Recently, the whole Dicebreaker team sat down for a game of Dead by Daylight: The Board Game, a tabletop adaptation of the popular asymmetric video game. If you don’t know, the video game pits four plucky survivors against a killer who is trying to sacrifice them to the all-powerful, ever-hungry Entity, who brought them all together in the first place.
Long time fans of the video game may be wondering how exactly developer Behaviour and tabletop publisher Level 99 Games planned on delivering a similar experience when it comes to the board game. As someone who has played 500+ hours of the video game, I can tell you that the board game does a great job at recreating the tense game of cat and mouse we have come to know. With survivor and killer perks proving to be just as important to winning the game as they are in the video game, all while rejigging them to fit in this tabletop version.
A couple of examples include The Nurse’s Thanatophobia perk, forcing the survivors to roll on the ‘danger die’ instead of a normal one, doing a great job at emulating the skill check penalties for each hooked survivor. Or Meg’s sprint burst allowing her to move one extra room away in the board game, mimicking the speed boost she gets in the video game for a short time.
Despite the wonderful job this game does at making it a great game in its own right, Killer mains are being punished in the board game. The juggling act to manage all four survivors in this game makes the video game look like a walk in the park (a park where the trees are meat hooks, sure). Not only do you have to hook the other players but they need to have been wounded in a separate round to do so and there is no such thing as ‘downing’ a survivor either, they can run around fixing generators with ease, with only a 1 in 6 chance that they will mess it up.
Let’s hope The Doctor has better luck winning this game because The Nurse is out of luck. When the full version of the game comes out, tell us how you get on.