In the base game, you get seven survivors, six killers, and two maps to play with. While the survivors aren’t that interesting to interchange, each new killer changes the game significantly. Having six in the box from the get-go is a serious amount of variability. When we see a movie, or a book, or a video game, we'll pay top dollar for an excellent design. We still haven't reached that level of maturity in the board game industry. Dead by Daylight: The Board Game follows the one-versus-many format of the video game. Two to four people control survivors - seven characters from the video game are included in the base game, with 17 in the expanded Collector’s Edition - while one player takes on the role of the killer chasing them. No solo or full cooperative mode will be included, Level 99 told Dicebreaker. There's a tough balance between the game that you want to create, the accessibility of that game and then, on the other corner of that triangle, the value proposition that you're making. When we see a movie, or a book, or a video game, we'll pay top dollar for an excellent design. We still haven't reached that level of maturity in the board game industry. We see a game and the bits have to justify the full price of admission; the design is an afterthought. Which is kind of a shame, because we have a lot of games these days with nice bits and gameplay that hasn't been fully thought through.

This system should be familiar to anyone who’s played BattleCon, a board game from the same designer. As that similarly has the same simple this-beats-that mechanism at its core. However, both games layer so much additional information on top of this simple decision, that it becomes not so simple. So in a two-player game, one person pilots all four different survivors at once. As you can imagine, this is as overwhelming as trying to drive all four screens in multiplayer Mario Kart. Dead by Daylight is a big game, but it's not a complex game. Every part in the game is very specific, in its uses; it's used in just about every playthrough. So, in my mind, the game is much simpler than a big modern big-box board game. At least in terms of what we'd call intellectual components; the ideas behind it and the categories of things are quite straightforward. Fewer moving parts is always a good idea. It was the same thing with the two-player mode - with one player controlling all the survivors and one player controlling the killer, we weren't generating a consistently good experience. We said, "Well, let's just cut it, and we'll make three the minimum player count." It's not as trendy to have those player counts. But what we guarantee is that when you pull this game out with the right player count, you will have the experience that we intended in design, and you will have a good experience 99% of the time. That consistency was more important to us than having a big feature list. However, Talton insisted that future expansions would only be released if the publisher could ensure that players’ experience of the upcoming board game wouldn’t be negatively affected by the extra content.

Dead by Daylight Board Game - Kickstarter

At the same time, we didn't want to create a mode that would not always generate a good play experience. With an automa or a cooperative mode, in a game like this that's a very directly competitive game, it can be really hit or miss. We didn't think that it would really give the core experience of what the versus mode gave - what the game was really about. Accessibility is a key aspect of the game," said lead designer D. Brad Talton Jr. "Dead by Daylight embodies a lot of detailed concepts but presents these very simply and intuitively. We worked hard to capture that aspect in the tabletop game as well, so that players of all skill levels can find something to enjoy." We wanted to make a game that you could break out at a Halloween party, play for an hour and then go on with your festivities. Or that you could break out at a regular board game night and just play. For that reason, we built the size of the box, and the contents of the box and sort of the tone of gameplay around those ideas. Survivors must use the movement cards at their disposal, along with their unique loadout of helpful perks and items collected from around each map, to outrun the killer - equipped with their own unique abilities - and avoid being sacrificed before they can escape.

As a Survivor, plot your moves, coordinate with your allies, and repair generators to power the exit and escape. Open-world games; we've got some really cool open-world board games now with Gloomhaven and with Sleeping Gods. I would say that those are the closest you get to an open-world video game - until you go into RPGs, which are the true open-world games. I think there's still room to do that.

🍪 Privacy & Transparency

The pitch I gave to Behaviour was was 'cooperative murder Battleship'. Then they said, "Oh, that sounds interesting." We actually had a lot of versions of the game that were very intertwined with hidden information. We had a central board and the players would have screens, and behind the board there was secret information. The killer actually had a map of the whole labyrinth that was randomised behind their screen, so they knew where all the props were and such. We had all of those tools. In the end, we scrapped a lot of that.

