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Bloodborne is one of the popular games in a long-running series by FromSoftware, making up the ‘borne’ in ‘soulsborne’. While it was an exclusive title for Sony’s Playstation 4, it was popular enough to spawn both a card game a miniatures board game. But how do they compare to the video game?
Bloodborne (PS4)
Exclusive to the Playstation 4, Bloodborne is a gothic victorian style action game with a mix of werewolf and eldritch horror themes. The game utilises the mechanics of the Dark Souls franchise, originally derived from the earlier Demon’s Souls.
To separate itself from previous titles, the game did away with shields and Vancian spellcasting. Instead, they brought in gunplay - which mostly functions as a parrying method, as well as a ranged attack - and transforming ‘trick weapons’. It retained the checkpoint and levelling mechanics of its predecessor (albeit, with different statistics to match the setting). All alongside other gameplay changes to take a different flow to exploration and combat. One of the most important mechanics in Bloodborne is the ‘rally’ mechanic. This allows your character to recover lost health if you attack after recently taking damage.
The story (without spoiling the later events of the game), begins in the city of Yharnam. Your character awakens after a blood transfusion, in order to seek the mysterious paleblood during the night of the hunt. You soon find yourself within a place called ‘The Hunter’s Dream’, a hub location with inhabitants that assist you. Your fully customisable character then adventures through a crazy world of nightmares and dreams. You equip new clothing, weapons, and powers, as you progress in both levels and locations.
In a similar fashion to Dark Souls, Bloodborne is rife with unique and difficult boss fights. They often progress and shape the state of the world, and your character’s capabilities, with every defeat.
Another important mechanic within Bloodborne is ‘Insight’. You gain Insight through defeating bosses, discovering locations, and using items that imply a gain in knowledge. ‘Insight’ is an integral part of exploration, which is a major factor of the game, between its beastly encounters.
Much like the Dark Souls games, you can also call upon other players as allies to aid your progress through levels or boss fights. At the same time, you are often open to invasion from other players - who are merely out to kill you for their gain.
Overall, Bloodborne is a fast-paced spin-off of Dark Souls. It takes place in a new world with a gothic theme, displayed not just in appearances but also in gameplay.
The first Bloodborne tabletop venture from CMoN is a semi-cooperative card game. Players race each other for survival, banking precious blood echoes and trophies until they defeat the boss monster.
At the end of the game, you tally up your blood echoes and trophies to see who came out on top as the best hunter (if your group survived, that is). The expansion pack adds to this experience with additional enemies, bosses, and a punishment mechanic for dying. The maximum number of trophies declines with each death.
Each player takes a turn to play a card face down, keeping their move a secret until all players simultaneously reveal their played card. The cards can determine a wide range of effects but primarily focus on causing harm to the monsters you face. Some effects can affect other players, but they are far fewer than other cards. So at face value, it is a mostly cooperative experience - only ceasing cooperation in endgame scoring.
After defeating the small deck of randomly picked monsters, you face the boss. The boss' effects have been empowering foes or depowering the players throughout the game. Upon defeating the boss, calculate the final scores from totalling the accumulated blood echoes, and the three types of trophies acquired by players. The trophies themselves are determined by the monster’s card, and often possess more than one trophy type.
Players find themselves missing out on trophies when they choose to return to ‘The Hunter’s Dream’. Here they recover their life, store their blood echoes in their bank, and gain a new card that they can add to their size limited deck.
When you’ve played all your weapon and item cards, you have no choice but to return to the Hunter’s Dream. The benefits of healing and protecting your points are too important to pass up - creating a high risk, high reward gameplay. It's similar to the video game’s ‘rally’ mechanic. Death in this game means you lose all your unbanked blood echoes and enter ‘The Hunter’s Dream’. You also lose the chance to gain trophies, should the monster die that round.
With light elements of deck building and competitive yet cooperative combat, Bloodborne: The Card Game manages to capture a rapid pace while battling your way through a randomly ordered deck of monsters. However, this only lightly touches upon the exploration elements of its video game counterpart.
