Darkest Night board game has been around for a number of years, slowly increasing its presence via a number of small expansions until in was kickstarted as a second deluxe edition arriving in 2018. It is a tactical co-operative game with a fantasy theme setting where characters must stop the evil necromancer from destroying the kingdom.
This fantasy adventure game sees your team of four heroes co-operating to try and stop the evil necromancer who is bringing darkness to the kingdom, which he does by putting out varied blights into the seven location areas of the board. Each hero has a deck of card representing their special powers which they use to destroy this evil directly, or chain effect with one other to help defend the realm. Clever co-operation between characters will improve your chances of beating off the rising darkness track.
The gameplay is easy to learn and follow but immensely involving, as each character only takes one action per round, such as travelling, searching, using a special power or fighting a blight. When undertaking a search or trying to clear the blights you will roll a number of dice depending on your skill aiming for target rolls to gain a success. Your unique powers plus the sparks you collect will enable you to roll extra dice, so you always have options and can plan ahead to utilise powers to your advantage. You need to balance defeating blights with collecting clues that are required to obtain a holy relic, which ultimately will bring down the necromancer. As the game progress so does your access to new and more elaborate power cards, while all the time a darkness tracker is increasing the difficulty and throwing more obstacles your way.
This game does need a bit of space to lay out the cards, and there is so much choice with 29 different heroes to select from, each having different power combinations, which means that every game can be a strategically different experience, and even playing the same characters will likely reveal different powers each game. Your party will need some balance of abilities to increase the chances of success, such as a fighter, a supportive character or one with unusual abilities. Due to the simple number of actions per round it is easily playable solo with four heroes, although there are variants to use only two or three if you prefer. The game difficulty and type of challenge is easily tailored to different levels by changing the blight deck through an easy colour code mechanism.
As a co-operative game it shares some similarities with others that include a darkness countdown tracker, such as Eldritch Horror with a similar doom tracker and a dice success roll requirement. Darkest Night in the deluxe second edition has large tarot sized cards, thick tokens, great artwork, and a board printed in two sizes, with the expansion content all built in. The standees in my opinion are better than the plastic alternatives. This is a quality product and remains one of my favourite solo or two player games which i keep returning to every year, as combining different groups of characters is immensely enjoyable.
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Expansions
This new second edition brought all the previous expansion content together into one package, massively improving the components and artwork and making it have a deluxe feel. The gameplay elements are self contained without expansion content now (my additions highlighted green = own, blue = part owned, red = not purchased) :
Miniatures Pack
There was a limited release of plastic miniatures to represent all the heroes and replace the standees, however the overall miniature quality was not considered the best around and the standees quality is exceptionally good anyway.