You Can No Longer Die – A Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game Review

_{“Aren’t you the headless fellow that’s been getting around?“}

Trying to model a Metroidvania platformer on the tabletop is a pointless endeavor. That’s why this quintet of designers didn’t attempt it. Instead of adapting Dead Cells the brutal twitch action game, they adapted Dead Cells the content-heavy roguelite progression game. The experience presented is one of momentum. Not from bounding through topsy-turvy levels with a maniacal cadre of lackeys trying to gut you, but from a near endless supply of upgrades, rule twists, and mysterious endowments.

At its best, Dead Cells the Board Game is offering you a gift, one wrapped in a shroud of noxious gas.

The structure of play is anomalous. Each participant takes on the role of a beheaded – those muscular humanoids with wispy heads and badass powers. Beheaded possess their own unique abilities that are upgraded during the game, as well as a personal deck of cards reflecting a specific playstyle. Your own beheaded doesn’t have a miniature or any form of individual representation on the board, instead, there’s a party marker to represent the entire group.

This is strange. At least from the perspective of someone who’s played Dead Cells the video game.

That’s one of the first things people ask when you present this cardboard adaptation, “is it cooperative?” The question lingers because the electronic version is a single player affair and nothing more.

So, you’re this party of headless non-horsemen, moving throughout a biome and encountering…stuff. Let’s first talk about these biomes. They are self-contained levels with their own encapsulated content. Each possesses unique enemy decks, items, and challenges. Part of the roguelike nature of the game is the way spheres of content are combined to produce a linear one-off composition. It’s not just the combination of biomes that alters this experience, but the variance within each level as well.

The party moves along a one-way track, sometimes deciding between two branching paths. The nodes encountered along the way are a mix of bennies and baddies. The former offers treasure and character improvements, while the latter shoves you into a combat challenge which forms much of the tactical meat of the experience. Sometimes there are other oddities and unknowns, all presented as facedown tokens you flip when arriving at their destination.

This feels like you’re navigating a cardboard version of the world travel in Super Mario Brothers 3 or Final Fantasy Tactics. It’s somewhat slight, with little action to the process and few actual rules. Because of this, you can assimilate a newcomer into the group quite readily, delaying the bulk of concepts until combat occurs.

The flow here, while simple, is actually enchanting. It’s a continual stream of both new doodads and interesting twists. The pace of play is near perfect, a sensation that is echoed on both the macro and micro levels. The only time tempo even scantly slows is when combat occurs.

Here the game grows a little craggy. It seems as though it wants to zoom in to a more detailed fight scene and crystallize the action into something shapelier and more formidable than the straightforward biome movement, but the resulting system is far more abstract than expected. Another rectangular board is utilized, occupying the same footprint as the biome map. It holds enemies, captures relative distance, and tracks initiative for activation order. The flipped encounter token tells how many foes to draw from the level’s enemy deck.

Shambling through the gap in the crumbling prison wall is a bulbous figure. Its gait an uneven waddle that belies its menacing features.

You step back, preparing to thrust through the creature and end its existence.

Before your aggression is actualized, the shape of another pulsates in the fuzzy margin of your vision. And before you understand what has happened, an arrow has pierced your symmetry and darkness follows.

Body desecrated!

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