It's very hard, for example, to see the stress tracker on the hero boards, and a lot of the very nice art is just plain hard to see. My biggest complaint isn't even a gameplay one - it's just that the printing is generally quite dark. It took me a bit to get used to, but I do like how everything in the game is very accurate - both heroes and monsters will be landing their hits much more than otherwise, and the oh-shit moments come from crits, while the relief when a monster misses (or the agony when a hero does) is that much more profound because it doesn't happen all that often. The combat is simple and quick, but does have tactics, and the abstract positioning is both interesting and important.

Exploration is brutal and really quite harrowing, for all that it's so abstract. It certainly felt like Darkest Dungeon, in that the moment-to-moment gameplay isn't particularly challenging, but little bits of bad news (damage, stress, quirks, diseases, all that good stuff) pile up faster than you can really deal with them, and eventually you find yourself looking at a dark corridor with no supplies and a bunch of wounds and stress on your heroes and decide to just end the quest early after all. It actually is pretty simple in play once you get things down! There's an awful lot of little cardboard chits, but each one is a pretty simple binary on-or-off effect, and even controlling 4 heroes solo didn't feel overly mentally taxing.

I got my copy earlier this week, and decided to use my last day of Covid-19 quarantine today (whoo!) to give it a whirl.

Darkest dungeon board game ship date