Dead by Daylight board game’s first expansion adds more killers and survivors to hunt in new maps this summer
Including several of the familiar faces reappearing in next month’s Endless Hunt DLC.
The Dead by Daylight board game, based on the killer-versus-survivors multiplayer horror video game, is bringing a fresh batch of hunters and hunted to the tabletop this summer in its first expansion.
Dead by Daylight: The Board Game was crowdfunded back in 2022 as a one-versus-many hidden movement game in which one player’s killer stalks the rest of the group’s survivors, who must race around the map to restart generators and escape before they’re dispatched via hook - just as in developer Behaviour Interactive’s video game.
The original game, compared to "co-op murder Battleship" by prolific video game adapter Level 99 Games, packed in either seven or 17 survivors and six or 16 killers, depending on whether you stumped up for the complete Collector’s Edition or the standard box.
The full roster brought the board game in line with the characters released for Dead by Daylight (the video game) up to its 2021 All-Kill DLC - with the exception of licensed characters from the likes of Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street, who were confirmed to be unable to appear in the tabletop game due to licensing restrictions.
Upcoming expansion Malicious will add a further three killers and four survivors to the line-up. Killers The Artist, The Dredge and The Knight were previously released for the video game during 2021 and 2022, but are due to reappear in next month’s Endless Hunt Pack, which gathers the past DLC into a single collection. (The fourth killer in Endless Hunt, The Skull Merchant, is yet to be announced for the board game.)
Three of the survivors coming to the board game in Malicious - maths genius Jonah, hardy podcaster Haddie and grizzled wanderer Vittorio - likewise make an appearance in Endless Hunt, along with siblings Thalita and Renato, who aren’t currently confirmed for the board game. The fourth survivor in the board game expansion will be supernaturally-gifted mystic Mikaela, who was added to the video game in late 2021’s half-chapter DLC Hour of the Witch.
The Malicious expansion will add two fresh maps for the new killers and survivors - as well as those already in the game - to play deadly hide-and-seek around. Garden of Joy adapts the Withered Isle’s fancy mansion, while Forsaken Boneyard is set in the eerie Chilean cemetery that blurs reality and imagination. The former joined The Dredge and Haddie in the video game in a 2022 patch, while the latter was added to alongside The Artist and Jonah in 2021 DLC Portrait of a Murder.
The release of the Malicious expansion towards the end of summer will accompany a fresh print run of the base Dead by Daylight: The Board Game needed to play. The expansion will cost $40.
Designer D. Brad Talton expressed the hope of bringing The Artist to the board game back in 2022, adding that releasing future expansions with additional characters was an “obvious move” - but couldn’t come at the expense of the game experience itself. (A legacy campaign based on the video game's Archives mode was scrapped during development.)
“I know we're probably leaving money on the table, but playability is more important,” he told Dicebreaker at the time. “I want to make a game that we're going to be printing three or four years from now, not a game that's going to make a lot of money on Kickstarter and then disappear.”