The next, and much larger tabletop experience from CMoN, is the board game. Originally a Kickstarter campaign, the board game is a massive collection. Starting with a fairly substantial starter box, there is also a variety of expansion packs of different sizes based on locations within the video game.
The aim of this game is quite different from the card game but follows a similar train of thought. While you still use cards to declare attacks, the character you choose determines your 'trick weapons'.
This game focuses more on story and exploration, set to a deadly timer as the moon shifts through its phases. When considering its exploration, it loosely resembles the card game's shuffling of monsters.
Combat still functions as a simultaneous reveal, albeit with the enemy action deck this time. It has similar deck building elements to its card game predecessor. Bosses function significantly differently, and can even include situations that resemble mini-bosses, invaders, or hostile NPCs, much like the video game. Often your story’s goal isn’t exactly to defeat a boss, but, usually, they are the obstacle blocking your ultimate goal.
A campaign deck of ordered mission cards gives you goals, instructions, and set-up scenarios.
As you progress through multiple stages of each adventure, the board undergoes changes that require players to continually reposition miniatures and tokens.
Interestingly, the stories of each campaign aren’t directly taken from the video game - no doubt due to the original’s loose breadcrumb narrative. This proves to be a great choice from the designers. It keeps the game fresh but familiar for those who have already played Bloodborne while allowing newcomers to pick up the video game after playing.
The miniatures for this game are delightfully accurate to the video game’s characters. It even includes some who don’t always serve a mechanical purpose. This could be a boon for collectors, but a bit of additional clutter for gamers.
Since the game uses map tiles, miniatures, tokens, player boards, and multiple decks, it is an absolute table eater. It constantly spreads and adds new boards as the players enter new spaces and reveal more cards from the scene deck.
My biggest gripe with the game is a lack of clarity on some of the keywords, which are also missing from the glossary section. For example, a quick search online shows players struggling to grasp what ‘Insight’ is on their first time playing. The very first hunt mission requires you to gain 2 Insight. Despite this, ‘Insight’ is not explained anywhere in the instructions booklet.
(It's actually the number of insight missions you complete that the chapter card triggers.)
Not to mention, later on, you use a separate set of ‘Insight’ tokens as counters for mission cards. Perhaps using a different name for the two mechanics would have worked better. But, once you get over that hurdle, there are only minor wording issues of abilities that can cause a temporary halt to your game night.
Conclusion - How do the three compare?
Compared to the video game, the two options for a tabletop experience are faintly similar, but different entities. The card game almost feels like a demo version of the board game at times.
If you’re looking to choose which one best fits your gaming group, they’re quite easy to divvy up and don’t take away from experiencing the video game at all.
The card game is a rapid-paced, and often hour-long, battle game. It absolutely serves as a game for fans of the video game as it expects you to already be familiar with the concepts of the original.
The board game is a much larger and more detailed experience. It's filled with plenty of elements that will excite fans of the video game and keeps newcomers involved, introducing them to new objectives as they arrive on the board.
Each scenario is three chapters. The length of a session depends on how much of one scenario you play. A chapter usually takes around an hour, with a whole campaign lasting upwards of three to four hours.
Due to the cooperative nature of the games, they both mostly lack the PvP mechanics of the original video game. While the card game has a hint of PvP, it's still a co-op game. The board game only features non-player invaders, with no PvP outside of house-ruling it.
Still, nothing quite beats the video game. Bloodborne is a fantastic piece of artistry. It continues FromSoftware’s trend of solid gameplay with plenty of player agency. It has great replay value and feels like a complete experience. The DLC, or game of the year edition, merely expanded upon what was already a complete work.
While you could argue the video game is still the most superior of the three, as an individual product, the card game and the board game both are fun gaming experiences that do a good job of reflecting their digital origins. They shouldn’t be passed over lightly. Especially if you like painting minis.