If you like co-operative tabletop games, Darkest Night will be a fantastic addition to your collection. And the $7 price tag for the TTS version blows away the $140 or so the physical copy would cost, especially if you're like me and have nobody to play with in person.

You play a medieval RPG party on a quest to save the land from the forces of evil headed by The Necromancer. There are 13 heroes in the TTS version: 9 base + 4 from the first expansion, maybe they'll add the second expansion later but don't count on it. Of these, you take four, and split them between the number of players - this maintains game balance, as there's always the same number of heroes, and the same number of resources available to the players. With these heroes, you will venture forth into the conquered lands and fight a guerilla war.

The game does a fantastic job of maintaining the atmosphere: you have no hope of winning conventionally, almost everywhere has been overrun, it's only a matter of time until you lose, and you must remain hidden or the Necromancer will come after you to stomp out the final resistance against him. This last part is done with "Secrecy", a character stat that represents how well you're hidden, and increases as you move and hide and decreases when you expose yourself by attacking things or are detected by scouting enemies.

Your goal is to find enough keys to obtain three holy relics and return them to the monastery to perform a ritual to cleanse the land of the Necromancer's presence. But, in a fantastic design choice, you can also just pick up one relic and go defeat the necromancer in combat for a more direct solution - though this will only work with a party that has good fighting skill and pools their efforts together to fight the necromancer. The only way to lose is for the Necromancer to overrun the Monastery (the last safe place in the land). Even if a character dies, you can keep playing; it's a setback, not an elimination from the game.

It's a fantastic co-op game, and you can even play it solo if you are so inclined. It does the Disaster Management style of gameplay very well, and it's well-balanced so that most games will come down to the wire. It uses a very strong bell curving system where you roll some numbers of dice and if ANY of them is high enough, you succeed, working very heavily in the player's favor (as long as you don't have my Contagious Bad Luck). And the expansion adds new content without any major mechanics changes, so you can pick it up and add it in on your first game with almost no added complexity. It has tons of replay value too: the different hero combinations, the different starting board states, and the fact that each hero has 4 potential starting abilities, but you only get to start with 3 of those.

If you like co-operative tabletop games, Darkest Night will be a fantastic addition to your collection. And the $7 price tag for the TTS version blows away the $140 or so the physical copy would cost, especially if you're like me and have nobody to play with in person. You play a medieval RPG party on a quest to save the land from the forces of evil headed by The Necromancer. There are 13 heroes in the TTS version: 9 base + 4 from the first expansion, maybe they'll add the second expansion later but don't count on it. Of these, you take four, and split them between the number of players - this maintains game balance, as there's always the same number of heroes, and the same number of resources available to the players. With these heroes, you will venture forth into the conquered lands and fight a guerilla war. The game does a fantastic job of maintaining the atmosphere: you have no hope of winning conventionally, almost everywhere has been overrun, it's only a matter of time until you lose, and you must remain hidden or the Necromancer will come after you to stomp out the final resistance against him. This last part is done with "Secrecy", a character stat that represents how well you're hidden, and increases as you move and hide and decreases when you expose yourself by attacking things or are detected by scouting enemies. Your goal is to find enough keys to obtain three holy relics and return them to the monastery to perform a ritual to cleanse the land of the Necromancer's presence. But, in a fantastic design choice, you can also just pick up one relic and go defeat the necromancer in combat for a more direct solution - though this will only work with a party that has good fighting skill and pools their efforts together to fight the necromancer. The only way to lose is for the Necromancer to overrun the Monastery (the last safe place in the land). Even if a character dies, you can keep playing; it's a setback, not an elimination from the game. It's a fantastic co-op game, and you can even play it solo if you are so inclined. It does the Disaster Management style of gameplay very well, and it's well-balanced so that most games will come down to the wire. It uses a very strong bell curving system where you roll some numbers of dice and if ANY of them is high enough, you succeed, working very heavily in the player's favor (as long as you don't have my Contagious Bad Luck). And the expansion adds new content without any major mechanics changes, so you can pick it up and add it in on your first game with almost no added complexity. It has tons of replay value too: the different hero combinations, the different starting board states, and the fact that each hero has 4 potential starting abilities, but you only get to start with 3 of those.