Dark Souls The Board Game: How to House Rules 

Per your requests we've added a list of our rules to BGG. You can find the link in the video description! Hope you enjoy!

To those claiming that the game's rules do not need changing: haven't you noticed how freaking long it takes to complete a single game (unless you're not stopping to discuss tactics at all)? My AVERAGE playtime with 2 players must be 7 or 8 hours. Sure, the houserules these guys are presenting aren't perfect but I appreciate anyone putting a bit of effort into trying to make the game last a humane amount of time. If I'm honest with you, I love houseruling this game to the point where I might as well write up my own damn rulebook 😂

Ok here are the tweaks I made to the game. 1st - I took 12 cards out of the treasure stach, that nobody ever uses, even if we are desperate. Lowering the chance to draw crap items. 2nd - I removed the ember and titanite shards cards too, leaving the deck with 40 cards, much more chance to gather useful items. The Ember is sold by the Firekeeper (2 souls) only one per player per playthrough and the 4 titanite shards sold by Andre for 2 souls each. 3rd - After completing an encounter we get one treasure card but only the first time it is completed. 4th - We can sell 3 treasures for 1 soul items sold go to the discard pile and can never be bought back. To me this makes the game feel more like Dark Souls, Andre sells the regular titanites while you find the better ones, Embers sold by the Maiden, run through an area and collect items and sell them for not a really good price.

The soul count isnt the problem with DS, but the item deck should have been divided by tier.

Thanks for the house rules. Tried them out last night and it made the game flow a lot better. Much less grinding and getting items at a much better pace. Never felt OP, just a lot more fun. Took out Ornstein and Smough.

One house rule I use - split all items into individual decks including melee weapons, ranged weapons, shields, armor, spells/miracles, rings, other. When you spend souls to reveal items, you reveal one of each type.

I'm not normally a fan of house rules however this game needs it to be fun. It's way to grindy and takes way to long to not make at least some house rules.

The only house rule I implemented was for level 1 encounters is 2 souls per player. Level 2 encounters are 3 souls per player, and level 3 are 4 souls per player. We always play with 4 players so it leaves enough challenge, but a less repetitive grind. The problem is they never played the real game so they don't quite enjoy the punishment the game is known for, so I'm trying to make it more enjoyable for them, but not make it a complete cake walk. I was thinking of making loot 3 souls for 1 card, and sell the junk no one wants for 1 soul.

Only adjustment I've made is you divide estus by number of players for example 2 players get 2 each 1 player gets 4

The house rules I have: 1. You don’t regain health after encounters 2. After clearing a room you gain souls=1+the level of the encounter Mini bosses are 4 souls Major bosses are 6 souls 3. You may sell 2 cards for 1 soul 4. Use the campaign rules for buying lives, skipping tiles, and maxing out stats to 40 5. Any party size may buy up to 5 lives

Honestly i clicked on this vid to see on ideas for streamlining the game for play with people that aren't familiar with the nature of DS. In the comments I see so much gatekeeping though, you know even in the official SFG vids they say that you can make your own rules. The Devs even describe it like a kit for you to use how you like. So yeah Ds boardgame boss rush anyone?

best thing to do is getting 1 soul per mob , or more generous 2 per level 2 mob, but man come on! getting 16 soul from one encounter will be child play

I feel better knowing that I spent $70 and let the community and company spend years finishing their game!

House rules are cool. Thank you.

Your soul calculation method punishes large groups: which have the largest need for souls due to having the most number of players to gear up (hence why the original rules gave more souls for larger groups). me and my wife play the game with the difficulty of the encounter increasing the # of souls. level one encounters yield 2 souls per player, level two encounters yield 3 souls per player, level three encounters yield 4 souls per player.

The Threat value is not relative to "challenge rating" - it only refers to initiative. You should simply assign souls value to enemies (say 1 per small hollow, 2 per Silverknight, 3 for Large Hollow, 4 for Sentinel, 6 for invader or mimic, 8 for miniboss, 12 for main boss)

What i do when we broke a barrel at the end of the fight, we roll a 6 face die and 1-2-3 is 2 souls 4-5 is 5 souls and 6 is an tier 1 items :) feels more like the game

Hi. I have played solo with some house rules and it's seems then not so difficult. I had really luck with the cards and the dices but anyway it was fun. Next for comparaison I will play the real rules. Thx guys

havent played the game myself yet. but i saw some playthroughs and i gotta say your house rules make so much more sense. not blaming the developers for poor gaming concepts. i myself been trying a lot to come up with boardgames. i know how hard it is to invent game mechanics and do logical adaptations. still if you play through the game you realize that something is off. i think your rules are key to a better experience!

