Level 99 | Dead By Daylight | Board Game | Ages 17+ | 3-5 Players | 45 Minutes Playing Time

Product Information

It was the same thing with the two-player mode - with one player controlling all the survivors and one player controlling the killer, we weren't generating a consistently good experience. We said, "Well, let's just cut it, and we'll make three the minimum player count." It's not as trendy to have those player counts. But what we guarantee is that when you pull this game out with the right player count, you will have the experience that we intended in design, and you will have a good experience 99% of the time. That consistency was more important to us than having a big feature list.

This system should be familiar to anyone who’s played BattleCon, a board game from the same designer. As that similarly has the same simple this-beats-that mechanism at its core. However, both games layer so much additional information on top of this simple decision, that it becomes not so simple. Staples of the game will be included, from items, perks and props, to the Killers and Survivors themselves.

I don't know why we don't have more battle royale games in the tabletop space, why we haven't done that. Because it doesn't seem like such a hard genre to dig into. So yeah, so we're definitely looking at how we could capture the feel of some of those, and they might show up on a future announcement. The pitch I gave to Behaviour was was 'cooperative murder Battleship'. Then they said, "Oh, that sounds interesting." We actually had a lot of versions of the game that were very intertwined with hidden information. We had a central board and the players would have screens, and behind the board there was secret information. The killer actually had a map of the whole labyrinth that was randomised behind their screen, so they knew where all the props were and such. We had all of those tools. In the end, we scrapped a lot of that. Outside of the fact it’s got a colon in the middle of its title. You know this is a Level 99 Games production from the sheer amount of board game in the box. However, there’s so much empty space on the board. Additionally, the different locations look like screenshots from Dead By Daylight. As such, it doesn’t feel like a cohesive map. Or like you’re travelling from one location to the next. One second you’re inside the Main Garage, the next you’re in the Barn.

Level 99 Games produces many of my favourite board games, including Empyreal: Spells & Steam and Argent: The Consortium. So going into Dead By Daylight: The Board Game I was confident we were going to get a good game. But I still harboured doubts. Would this IP stifle the creativity of the design team I’ve come to love? The killers also reflect their unique abilities in the video game, from foes able to inhibit survivors’ movement to those able to throw survivors around the board. Six will be in the standard version of the game, with an additional ten in the Collector’s Edition - including all of the characters up to the All-Kill DLC released for Dead by Daylight last March. We were actually thinking that we would try and launch last October for this October. That was our original plan. But we decided we wanted to launch with the game in hand; rather than the game being design-complete, we wanted it to be product-complete. And so that's why we pushed forward to April.Dead By Daylight: The Board Game is a one-versus-many game. Up to four players play as survivors trying to escape a location by powering four generators and finding an exit. Meanwhile, the evilest player at the table assumes the role of a supernatural killer aiming to sacrifice these survivors. Making sure no one gets out alive. Did you run into any particular hurdles in translating Dead by Daylight from digital to physical in terms of keeping the overall feel of either specific killers and survivors, or the wider balance of how they might work in terms of a board game? The board game adaptation of the popular multiplayer survival-horror video game, in which one player’s killer stalks the others’ survivors as they attempt to restart a series of generators and escape, is in the works from Level 99 Games. The tabletop publisher has previously brought indie video game Shovel Knight and arcade fighter Street Fighter to its card fighting series Exceed.

Survivors must use the movement cards at their disposal, along with their unique loadout of helpful perks and items collected from around each map, to outrun the killer - equipped with their own unique abilities - and avoid being sacrificed before they can escape. Asked whether Dead by Daylight: The Board Game could see future expansions that bring characters released for the video game since the All-Kill DLC to its tabletop counterpart, Talton left the possibility open. There are a lot of genres that I want to do. But we're not alone in the video games-to-board games world anymore. There's some genres that are still really unrepresented, though. We only have like two, maybe three games that try to capture the first-person shooter genre. I feel like everybody has just said, "Oh, this is a video game, there's no way that we can bring that to the tabletop." And they've given up on it. Now, being the Level 99 Games sycophant I am, I got the collector’s edition. That comes with 17 survivors, 16 killers, and 4 maps. That’s just an absurd amount of variety.

Dead by Daylight Board Game - Gameplay

Survivors take their turns before the killer, so the killer will need to carefully plan out each move to get closer to victory, achieved through hooking enough survivors before the generators are completed. Sound familiar?

When we spoke previously about the Dead by Daylight board game, you mentioned that there was inspiration drawn from Scotland Yard. ( The classic hidden-movement board game.) And then also Battleship, which I was surprised to hear…

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We actually started in April last year. Around the time that the All-Kill chapter came out for Dead by Daylight. That was the game that kind of became the talk of our board game nights. We have a team board game night, with all of our friends and most of the team from Level 99 Games. We were talking about what video games we were playing, and we were all talking about Dead by Daylight at that point. And so I said, "Well, everybody's into it, maybe I'll just make a board game. And, if it works out, maybe it'll actually be a Dead by Daylight board game. And if it doesn't, it's still a lot of fun with friends." As far as doing an expansion, of course, nothing is set yet. We need to complete this project first. But through this all we've developed a really good working relationship with [Dead by Daylight developer] Behaviour. And with the success of the game, it would be a pretty obvious move to continue to create content.” Dead by Daylight: The Board Game follows the one-versus-many format of the video game. Two to four people control survivors - seven characters from the video game are included in the base game, with 17 in the expanded Collector’s Edition - while one player takes on the role of the killer chasing them. No solo or full cooperative mode will be included, Level 99 told Dicebreaker.