Darkest Night in Review

Darkest Night, designed by Jeremy Lennert and published by lovable...

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Thanks for the review, VPG games easily slip under my radar.

So overall, this is better, more thematic than Pathfinder? I don't have either but I'm tempted to pull the trigger on this one.

ThirstyMan wrote: So overall, this is better, more thematic than Pathfinder? I don't have either but I'm tempted to pull the trigger on this one.

100% yes. It also has quite a bit more depth, yet it isn't very much more complicated rules-wise. It's really a pretty compact game. I would definitely rate it over Pathfinder. Which is, BTW, one of only two games that I think I over-rated when it came time to write the review. The other was MEQ. I kind of don't ever want to play Pathfinder again, although I did really enjoy it for the period that I was into it. Just no desire to return to it.

Barnes. Dude! Darkest Night fucking rocks.

It had been in the back of my mind for a while and your review prompted me to do some more research on the game, which led to my buying the Necromancer Bundle and the two remaining expansions. At this point I've played it twice solo and I can't wait to get my buddies into some sessions. There is so much to appreciate about the game, from its design to its presentation. The game mechanics are elegant and easily teachable, the graphic design is spare but beautiful, and the art is excellent at conveying the desperate and yet heroic tone of the game's setting and events.

One of the things that I most appreciate about the game is that it generates striking stories and vignettes without relying on flavor text. I don't have anything against flavor text but it's neat to play a game that has so little of it and yet is so thematically satisfying. These stories emerge from the interplay between character abilities and core stats, random events, the activities of the Necromancer, and your own decisions as a player. Here, I'll give an example from my first game. Anyone not interested in a geek geeking out about geek stuff should stop reading now. Fair warning!


In search of clues to the whereabouts of a holy relic that would be crucial in defeating the Necromancer, our Wizard had travelled to some ancient Ruins that sprinkled one corner of the kingdom. While there he received word that the peasantry were in a panic because something was snatching their children in the middle of the night and leaving no trace behind. The Wizard used his ability to turn invisible to track the creatures back to their lair, sneak in undetected, and spirit the children away to safety. The experience changed his outlook, and he realized that with the proper attack spells he could have defeated the creatures outright. This epiphany prompted him to master the devastating Fiendfire spell. Later he discovered a straggler from the original group of kidnapped children, and once again the Wizard used his invisibility to rescue her. He decided to put an end to this atrocity and assaulted a vast host of animated skeletons with his Fiendfire, reducing them all to ash. Sifting through their remains he found regimental insignia on some of the skeletons' armor that indicated that the most recently animated corpses had served the king, while living, in the Mountains on the opposite side of the kingdom. What could have kept them alive longer than their brothers had in the face of the Necromancer's foul magic? After paying his respects at an ancient altar he teleported to the Mountains to investigate this lead.

Now the mechanics of what happened there:

Round 11 Event Phase -- The Wizard starts the round in the Ruins and draws the Panic card, which has you draw a Quest card, roll for its location, and immediately add an hourglass token to it to indicate that it is already a bit closer to expiration. He draws the Without a Trace Quest card ("Something is stealing children from the local populace without leaving any witnesses. Track it to its lair or you will lose the sympathy of the townsfolk.") and randomly determines that its location is the Ruins. This quest can be resolved by taking a quest action in that location and then successfully eluding an Awareness 6 opponent. Failure to resolve the quest in time costs all heroes 2 Secrecy; success gives the questing hero an Epiphany, which lets them search their powers deck and learn the power of their choice.

Round 11 Action Phase -- The Wizard takes a quest action, then activates his Invisibility spell to help with the challenge. This gives him +2 dice (3 dice total, in this case) when eluding, but will exhaust itself automatically if he ever fails in a fight or uses another attack spell. Rolling 3d6 (looking for individual values rather than summing their total) he tries to match the Awareness rating of the challenge (6) and succeeds! This means that at least one of his three dice came up as a 6. The quest is completed and for his reward he learns the Fiendfire spell.

Round 12 Event Phase -- He draws the Rescue event card, which is an immediate challenge to either fight with a target number of 5 or elude with a target number of 4. With his Invisibility still active from last round he chooses to elude, rolling 3d6 (again, just looking for the highest individual values rather than summing the dice) and succeeding. The reward is a slight increase to his Grace.

