If a board game version of Deep Rock Galactic's dwarf mining and spider-killing sounds fun, good news: Developer Ghost Ship is launching a Kickstarter campaign sometime in 2022 to make it a reality. They've even published a blog showing off what early versions of the board game look like and how it translates the co-op experience to the tabletop.
Deep Rock Galactic: The Board Game is being designed by Ole Steiness, creator of Champions of Midgard, which sits at 92 in BoardGameGeek's top 100 strategy games list. Though the DRG board game went through plenty of prototyping, Ghost Ship knew it wanted to make it a 1-4 player co-op dungeon crawler, just like the videogame.
The final version of the game will have a team of players moving through a hex grid made of solid rock, and choosing where you dig will impact future combat encounters. Rather than a long multi-stage campaign, the board game version will have players work through a one to two-hour missions that can be affected by random event cards, different mission types, the flexible layout, and in-mission progression. It seems that the final version of the board game will focus a little more on combat with underground creatures than exploration compared to the videogame.
One humorous addition is the "Rock and Stone" cards, which function as a way to encourage player cooperation. Players will literally say/shout out character phrases (like "rock on" or "look what I've found") which give the rest of the team certain boosts or abilities, like a special ranged attack, or scrying your supply cards.
Of course, it's not a strategy board game Kickstarter without mini figures of creatures and characters, though they haven't shown those just yet. Note that the figures in the pictures are placeholders collected from other games or elsewhere.
Ghost Ship CEO Søren Lundgaard says he doesn't have a good answer for when the board game Kickstarter will launch or when the game itself will be available.
You can check out the Deep Rock Galactic board game pre-Kickstarter page here. Ghost Ship is giving away one copy to a lucky winner on the signup list.
