Darkness Comes Rattling Review

Near the end of Darkness Comes Rattling, one of the players volunteers to be swallowed by the great snake Darkness that encircles the board and race through its belly in an attempt to catch the sun. It's a great metaphor for the game as a whole: just like chasing the sun, Darkness Comes Rattling is poetically and visually beautiful, but it's also a rather exhausting marathon of the same activity over and over and over, and for all your trouble, your goal might be literally impossible to achieve, leaving you wondering why it seemed like such a good idea at the time.

To give designer Kevin Wilson his due, Darkness Comes Rattling is full of good ideas that just don't quite come together the way they should. Even the endgame is an inspired bit of atavistic imagery and would be awesome if it worked properly. Balance issues aside, this is the next evolution of the Arkham Horror-style encounter card adventure genre that put Wilson on the map. It's atmospheric but streamlined, grand but contained, and even though you are rolling dice, there is a strong emphasis on luck mitigation. In other words, the game is salvageable and worth salvaging. A few well-placed house rules are all it would take. But looking at the rules as written, the game is marred by a few unforgivable flaws.

For one thing, it's just a little bit too long. We're not talking Arkham Horror or Talisman here, but it still lasts 30-60 minutes longer than the simple mechanics remain interesting. In fact, by the time that final 30-60 minutes rolls around, you are probably beyond the point of being able to influence the outcome. This is a cooperative game with one victory condition--catch the sun--and depending on the number of players and early luck, you can tell as soon as you enter Darkness whether that goal is achievable or not. The rest of the game is just waiting for the inevitable.

That's really the only game-breaking flaw, but it will color your whole experience. It's hard to get invested in a game when you know the odds are stacked in or against your favor (it's easier with 2-3 players and verging on unwinnable with 6).

This ought to make you livid, because Darkness Comes Rattling is chock-a-block with ingenius ideas to get you invested. Take Corruption. The mythology of the game is that, when Mother Moon birthed the sun, she accidentally created Darkness at the same time, and the serpent, jealous for its mother's attention, has swallowed the sun and now spreads corruption across the land. Mother Moon has called on Warriors from the many Tribes of Man to retrieve the sun before it reaches Darkness' rattle and is gone for good.

Corruption tokens, which are placed on the board in various ways, represent the influence Darkness has over the world of Tallil. They come in three colors, matching the three colors of dice you roll to complete Challenges, and their function is insidious: if a token in your Region matches the color and value of a die you rolled, that die counts as a 0. As Corruption piles up, rolls become more and more difficult to achieve, which means that during the Movement phase of their turns, players are doing everything they can to remove tokens from the board. Even though the board is small, 16 spaces arranged in a circle around the central Village, there is a very satisfying movement puzzle to this part of the game as you try to remove Corruption and end your turn on a Challenge you can complete. If a space ever has 3 Corruption tokens, a Shadow appears in that space. Shadows are like Challenges, except that they are more difficult, don't yield any rewards when completed (other than removing the Shadow, which is almost immediately replaced due to the plentiful Darkness Track events that spawn them), and have a Corruption token printed right on the card that applies to all 3 colors of dice at once.

As for how Challenges work, it is mostly as simple as rolling the 3 dice to try to match a target value. If you succeed, you gain a reward and the card is discarded, to be replaced at the end of the round. If you fail, you get a penalty and the card is also discarded, except for a few that remain in play. However, the Challenges all offer ways to mitigate your random luck. If your Warrior matches the color of the Challenge, you are allowed to reroll 1 die for free. You also get numeric bonuses, some of them sizeable, if you are carrying the item(s) shown on the card or accompanied by an ally, and the Regions, equipment and character powers all give you other ways to mess with the roll. The pool of items is small, and you can often trade in reward items for the specific equipment you want, so this never feels unfair or arbitrary. Unlike many games of this type, you can spend one of your movement points to reveal the Challenge before you encounter it, giving you a chance to coordinate and send the right Warriors to the right spaces.

What makes Challenges even more interesting is that every time you face one, you also roll a fourth die, the Dark die. This is always bad, although some faces of the die are worse than others. A few of them simply put out more Corruption tokens, but the majority move the sun one or two spaces closer to Darkness' rattle. When the sun hits certain spaces, events occur, all of them awful, so it's doubly painful to watch the sun travel around the track. And here's the great part: even if you did not participate in a Challenge (maybe you were supporting another player, or stopped in the Village space), you still have to roll the die. The clock never stops ticking.

It was brilliant to integrate the adversarial parts of the game into the player turns like this, rather than in a lengthy upkeep phase, and it also balances (most of) the game perfectly across all player counts. However, it simply stops working once you hit the endgame. The Warrior in Darkness moves once per round, but the sun moves once per player, leading to the imbalances described above.

Aside from the clever mechanics, Darkness Comes Rattling has some stellar flavor text that draws upon folklore from all over the world. Each Warrior's name comes from a native word for their spirit animal—I never even got to talk about Spirits, a smart way of addressing player elimination, or the four Winds, or lots of other cool mechanics. Visually, the tribal aesthetic works well, and it is genuinely fun to play for the first hour or two. We can only hope for a second edition or some official errata to lash this bright star of a game to an ending that doesn't blot it out.