I've always wanted to be called a chu chu! it finally happened , thank you ! =')

I'll need to try these out. I love the game. But 4 hours just to get anything to deal with the first boss is a little much.

So what ive ive thought is that you get three souls each when you finish an encounter (instead of the original 2 souls each) When you die, that player goes back to camp and stays there until the enouncter is finished. The number of spawn doesnt decrease unless the whole team or 2player dies. (unlike the original when you you die, the whole goes back to the campfire and the number of spawns goes down by one) In relation to the second rule when a player dies, the souls that are in the soul cache gets placed in the node where they died and it gets collected when another player goes on to that node. Or we could make it 0 soul reward for those that dies What do you guys think?

Greetings from Germany! d_^v^_b Thank you, guys! Your house rules are very interesting and I'm going to use them in my next playthrough. I've played the board game only three times, but every playthrough felt very different to the next one: the first was one-player, just to learn the rules. I was lucky because my loot from the deck needed just a few upgrades to equip it to my knight. In addition to that I started with 16 souls as it says in the manual. So the start was a little bit easier than the next ones. I won this first game. xD My second playthrough was four-players. My buddies were so excited because we like Dark Souls and board games. But the gaming event in my living room last weekend was extremely horrible and disappointing. No weapon or armor was equipable. All of our souls got lost by buying stuff from the treasure deck. My best friend got so grumpy... omg... So I want to modify the game to a more playable and less depressive game. Obviously... we lost. My actually last and third playthrough was also four-players, but I played the four characters. I changed only one rule: the battle order. Normally: all enemies --> one hero --> all enemies --> the next hero and so on. Changed: all enemies --> all heroes --> all enemies --> all heroes, but in a different sequence --> all enemies --> ... I imitated the sequence of poker texas hold 'em: the aggro marker was like the dealer button and is passed on at the start of every hero turn. Within the hero turn the player left of the "dealer" started, then clockwise again to the "dealer". So the "dealer" is the last one of every turn. My experience is: the fights get more easy (of course) and feels more realistic. It feels not like the heroes are glued to the ground because it's not their turn or something like that. ^^ This time I played only to the mini boss and in the third attempt I could kill him (my assassin had no luck with dodging... two times! Altair wouldn't be proud of him...) And yes, I know! Dark souls must be difficult and frustrating! I think so too! I want it that way! But the loot mechanic with the character parameters is still annoying. The manual's rules are... poor. (I prefer to be careful with my words because my English is not as good as it could be. Sorry for that and thanks to the google translator! Thumbs up!) Like I wrote above I will give your house rules a shot. I'll give you my feed back later. Maybe I'll try the other ideas of the community too. They sounds great! I wish you and everyone else a good evening, a nice sunny March, GG and HF!

I absolutely never use house rules. Honestly, I think the game works fine, and in all the times my buddy and I have played (probably around 10 or so) we've never lost a single game. Even recently we did the Titanite Demon - Ornstein and Smough route, without a doubt the most difficult route in the base game, and still managed to win, despite some really unlucky rolls in certain rooms. I've only ever played with 2 people and it works great IMO. I'd say the best tactic is to get a few items, and then concentrate on levelling up for them right from the get go even if they're not what you're hoping for. Just do whatever it takes to get that little bit stronger. Also, never get attached to builds and be ready to swap them out. In the game I played recently, I ended up as a full-on spellcaster (despite being a Knight) before the miniboss, switched to effigy shield (can be used with two handed weapons) + claymore with fireball as backup, then swapped out for black tower shield and upgraded thrall axe to fight the main boss. None of these builds were optimal, and I missed a chance to upgrade my strength to wield the warpick, but it still worked out in the end. My buddy ended up with a three shield build (yes, really) with the silver Knight shield and pierce shield (both capable of actual attacks) with a more defensive shield in backup to swap in for tanking. My only real issues with the game are its awfully written rulebook (played a few games with the incorrect rules thanks to this thing...) and the fact dodge builds are considerably more risky than armour builds unless you have the absolute best gear. Personally, I'm really excited for all the expansions and I'm so happy I backed on Kickstarter. No regrets here whatsoever! :)

Hello, great Video. You should write the rules down and post them on Boardgamegeek.

i have a question for boss fights. when you fail the boss fight. did you take out the head up card? reshuffle the deck and add another one or do you leave it the same.

