Level 99 | Dead By Daylight | Board Game | Ages 17+ | 3-5 Players | 45 Minutes Playing Time

Product Information

Each survivor has a unique ability to help them survive, with a recommended loadout printed on each player board. As in the video game, players can fully customise their characters’ perks using tokens in an advanced version of the rules. We wanted to make a game that you could break out at a Halloween party, play for an hour and then go on with your festivities. We had originally planned a few more [maps],” Talton revealed. “But ultimately we felt like it was better to do a smaller number of maps that players can be familiar with. Because the killers and the survivors you choose are where most of the variety in the game comes from.”

With this game, we felt that the real target audience is going to be people who are people who are into the video game, sharing this game with maybe people who are not necessarily into the video game - people who are coming at it either from outside of the video game or outside of board games entirely. Managing secret information is really tough. And this is a very fast-paced game, where you expect to reveal and to hide, many, many times. What we discovered through many tests is that these moments of revealing your position and hiding your position were the key moments of the game. And we wanted to be doing that every single turn. We didn't want to have two or three turns where the killer just gropes around in the dark looking for you, or where you just search blindly for a generator in a labyrinth you don't understand. There are a lot of genres that I want to do. But we're not alone in the video games-to-board games world anymore. There's some genres that are still really unrepresented, though. We only have like two, maybe three games that try to capture the first-person shooter genre. I feel like everybody has just said, "Oh, this is a video game, there's no way that we can bring that to the tabletop." And they've given up on it. Putting that aside, Dead By Daylight is one of the best licenced board games on the market. Although it is flawed – around the player count and people losing their turns – it translates the video game exceptionally well. I want to make sure that we're not falling into that trap at Level 99 Games. That we're delivering a great game first, and then taking all and only the pieces we need to support that great gameplay, not chasing after a bunch of small expansions or a bunch of extra modes just so we can have a giant-looking list of features.For any other publisher, this wouldn’t be worth a mention. Coming from Level 99 Games though, it’s a surprise. As most of their board games are bright, colourful, and full of details. As far as doing an expansion, of course, nothing is set yet. We need to complete this project first. But through this all we've developed a really good working relationship with [Dead by Daylight developer] Behaviour. And with the success of the game, it would be a pretty obvious move to continue to create content.” When we spoke previously about the Dead by Daylight board game, you mentioned that there was inspiration drawn from Scotland Yard. ( The classic hidden-movement board game.) And then also Battleship, which I was surprised to hear… Dead by Daylight is an asymmetrical horror game where four Survivors have to try and escape a terrifying realm of horror, while being pursued by one menacing Killer. The game is a love letter to the horror genre, with characters from Saw, Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil 2, Scream, and other horror classics showing up on the roster, alongside an original cast of characters. On Tuesday, developer Level 99 announced Dead by Daylight: The Board Game. The pitch I gave to Behaviour was was 'cooperative murder Battleship'. Then they said, "Oh, that sounds interesting." We actually had a lot of versions of the game that were very intertwined with hidden information. We had a central board and the players would have screens, and behind the board there was secret information. The killer actually had a map of the whole labyrinth that was randomised behind their screen, so they knew where all the props were and such. We had all of those tools. In the end, we scrapped a lot of that.

