Intro:
I've been a souls fan since Demon's Souls, having backed the Dark Souls Board Game and played it extensively despite its numerous shortcomings. With CMON helming Bloodborne, and the first bits shown of it looking like a far more fleshed out game than its steamforged brother, it was a no brainer that I go all in backing this game.
Having now received it, painted it, and dove into at least 10 campaigns, around 9 of which saw the final boss falling at the end of it, I can safely say this is my favorite co-op board game. However that is not to say there aren't small quirks, as well as some truly baffling and embarrassingly poor elements that stick out like a sore thumb that I can't turn a blind eye to even if they weren't dealbreakers for me- This review will be a sectioned look at all that, with a summary at the end if you want to skip to that.
Gameplay:
This is going to be a fairly quick summary, boiling things down to their essence for those totally unfamiliar with the game, feel free to skip ahead if that isn't you.
The game is played with 1-4 players, each choosing a unique hunter, boasting a double sided trick weapon card featuring up to three different attacks as well as an ability on each side. Players use a deck of 12 cards to perform every action in the game, be it moving, attacking, or interacting. This deck of cards can be upgraded over the course of the campaign, primarily by killing enemies over the three standard chapters of a campaign.
While the overall themes and gameplay of chapters vary wildly, they boil down to trying to complete the Hunt Objective, which is nearly always advanced by completing insight missions, which will be revealed upon finding certain tiles as you explore Yarnham, revealing tiles from a shuffled deck of tiles in a "Betrayal at house on the hill" type manner- With the needed tiles being somewhere in the deck in addition to a limited number of random ones.
As rounds pass and players die or dream, the "Hunt Track" ticks up, reseting all enemies every 4th tick, which also resets bosses HP as well as certain mini boss type enemies spawned by the campaign. When the final spot on the track is reached you have that one round to complete the hunt. Fail and the campaign is over and you'll have to tackle it again from scratch.
Should you reach the end of the campaign, the final hunt mission is always a showdown with a boss, each which has two phases and unique attack decks- Bring them down and all thats left is to read the conclusion!
Contents/Value:
The base game comes packed with 4 hunters, 4 campaigns and their respective bosses, and 7 different enemies each which has 4 figures. 386
For the price and considering the quality of the figures this is quite good bang for your buck, especially since each campaign has replay value and the average campaign seems to take 6 or so hours, meaning you are looking at about 24 hours of unique play experience. However, the one glaring shortcoming is that there are only 4 hunters to play with, meaning in a four player game there will be no team composition variety, and your choices are very narrow.
Thus in terms of content and improving play quality the Blood Moon Box which adds a whopping 6 hunters and the Chalice Dungeon Expansion which adds 4, with both adding a slew of enemies you can include in certain campaigns, and the entire chalice dungeon game mode, I would recommend them even to first time players unless you are more focused on campaigns over everything else in which case the Forbidden Woods and Cainhurst offer two full campaigns plus one mini chapter each, as well as much welcome new tile sets.
Then that just leaves the small box expansions which offer a single boss, two unique enemies, a jumbo sized tile, and a campaign which utilizes all of them. While I have enjoyed the majority of these, they objectively offer far less content than any of the other expansions by a fair margin and they aren't worth grabbing if you aren't a huge Bloodborne fan or already totally sold on the game.
Addressing the Hunt Track:
I wanted to dedicate a distinct section to this since there is so much controversy over it, and it seems to be a dealbreaker for some. The gut reaction a lot of people have is that the hunt track feels off, with high player count games feeling limited on how often you can dream. In addition, fighting a boss that resets its HP can feel like a flavor fail, which if it sequences into a loss ultimately, can feel bad.
My playgroups first game was 4 players, and we felt very similarly to that general consensus. However to anyone in the same boat I strongly recommend playing another campaign. A first playthrough is naturally going to have more deaths from mistakes/inexperience, people dreaming excessively, as well as simply missing rules. 884