The Dark Souls board game is a ruthlessly hard exploration miniatures game for 1-4 players. Be ready to die.

The game has a "fast set-up, long reveal" mechanism that gets you into the game fast and builds the location as you explore. The sense of danger is palpable as you find new locations and the monsters that inhabit these dark places. The core combat mechanism and enemy behavior system creates deep strategic play and clever management of stamina to survive.

To win the game, players must work together tactically to discover how to defeat enemies before finally confronting the boss. Players will find certain attack patterns and weaknesses of the enemies, but they will have to be careful. If a player's character dies, the game does not end, however starting over comes at a cost. Each time a character dies in combat, the whole party needs to return to the bonfire, and all enemies reset. Use your resources carefully, learn quickly, and prepare to die.

Dark Souls has numerous boss and mini-boss encounters — including one against the Dragon Slayer Ornstein and Executioner Smough — and uses an innovative behavior mechanism so that no two encounters are the same, thus giving the game near infinite replayability.