Dark Gothic Unboxing

We visited Sci Fi City while we are here in Orlando. We almost missed it because they had moved across to the other side of the shopping estate sometime in 2013 and when we arrived we thought they had closed down. Luckily I spotted their sign on the other side of the car park.

We bought a bunch of stuff, one item of which was Dark Gothic, a card game from Flying Frog, and based on their earlier game A Touch of Evil (the Spooky Hollow game). This is a deck-building card game using all the same illustrations, which is nice.

A deck-building game is a little like Magic or Netrunner, but the difference is that while in Magic you build your deck before the game, In a deck-building game you build your deck during the game. Each player starts with a small deck of mediocre cards. As you play the game you get better cards and add them to your deck, and remove the bad ones. The idea is that you refine your deck so that you are drawing only good cards as you play the later stages of the game. This type of game was only invented in 2008, the first being Dominion, and there have been many, many games using this principle since then.

The box contains the cards, rulebook and a special die. There is a lot of extra space, which I would guess is for future expansions.

The goal of the game is to defeat the villain, e.g. the headless horseman or the werewolf, and all the players are working towards this target, but once the villain is defeated then the winner is the player with the most investigation points. This basic game is therefore semi-cooperative, but they also have a fully cooperative version, where the players are racing to defeat the villain before the shadows fill up. Gab will be pleased about this.

Here is closer look at the contents. There are hero cards, villain cards, and masses of regular cards for the decks.

Here is closer look at the contents. There are hero cards, villain cards, and masses of game cards for the deck-building.

In Dark Gothic you play one of the heroes from A Touch of Evil, such as Isabella Von Took the noblewoman, Karl Harrison the soldier, or Katarina Clark the outlaw. Each has a special ability so they play differently and you will need to use different kinds of cards as you build your decks during the game.

The characters are the same as in the original boardgame. I painted all the boardgame figures, but they can’t really be used here in the card game. Maybe as lucky mascots?

The villains are also from the boardgame, so you have the Headless Horseman, Vampire, Werewolf, Creature from the Black Lagoon, etc.