I’ve heard a lot about Deep Rock Galactic, and we’ve certainly covered it here at B3 — but I’d never played it myself. Dwarves, beer, mining etc — I felt I’d seen and done it all before. But on the tabletop things hit differently. Creating pace, jeopardy and interest bring their own challenges — and with the passionate new studio Mood Publishing at the helm, I suddenly found my interest on the rise.
Deep Rock Galactic is probably best described as a dungeon crawler. All of the missions that I’ve seen involve some combination of dropping up to four dwarves (with unique classes and skills) into a cave and having them fight through enemies whilst also handling at least one primary objective — for example to collect a certain number of gems, or to defeat a particular big bad guy.
Whilst most dungeon crawlers have common ideas — like enemies that slow you down and lots of collectibles — the best also have something completely unique that makes them interesting. You can read about some of the best of these features in our Dungeon Crawler long read here, but for Deep Rock Galactic, the cave itself is a key feature, as are the weapons that the dwarves equip and the four (arguably five) kinds of damage they do.
Simply put, each of the four dwarves belongs to a specific class that comes with its own ability. The Driller can smash through any wall or stalagmite without spending an action, whilst the Engineer can add platforms to the board to bridge gaps in the terrain so that the dwarves can progress. The scout has a grappling hook for the same purpose.
Each class can choose from one of two primary weapons, each of which will do a specific kind of damage (denoted by dice of a set colour.) There is fire damage, explosive damage, bullet damage and so on, as well as melee damage which is basically symbolised by a pickaxe that is also used as success when mining for ores.
Every dwarf will also have a secondary weapon which comes from a wider and non-class-specific pool, and the game recommends that this weapon is chosen specifically to have a different damage type to the primary weapon. So for example, it makes sense to have one weapon that does dire damage and one that does explosive damage…. But why?
Well, that’s where Deep Rock Galactic gets more interesting as you progress further into it. Damage type doesn’t really matter in the first mission or two whilst you’re only facing the basic grunt enemies, but as you progress, larger enemies begin to appear and these come with resistances. This simply means that some enemies will soak up one or more hits from damage of a certain type.
Another interesting wrinkle is that of ammo — which is rarely used in board games. Each primary weapon has five shots, whilst the secondary only comes with three. Secondary weapons can be upgraded later in the game, but this means you’ll have eight shots unless something resupplies you — like a supply drop, which can be summoned in return for some of the precious in-game material that you’ve collected.
Mining is a key part of the Deep Rock Galactic video game, and so it is in tabletop form as well. In this case, Mood Publishing has made a fun mini game of this, with stalagmites needing to be broken open using the mining die (generally successful) and then a second die revealing what you’ve found within. Gold is perhaps the best as it is somewhat wild, but you may even be unlucky enough to crack open a rock and find nothing within.
Other precious minerals, metals and items are placed around the edges of the caves, or on floor spaces within. Deep Rock Galactic makes it fairly easy to collect these, and whilst the seeding of key quest items is often (almost always) randomised, most of it (minerals specifically) is known information — this means that so far, at least, I haven’t found a mission where I am frustrated by having to stab around at rocks for random items that I don’t know the location of.
Enemies are also fun to play with, over and above the resistance mechanic. Larger enemies have a facing and if flanked, lose their resistance (which is easy to implement and quite clever) whilst almost all have a relatively easy to remember special attack or feature. Deep Rock Galactic definitely comes to life in later missions with larger foes, and a randomly seeded event deck can introduce fun and amusing new threats — which again will be known to you during mission setup.
In terms of components, we received the deluxe version of Deep Rock Galactic, which simply means that we have a load of miniatures for every creature, the BOSKO robot (used in solo play) and the supply drop. Some of these are replaced by tokens or standees in the basic version, although I can’t tell you offhand which ones. I’d go with whatever you can afford or prefer here — I like the miniatures and for this kind of game (and dungeon crawler really) it can be seen as a fairly important part of the experience.
In any version of the game, the dual layer player boards are really nice, as are the chunky weapon cards and ammo tokens that slot into them. Card art is good, although the Rock and Stone cards oddly dedicate their space to a large piece of repetitive artwork and then a tiny bit of print to explain what they do (one reroll, or similar) and I thought this was a bit weird.
I don’t think that Deep Rock Galactic is going to be considered classic or legendary by anyone given that competition in this space is fierce, but it is definitely, without doubt, great fun. You can pick up and play Deep Rock Galactic pretty quickly, and with logical rules and clear mechanical progression from one mission to the next, it just flows very easily. Fans of the video game will clearly get more value from it over and above this, and just to reiterate — I’ve never played the video game before so this review is unbiased from that perspective.
You can check out Deep Rock Galactic on Kickstarter.
Love both video games and board games? Here’s our list of some fantastic crossover games.
