Souls and cosmic horror Bloodborne, have both seen full-blooded board game and card game adaptations, with Dark Souls also making a recent leap into a D&D-like tabletop RPG.
Until Elden Ring inevitably gets its own tabletop outing, the Soulsborne board games are well worth revisiting when you need a moment to stop dying to Malenia and unwind with some good ol’ fashioned cardboard for a couple of hours.
While Dark Souls: The Board Game and Bloodborne: The Board Game have both proved as popular as you’d expect from Popular Thing: The Board Game, raising millions of dollars on Kickstarter, some of the games’ other adaptations have been somewhat overlooked despite their tie to the series.
Most notably, Bloodborne: The Card Game, an earlier 2016 take on Miyazaki’s Lovecraftian horror masterpiece that stands out for veering away from a more direct translation of the game’s single-player exploration elements for a semi-cooperative multiplayer affair.
Rather than Bloodborne’s main story, Bloodborne: The Card Game takes the game’s Chalice Dungeons as its inspiration. In the video game, Chalice Dungeons are procedurally generated levels that players can work their way through in search of specific items, encountering both new bosses and reappearances from some of the monsters found out in Yharnam.
“The result is a tense, tight game of chicken”
Bloodborne: TCG similarly puts a different spin on Bloodborne’s co-op multiplayer, offering up a semi-cooperative, semi-competitive boss rush as players’ hunters slash and shoot their way through a series of monster cards, hoping to rack up as many blood echoes as they can ahead of their rivals.
Like the Soulsborne series’ ‘Prepare to Die’ mantra, collecting blood echoes comes with a risk-reward. Rather than throwing themselves into the next battle, players can choose to ‘warp’ back to the Hunter’s Dream, banking the echoes on their board to avoid losing them on their next death and recovering any used weapon cards.