The board game’s Collector’s Edition will include all of the playable characters up to the All-Kill DLC expansion released for the video game in March 2021: a total of 16 killers and 17 survivors, all represented by miniatures. The cheaper standard edition will include seven survivors and six killers pulled from the full roster, as well as reducing the number of maps in the box from four to two. Level 99 previously confirmed that none of the licensed characters from other movie and video game franchises - such as Halloween, Resident Evil and A Nightmare on Elm Street - seen in the video game will appear in the board game. Players will be able to play as familiar faces; all original survivors and killers from Dead by Daylight prior to the release of The Artist will be available as minis. Unfortunately, licensed characters will not be available as playable characters, nor will their perks appear in the game. We are really excited about the new characters, and especially the new original killer [Carmina Mora, The Artist] that's been released since then,” the designer said. “There's a ton of cool content coming out for Dead by Daylight. In our first play, we used Legion as the killer and the survivors ran rings around them. However, in the very next game, we changed the killer to the Doctor. Then it was the survivors who didn’t stand a chance. What we guarantee is that when you pull this game out with the right player count, you will have a good experience 99% of the time.It's not something you want to do; it feels bad, and it's bad for the team,” Talton said. “So you definitely want to dodge the killer where you can.” Survivors take their turns before the killer, so the killer will need to carefully plan out each move to get closer to victory, achieved through hooking enough survivors before the generators are completed. Sound familiar? The Dead by Daylight board game may see future expansions that bring the latest killers from the video game to the tabletop, but not if they make for a worse game, publisher Level 99 Games has said. The #1 Reddit source for news, information, and discussion about modern board games and board game culture. Each killer has a unique ability drawn from their powers in the video game, while survivors can make use of their loadout of perks and items they find around the map. | Image credit: Level 99 Games

Meanwhile, whenever someone is sacrificed in a five-player game, their turn is missed while they’re on the hook. Then when they return, they’re wounded and still an easy target to be re-sacrificed and sidelined from the game again. I want to make sure that we're not falling into that trap at Level 99 Games. That we're delivering a great game first, and then taking all and only the pieces we need to support that great gameplay, not chasing after a bunch of small expansions or a bunch of extra modes just so we can have a giant-looking list of features. We were actually thinking that we would try and launch last October for this October. That was our original plan. But we decided we wanted to launch with the game in hand; rather than the game being design-complete, we wanted it to be product-complete. And so that's why we pushed forward to April. This is just one example of the effect of the IP. Another is the look and feel of the main board, which suffers because it tries to capture the dark and dingy feel of Dead By Daylight. It succeeds, but to put it plainly, it’s boring. Yes, from a usability standpoint, it’s got everything it needs.Dead by Daylight is an asymmetrical horror game where four Survivors have to try and escape a terrifying realm of horror, while being pursued by one menacing Killer. The game is a love letter to the horror genre, with characters from Saw, Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil 2, Scream, and other horror classics showing up on the roster, alongside an original cast of characters. On Tuesday, developer Level 99 announced Dead by Daylight: The Board Game. Asked whether Dead by Daylight: The Board Game could see future expansions that bring characters released for the video game since the All-Kill DLC to its tabletop counterpart, Talton left the possibility open. Level 99 Games produces many of my favourite board games, including Empyreal: Spells & Steam and Argent: The Consortium. So going into Dead By Daylight: The Board Game I was confident we were going to get a good game. But I still harboured doubts. Would this IP stifle the creativity of the design team I’ve come to love? The board game adaptation of the popular multiplayer survival-horror video game, in which one player’s killer stalks the others’ survivors as they attempt to restart a series of generators and escape, is in the works from Level 99 Games. The tabletop publisher has previously brought indie video game Shovel Knight and arcade fighter Street Fighter to its card fighting series Exceed.