A Dead by Daylight board game is releasing in time for this Halloween, bringing the hugely popular multiplayer video game’s deadly hide-and-seek match to the tabletop. Each survivor has a unique ability to help them survive, with a recommended loadout printed on each player board. As in the video game, players can fully customise their characters’ perks using tokens in an advanced version of the rules. Combining the hidden movement of games such as Fury of Dracula and Letters from Whitechapel with the team challenge of co-op board games like Pandemic and Dead by Daylight’s brutal horror-movie influences, it looks to be a faithful take on the video game’s atmosphere and tension while transforming it from screen to table.

While hooked survivors can be rescued by their companions, like the video game, Dead by Daylight: The Board Game will not feature permanent player elimination or death. Instead, players simply miss a turn while hooked, waiting to be rescued by their allies. 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? We made the game, and we pitched it. And Behaviour [Interactive, the developer of Dead by Daylight] was really interested. And so we started going through that partnership and doing the design. It took us a good part of last year to do the design. Developer Behaviour Interactive has partnered with Level 99 Games, acclaimed publisher of video game-inspired board and card games, to create a board game based on the hit multiplayer horror. 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.Managing secret information is really tough. And this is a very fast-paced game, where you expect to reveal and to hide, many, many times. What we discovered through many tests is that these moments of revealing your position and hiding your position were the key moments of the game. And we wanted to be doing that every single turn. We didn't want to have two or three turns where the killer just gropes around in the dark looking for you, or where you just search blindly for a generator in a labyrinth you don't understand. As fans of the original video game, we worked hard to capture the tension between the Survivors and the Killer on every turn," said D. Brad Talton Jr, the board game's designer. "The moment when you commit to your move and then have to hold your breath while the Killer makes their play - to me that's the essence of Dead by Daylight."

Dead by Daylight: The Board Game will feature all of the video game's characters up to last year's All-Kill DLC. The killer must catch and sacrifice survivors to achieve victory, interacting with survivors in their space to wound them - a second wound results in capture. As in the video game, the killer must carry caught survivors to a hook, with every hooked survivor granting a victory point at the end of the turn. In place of the chance to wiggle free while caught in the video game, survivors must roll dice based on the distance to the closest hook, granting them the opportunity to escape before they’re hooked. Dead by Daylight is an asymmetrical horror game where four Survivors have to try and escape a terrifying realm of horror, while being pursued by one menacing Killer. The game is a love letter to the horror genre, with characters from Saw, Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil 2, Scream, and other horror classics showing up on the roster, alongside an original cast of characters. On Tuesday, developer Level 99 announced Dead by Daylight: The Board Game. In our first play, we used Legion as the killer and the survivors ran rings around them. However, in the very next game, we changed the killer to the Doctor. Then it was the survivors who didn’t stand a chance. 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.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? Therefore, having three or four players is the perfect player count. At three, players get two survivors each, allowing them to still play while one is hooked. And at four, the unassigned survivor can be controlled by a sacrificed player. Unlike the video game, the survivors win or lose together,” Talton said. “We experimented with that a lot - about giving them separate win-loss conditions. But for various reasons, we decided that it had to be a shared victory for the survivors. Because with the video game, you have a lot of meta conditions even when you die as a survivor. You have a lot of incentives; you can make progress in the archives, you can make progress in your own personal daily routine, you get a lot of blood points. There's a lot of flavours of victory in the video game. In the board game, you win or you lose.” Each killer has a unique ability drawn from their powers in the video game, while survivors can make use of their loadout of perks and items they find around the map. | Image credit: Level 99 Games

For any other publisher, this wouldn’t be worth a mention. Coming from Level 99 Games though, it’s a surprise. As most of their board games are bright, colourful, and full of details. As fans of the original video game, we worked hard to capture the tension between the Survivors and the Killer on every turn,” says D. Brad Talton Jr, the designer behind the game. “The moment when you commit to your move and then have to hold your breath while the Killer makes their play—to me that’s the essence of Dead by Daylight.”Players will be able to play as familiar faces; all original survivors and killers from Dead by Daylight prior to the release of The Artist will be available as minis. Unfortunately, licensed characters will not be available as playable characters, nor will their perks appear in the game. However, Talton insisted that future expansions would only be released if the publisher could ensure that players’ experience of the upcoming board game wouldn’t be negatively affected by the extra content.

Open-world games; we've got some really cool open-world board games now with Gloomhaven and with Sleeping Gods. I would say that those are the closest you get to an open-world video game - until you go into RPGs, which are the true open-world games. I think there's still room to do that. This is just one example of the effect of the IP. Another is the look and feel of the main board, which suffers because it tries to capture the dark and dingy feel of Dead By Daylight. It succeeds, but to put it plainly, it’s boring. Yes, from a usability standpoint, it’s got everything it needs. We wanted to make a game that you could break out at a Halloween party, play for an hour and then go on with your festivities. Or that you could break out at a regular board game night and just play. For that reason, we built the size of the box, and the contents of the box and sort of the tone of gameplay around those ideas. ORIGINAL STORY 1/3/22: An official Dead by Daylight board game is on the way to spook players this Halloween. 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.Oh, absolutely. Dead by Daylight is a really huge game, and there's a lot of mechanics to it. We had to be really careful about what we decide to keep in and what we have to take out. Behind Dead by Daylight’s tabletop adaptation is Level 99 Games, the publisher known for its board games heavily inspired by classic video games, including fighting game series Exceed, retro-flavoured Pixel Tactics and fast-paced puzzle game Bullet. 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? 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.