Expect the Unexpected – Unlock #7
The Kickstarter campaign for Don’t Starve: The Board Game goes live in less than two weeks, on September 30, and we need you to be a part of it! If by some confounding mishap you’ve yet to punch the ‘Notify me on launch’ button on the preview page for the project—don’t tarry! One simple clickety-click and you get the Constant Curiosities mini-expansion for free once you pledge!
Today’s blog post is dedicated to the idea of replayability. It’s a real buzzword, isn’t it? But whatever your feelings about it, it’s hard to deny that braving the world of Don’t Starve again and again after each failure lies at the heart of its roguelike aspect. Which is why it also plays a big role in our board game.
The Next Try’s the Charm
It’s very human to stand tall in the face of adversity. There’s a primal thrill in getting up, brushing off the dust, and tackling the challenge until you succeed. Victory in board games captures that perfectly—once you win, it feels so much more rewarding knowing the effort it took to get there.
That said, it helps when each new attempt feels fresh. There are only so many times you can bang your head against a wall before it stops being fun. Don’t Starve: The Board Game is chock full of things that make each rush unto the breach worth your while.
If At First You Don’t Starve…
Each time you set up a new game you get to use a wealth of randomized components. First up: Map Setup cards. While each scenario comes with a recommended layout, you’re free to pick one at random. These determine the distribution of Map tiles on your table, representing the chunk of the game world that you’ll get to explore. This directly affects how easy (or hard) it is to move around the board, with some Map tiles being easily accessible, and others having you run around risking monster encounters before you reach them.
Next are Location cards, which represent each available biome and add unique points of interest. And yes—you guessed it—they’re drawn at random. This keeps each foray into the wild fresh and surprising (and potentially lethal).
But then you add another layer of uncertainty by choosing one of four different seasons. These come with their own Needs tiles, which are also revealed randomly during setup and force you to balance your priorities between maintaining sanity and battling hunger.
All this is made even crazier due to the weather—another random factor which we’ve covered in our last blog post and one that you have to take into account when planning your strategy. Add different difficulty levels and suddenly you’re like a babe in the woods. And it’s a jungle out there!
MORE MORE MOAR!
Replayability ties directly into today’s Constant Curiosities unlock. If you’re following our preview page, your game just got even more unpredictable with 3 new Map Setup cards and 2 shiny Needs tiles (1 for easy difficulty and 1 for hard mode). What a doozy!
She’ll Teach You to Burn
Here’s the fourth Survivor to make their way to base camp. For Willow, spontaneous combustion is a way of life, and the world around her is little more than one big flammable playground.
“Things are prettier when they burn.”–Willow
Willow comes equipped with her lucky lighter, which comes in handy when fending off the dark and battling baddies. It runs on embers—her most precious resource. The more the strain of day-to-day survival gets under the skin, the more she becomes inclined to burn it all down.
Be sure to make good use of the time left before the start of the campaign by booking a Don’t Starve: The Board Game demo session with Derek from GCU and Asaf from EZBoardGames, here, on Discord: https://discord.gg/Gavkv9GeJW
Join the Glass Cannon Unplugged Newsletter and follow us on:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glasscannonunplugged
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GlassCannonUnplugged
Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/972823177685971/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@glasscannonunplugged
X: https://x.com/gcutabletop
Discord: https://discord.gg/Gavkv9GeJW
