It was the same thing with the two-player mode - with one player controlling all the survivors and one player controlling the killer, we weren't generating a consistently good experience. We said, "Well, let's just cut it, and we'll make three the minimum player count." It's not as trendy to have those player counts. But what we guarantee is that when you pull this game out with the right player count, you will have the experience that we intended in design, and you will have a good experience 99% of the time. That consistency was more important to us than having a big feature list.

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. Staples of the game will be included, from items, perks and props, to the Killers and Survivors themselves.

Dead by Daylight Board Game - Kickstarter

Level 99 have managed to perfectly adapt the Dead by Daylight experience to a board game: the Killers VS Survivors asymmetrical gameplay, the unexpected surprises, the game loops, everything is there. And with almost all original characters present, all the different perks there's a lot to discover and love in this," said Mathieu Côté, game director of Dead by Daylight. 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. I don't know why we don't have more battle royale games in the tabletop space, why we haven't done that. Because it doesn't seem like such a hard genre to dig into. So yeah, so we're definitely looking at how we could capture the feel of some of those, and they might show up on a future announcement.

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. 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.

🍪 Privacy & Transparency

In our first play, we used Legion as the killer and the survivors ran rings around them. However, in the very next game, we changed the killer to the Doctor. Then it was the survivors who didn’t stand a chance. Up to a few years ago, it felt like Level 99 was mostly known for its card games. Is the scope of Dead by Daylight something that you're looking at from now on in terms of miniatures and really blowing the scale of these games out a bit? 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. 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.” Dicebreaker is owned by Gamer Network Limited, a ReedPop company and subsidiary of Reed Exhibitions Limited.

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. 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. Dead by Daylight is a big game, but it's not a complex game. Every part in the game is very specific, in its uses; it's used in just about every playthrough. So, in my mind, the game is much simpler than a big modern big-box board game. At least in terms of what we'd call intellectual components; the ideas behind it and the categories of things are quite straightforward. Fewer moving parts is always a good idea.Did you run into any particular hurdles in translating Dead by Daylight from digital to physical in terms of keeping the overall feel of either specific killers and survivors, or the wider balance of how they might work in terms of a board game? 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.”