This system should be familiar to anyone who’s played BattleCon, a board game from the same designer. As that similarly has the same simple this-beats-that mechanism at its core. However, both games layer so much additional information on top of this simple decision, that it becomes not so simple. Ultimately, we took all of those secrets, all those screens, out of the game and instead used just the movement system to obscure your position. When you make a move, you don't know where the killer is going to go, and they don't know where you're gonna go. And before anybody can interact with each other, everybody has moved. You're always one turn behind the other side in terms of understanding what they're trying to do. That was really all the hidden information we needed. Unlike the video game, the survivors win or lose together,” Talton said. “We experimented with that a lot - about giving them separate win-loss conditions. But for various reasons, we decided that it had to be a shared victory for the survivors. Because with the video game, you have a lot of meta conditions even when you die as a survivor. You have a lot of incentives; you can make progress in the archives, you can make progress in your own personal daily routine, you get a lot of blood points. There's a lot of flavours of victory in the video game. In the board game, you win or you lose.” Dead by Daylight: The Board Game follows the one-versus-many format of the video game. Two to four people control survivors - seven characters from the video game are included in the base game, with 17 in the expanded Collector’s Edition - while one player takes on the role of the killer chasing them. No solo or full cooperative mode will be included, Level 99 told Dicebreaker.Therefore, having three or four players is the perfect player count. At three, players get two survivors each, allowing them to still play while one is hooked. And at four, the unassigned survivor can be controlled by a sacrificed player. So in a two-player game, one person pilots all four different survivors at once. As you can imagine, this is as overwhelming as trying to drive all four screens in multiplayer Mario Kart. We are really excited about the new characters, and especially the new original killer [Carmina Mora, The Artist] that's been released since then,” the designer said. “There's a ton of cool content coming out for Dead by Daylight. It's not something you want to do; it feels bad, and it's bad for the team,” Talton said. “So you definitely want to dodge the killer where you can.” Developer Behaviour Interactive has partnered with Level 99 Games, acclaimed publisher of video game-inspired board and card games, to create a board game based on the hit multiplayer horror.

Meanwhile, whenever someone is sacrificed in a five-player game, their turn is missed while they’re on the hook. Then when they return, they’re wounded and still an easy target to be re-sacrificed and sidelined from the game again. Now, being the Level 99 Games sycophant I am, I got the collector’s edition. That comes with 17 survivors, 16 killers, and 4 maps. That’s just an absurd amount of variety. Behind Dead by Daylight’s tabletop adaptation is Level 99 Games, the publisher known for its board games heavily inspired by classic video games, including fighting game series Exceed, retro-flavoured Pixel Tactics and fast-paced puzzle game Bullet.Level 99 confirmed to Dicebreaker that no licensed characters will make an appearance in the board game; the video game has seen the inclusion of figures from movies such as Halloween’s Michael Myers and A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Kreuger, as well as video games in the form of Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head and Resident Evil’s Jill, Claire, Leon and Chris. We were actually thinking that we would try and launch last October for this October. That was our original plan. But we decided we wanted to launch with the game in hand; rather than the game being design-complete, we wanted it to be product-complete. And so that's why we pushed forward to April.

The board game will feature a miniature figurine of all non-licensed killers and survivors from the original game. (Image: Level 99 Games LLC) Survivors take their turns before the killer, so the killer will need to carefully plan out each move to get closer to victory, achieved through hooking enough survivors before the generators are completed. Sound familiar? That was too good to pass up! The generators are the same way. The pistons slot into them to show your progress towards completing the generator. So we have a little bit of toy factor in the game, just enough to give it that classic board game feel - just enough that it feels like a game you could dig out of the attic. They take turns revealing their selection and performing the movement. Available movements include sprint, crouch, sneak, and vault. Each of these aligns with the different connecting lines on the map. For example, moving your character along a yellow line requires you to play your Vault card.

Staples of the game will be included, from items, perks and props, to the Killers and Survivors themselves. The board game adaptation of the popular multiplayer survival-horror video game, in which one player’s killer stalks the others’ survivors as they attempt to restart a series of generators and escape, is in the works from Level 99 Games. The tabletop publisher has previously brought indie video game Shovel Knight and arcade fighter Street Fighter to its card fighting series Exceed. Players will be able to play as familiar faces; all original survivors and killers from Dead by Daylight prior to the release of The Artist will be available as minis. Unfortunately, licensed characters will not be available as playable characters, nor will their perks appear in the game. The video game itself is fully multiplayer - there's not a single-player mode or even a mode against AI - and you’ve adapted that directly as a one-versus-many board game. We've seen a number of board games recently go from either one-versus-many or another competitive format to fully cooperative, either through physical mechanics or something like a companion app…