A big announcement made by Guillotine Games and CoolMiniOrNot recently was Massive Darkness, a new dungeon-crawl-style board game. Well, here at the CMON Expo, we got a whole panel on what people can expect from this new, and exciting, game.
We’re here with Thiago Aranha (CMON Lead Producer) and David Preti (Guillotine Games).
The game is a modern-style Dungeon Crawl game. It will have all the popular fantasy tropes in terms of monsters. Goblins, Demons, Spiders, Kobolds, and on and on. There is a massive drive toward coming out with lots of different monsters. That will increase the replayability of the game, as each time you can play through with different monsters that you will fight. You can tailor-make your game to what you want to fight. There is no “GM-Player” required. It’s entirely cooperative. During the course of the game, your character will progress not only during the game, but also during the entire campaign system.
Monsters are spawned when you encounter new rooms. Also, there are event cards that can also create wandering monsters. Monsters generally move 2x and then they will make an attack (if they have something to attack).
As you would expect from a Guillotine Games/CMON product, you can expect plenty of awesomely-sculpted miniatures. You can get a bit of a look at them here.
Heroes each come with a unique special skill. From there you add in a Class Skill. You can match heroes with any class you want. While there might be a particular class that a character might favor, that doesn’t actually limit you. So again, replayability comes from switching heroes with classes in almost limitless ways. Classes combine skills with unique signature moves. As you play further into the campaign, your skill tree also grows, giving you branching options for how you want your character to progress.
But it’s not just skills you’ll amass as you kill off enemies. You also get loot! There’s weapons of all types: melee, ranged, consumable, and even magic items. Didn’t get exactly what you want? Or maybe an old weapon isn’t doing what you need it to anymore? You’ll be able to transmute them into more powerful ones.
Monsters come in the form of bosses leading masses of minions. There’s also enemy agents who can call in reinforcements. Maybe you’ll run across a random wandering monster as well! Guardians will carry powerful pieces of treasure, and they know how to use ’em! Thankfully, fighting against them, abilities and equipment stack together. Both the attacks and defense part of an attack is done with a single die roll. There are different attack and defense dice that you will roll together. Add up your attack totals vs. the defense totals and see what happens. There’s a limit of 12 dice for a die roll, since there are 3 of each type of 4 dice (2 attack, 2 defense) Special enhancements on items or characters are triggered by rolling certain symbols on the dice.
The game board creates a dynamic world. There’s Shadow Areas on tiles that the heroes can use to their advantage. Heroes can use those spots as mid-game “hiding spots.” They can hide from wandering patrols. They can avoid certain attacks. They can even use those spots as launching-off points for their own surprise attacks. Like with Zombicide before it, just charging in headlong into the enemies will result in you more-than-likely losing the game and your characters dying (though there are a couple resurrection methods). This brings a deep tactical, and cooperative portion for the game. You must work together.
The molds for the miniatures are already in production. As such, there’s a real push to getting the game out and on time in a quick fashion.
They have a brand-new, prototype version of the game here. I snapped a few photos. I hope you enjoy.
There’s a lot of really cool things in store for this game. Stay tuned for more previews and info as we get closer to the Kickstarter launch date.
Final preview tidbit: They’re working on Zombicide: Black Plague Season 2. But they are not currently working on regular Zombicide Season 4.
Also, the Blood Rage team (Adrian Smith, Eric Lang, Mike McVey, and crew) are working on a new game. It’s not related to Blood Rage, but is a “spiritual successor.”