We received a question that seems to not appear in the comment section (no idea why). "Do you still divide by 2 in higher player count games?" The simple answer is "Yes." However, in a 4 player game this might be less lucrative than getting 8 souls per room. We dabbled with the idea of gaining one soul per player per room on top of our "divide by 2" rule. The only reason we didn't add this to the video is because we felt it might make the game too easy. Feel free to try this rule in addition to the others in a 4 player game. In a 3 player game we still found that the "divide by 2" rule was better than gaining 6 souls per room.

Is this game worth buying?... I seem to hear a bit of regrets from people that have bought it... maybe they were the backers that had long delays before the game arrived tho. Would you recommend this for 2 players..me and the wife.. we both love the PC/Ps4 games :D

No just nope. I'm going to keep playing how it was made thanks.

I just make it so big enemies give an additional 1 soul each

When I played the game - and decided that it was crap - the main reason which brought the whole table to that conclusion was, when we had to face the same supereasy room for the third time and we already knew we would make it without any consequences, so we decided to just bank the souls without even actually going through the fight, because it would have been super boring. So, this is a BIG issue for me, in ANY boardgame: when you decide to skip huge chunks of its gameplay because you already know the outcome and you already know it will bore you to death. This is unexcusable. Grinding works for videogames, not boardgames. In boardgame adaptations you should pick more from the abstract side of a videogame's concept (i.e. Bloodborne Card Game), not translating videogame's underlying logic into boardgame rules, that just doesn't work. No one would play a Super Mario boardgame in which you have mechanics for running straight and jumping on enemies' heads (maybe by rolling dice). As far as I can understand, by watching this video, you did not really solve the boring grinding, you just made it less necessary by giving more souls upfront. Am I right? EDIT: I forgot to mention that I really appreciate those house rules and the effort you put into creating them and sharing them with us.

Something just felt really childish and silly about this whole thing. The whole idea of exponentially increasing the soul reward per room comes off as pretty excessive, and as many have mentioned, doing so based off of threat level just isn't particularly accurate. Personally, I plan on incorporating a 'trade-in' system where two or three items can be discarded to earn a single soul. To be honest, though, the regular rules don't seem to be as big of a deal as people make them out to be.

Sorry but this rule is bad. Threat level is no indication of the difficulty of an enemy... Doesn't make sense to create a formula of souls gained by determining threat value. It could be a good concept if applied correctly.

Do you scale souls if you have more players in?

some pdf would be nice to read your modifications.

I was hoping to find an improvement to the campaign that made it feel more like dungeons and dragons or even warhammer quest. I was hoping darksouls would be a bit more roleplay oriented a bit like mansions of madness especially since the narrative and lore is so damn strong.

I think you two think dark souls: the board game must behave like a family board game, this board game is the analog version of a tough video game, then it must be tough, you must die many times until you learn minions' and bosses' patrons and don't make mistakes, like the video game, a grinding video game.

Threat is initiative not a challenge rating. Bad idea to base souls on this stat.

Balls🗿

I love Dark soul the video game and love boardgames in general but this game is not an accurate representation at all. You don't have to grind in Dark souls and there is basically no luck involved either. I love the art and the minis but the more videos I watch the more I hate this game. It's a bunch of lucky/unlucky draws from the deck or a bunch of dice rolls all of that makes it pretty much the antithesis of what dark souls is - a game of knowledge and skill.

Dude thats much harder

This makes the game much too simple. Simple and Dark Souls don't go well together.

loved this. this goes to show how lazy this games was designed, although it has so much potential. nice job with these ideas guys

"We've never made it this far in the game to take on this many". So why are you already making house rules to change the game? I'm all for house rules but if you haven't even finished the game you aren't doing yourself any favors by blatantly making it easier.

Things are simple. So many great games and so little time for a mediocre one... An unfortunate backer... Good try by the way...

Title should be either "Dark Souls The Board Game: How to Not Play the Game properly". Seriously, this video is a disgrace and you only made them because you cannot play the game properly or complete it yourself because it's "too hard". Were you one of those people that complained that the Dark Souls 1 game was "impossible" to do? All you are doing is butchering the game because you struggle at the game. Why not just get rid of both the game (unless you did) and remove this video? It's disrespectful.