Round 12 Action Phase -- The Wizard attacks the Skeletons blight that the Necromancer placed in the Ruins at the end of the last round. By attacking the blight the Wizard must fight a target number 5. He exhausts his Fiendfire spell to roll 5 dice and he succeeds, destroying the blight. This satisfies the Into the Dark mystery ("You can uncover critical secrets of the darkness if you can defeat its local manifestation.") that had been in place in the Ruins for several rounds, giving the heroes +3 Clues the first time a blight at that location is destroyed. The heroes need 10 clues to track down the location of a holy relic, and this leaves the group at 9 clues.

Round 13 Event Phase -- The Wizard encounters an Altar event, and his card-dictated roll determines that it is a Pure Altar. This gives him the ability to spend 1 Secrecy to gain 1 Grace, which he does.

Round 13 Action Phase -- The Wizard exhausts his Teleport spell to gain 2 Secrecy and move to the Mountains, which are the location of another Mystery card that may give the group enough clues to find a relic.


So maybe it was just me but when I played out that sequence the story just came alive and it was so easy to imagine the action unfold. And there have been quite a few other similarly evocative sequences just in the two games that I have played so far. From the Priest's Sanctuary spell flashing like a beacon so brightly in the Village that the Necromancer is practically summoned to the trap that we had laid for him there, to the Exorcist condeming a vicious blight so forcefully that the unnatural darkness afflicting the entire region is actually pushed back a bit, to the young Prince inspiring the Wind Dancer to perform so potent a dance that she summons a hurricane that annihilates several blights from the kingdom... man, it's cool. And a mechanically sound, fair, challenging, AT/Euro hybrid co-op to boot.

Yeah, Barnes, if we ever meet I owe you a drink for this recommendation.

Ha ha, glad you liked it! My review Thursday is for all four expansions...I agree with a comment someone made here that they kind of feel like patches for the base game, but regardless- they make a great game better. It really does make a great narrative every game, and the characters are all really interesting to explore.

Do the expansions make Darkest Night a whole different game? Even I'll admit that 'base game' pizza is better with the sauce expansion, the cheese expansion, and the pepperoni expansion.

Anyway, I played DN once (2-player) and thought that was plenty. For the price, there are so many better games available - Eldritch Horror, for starters.

Hmm...could be that DN fills a niche as an amazing solo game - is that the draw? I'm just curious.

Edit:

Re-reading the posts above, I'd also add that - for me - Pathfinder has turned out to be the one of the best family-style games ever released. But as a solo game? I imagine it would be mediocre at best.

Some games just have to find their audience, I think.

Let's hold on that to tomorrow. In short, yes, I think I does and I actually think it is a much better solo game than a multiplayer game. It's very different than Eldritch Horror or even Mage Knight, which would be the other top games in its class. But Eldritch Horror would be the one that is a better multiplayer game than either of its peers.

Michael Barnes wrote: Let's hold on that to tomorrow. In short, yes, I think I does and I actually think it is a much better solo game than a multiplayer game. It's very different than Eldritch Horror or even Mage Knight, which would be the other top games in its class. But Eldritch Horror would be the one that is a better multiplayer game than either of its peers.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow's column, but that won't stop me from chiming in with something tonight. First of all, the expansions are amazing and I'm very impressed at how they expand the gameplay in natural ways. I haven't played without them and I don't intend to, so I guess the downside there is that it's about a $120 game after shipping and tax. Adjusted for inflation that's how about how much I paid for stuff like Wing Commander way back when, and I was dirt poor. I'm fine with that price for something like Darkest Night.

Regarding group vs. solo, I haven't played it with a group yet so I can't speak from experience on which mode works best. However, my intuition tells me that Mr. Barnes is correct on this, or at least that Eldritch Horror lends itself to communal play more than Darkest Night does. I think that Darkest Night presents the characters as a tiny team that is working in a relatively small area. The game's scope and mechanics reward good coordination of the characters' actions, which of course is great for solo play. In Eldritch Horror I get much more of a feeling that our characters, while certainly working together on the same side, nonetheless are pursuing their own adventures as part of the larger effort. In most of the Eldritch Horror games that I've played my character rarely even meets more than one or two of the others. This plus the globetrotting action seem to make Eldritch Horror very well suited to group play.

TLDR: In Eldritch Horror you play B.A., Hannibal, Face, and Murdock. In Darkest Night you play the A-Team.