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

Product Information

So in a two-player game, one person pilots all four different survivors at once. As you can imagine, this is as overwhelming as trying to drive all four screens in multiplayer Mario Kart. 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?

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. 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. 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. When we see a movie, or a book, or a video game, we'll pay top dollar for an excellent design. We still haven't reached that level of maturity in the board game industry.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." 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. The video game itself is fully multiplayer - there's not a single-player mode or even a mode against AI - and you’ve adapted that directly as a one-versus-many board game. We've seen a number of board games recently go from either one-versus-many or another competitive format to fully cooperative, either through physical mechanics or something like a companion app… I want to make sure that we're not falling into that trap at Level 99 Games. That we're delivering a great game first, and then taking all and only the pieces we need to support that great gameplay, not chasing after a bunch of small expansions or a bunch of extra modes just so we can have a giant-looking list of features.

You've worked particularly with fighting video games, you've now done survival horror. Are there video game genres in general that you're looking at and thinking: 'Someone should really do a board game like that'? The campaign has two tiers of pledge reflecting the standard and collector's edition, the latter featuring over twice the content of the base game. 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. The board game’s Collector’s Edition will include all of the playable characters up to the All-Kill DLC expansion released for the video game in March 2021: a total of 16 killers and 17 survivors, all represented by miniatures. The cheaper standard edition will include seven survivors and six killers pulled from the full roster, as well as reducing the number of maps in the box from four to two. Level 99 previously confirmed that none of the licensed characters from other movie and video game franchises - such as Halloween, Resident Evil and A Nightmare on Elm Street - seen in the video game will appear in the board game. Level 99 confirmed to Dicebreaker that no licensed characters will make an appearance in the board game; the video game has seen the inclusion of figures from movies such as Halloween’s Michael Myers and A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Kreuger, as well as video games in the form of Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head and Resident Evil’s Jill, Claire, Leon and Chris.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. 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.

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.” 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. 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. Survivors must roll dice to restart generators, replacing the timing-based minigame in the video game. On a failed roll of 1 (replaced by a skull), the six-sided dice grant the killer blood points, which are used to perform more powerful abilities and perform extra actions. Four generators must be successfully restarted to allow the survivors to escape and win. 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.

We are really excited about the new characters, and especially the new original killer [Carmina Mora, The Artist] that's been released since then,” the designer said. “There's a ton of cool content coming out for Dead by Daylight. They take turns revealing their selection and performing the movement. Available movements include sprint, crouch, sneak, and vault. Each of these aligns with the different connecting lines on the map. For example, moving your character along a yellow line requires you to play your Vault card.

The board game will feature a miniature figurine of all non-licensed killers and survivors from the original game. (Image: Level 99 Games LLC) 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. Dead by Daylight's Collector's Edition will include hook miniatures - which the survivor figures can be placed onto for real. What we guarantee is that when you pull this game out with the right player count, you will have a good experience 99% of the time. The survivors each take their turn before the killer, who must anticipate the survivors’ movements but has a greater number of movement actions to make up for chasing the bigger group. Both survivors and killers must play a movement card on their turn.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 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. We had originally planned a few more [maps],” Talton revealed. “But ultimately we felt like it was better to do a smaller number of maps that players can be familiar with. Because the killers and the survivors you choose are where most of the variety in the game comes from.” 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. 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?