There’s a Dark Souls card game coming out next year

Dark Souls: The Board Game creator Steamforged has announced a natural follow-up to its tabletop adaptation of the video game series: Dark Souls: The Card Game.

Due out next February, Dark Souls: The Card Game is similar to the board game in that it sees up to four players work together to take down enemies and bosses from across the trilogy of video games – unlike the semi-competitive gameplay of its sibling adaptation, Bloodborne: The Card Game.

Each character class has a unique ability and set starting deck, which can be customised by trading cards with other members of the party.

Although we weren’t big fans of the Dark Souls board game overall, we were impressed by its smart implementation of health and stamina, which were combined into a single tracker bar to encourage players to manage them more efficiently while battling.

Dark Souls: The Card Game sounds like it will similarly have a clever implementation, with each player’s deck of action cards also serving as their health. When damage is taken, the deck is gradually exhausted and won’t be refreshed until they rest at a bonfire.

The deck will include equipment cards with abilities that use up stamina, as well as stronger treasure and stamina cards gained by progressing along one of the game’s adventure paths.

The different chains of scenarios steadily increase in difficulty, with branching paths and variable encounters that change each time players come across them.

One of the best parts of Dark Souls: The Board Game was its boss fights, with the dedicated boss card decks allowing the fights to suddenly become more challenge and unpredictable once each foe had taken enough damage. There are echoes of this in Dark Souls: The Card Game: each path ends with a boss card, which might flip over partway through the battle to unleash more abilities.

It looks like Dark Souls: The Card Game will also skip Kickstarter – the core box, including more than 400 cards, is already up for sale on Steamforged’s site priced at £29.95, although pre-orders are said to only remain open until August 25th.