Darkest Doom - Official How to Play. Complete, Clear, Concise Board Game Tutorial.

Not only you must survive the eight days of darkness, but you also need to compete with other wannabe winners in Darkest Doom. >> And today we'll be teaching you how to play Darkest Doom game designed by Mario Zatini and published by Gamestart Studio. >> And hi everyone, it's Stella >> and Tarant. Welcome to Maple University.

>> And hey, if you enjoy this video after watching, like, subscribe, and comments. You know what to do. Right now, let's get to the classroom. In Darkest Doom, players are animal guardians making their way in their attempts to save the land of Beetle. Players will venture out, attempting to complete quests and defeat the fearsome enemy creatures, to gain fame and increase their skills.

This will in turn allow them to form alliances with citadels, to gain access to greater abilities, and bank their fame. Meanwhile, the forces of darkness will be working against the players, adding dark filaments to the blood temples and the citadels of the board. The game plays over a maximum of eight rounds.

And if it lasts that long, then whoever has the most total fame wins. But there are ways to bring an early end and instant victory to the game, including defeating the darkness in the High Priestess at the Winter Mountain or freeing Mosh the Shadow Shaman at the Monolith. But be warned, if all eight buildings on the board are ever enveloped with three dark filaments, then the darkness has won the game.

All players lose except for a player who has switched sides and joined the darkness. I won't be walking you step by step through setup, but I'll show you what the board is like when you're done and introduce you to the components. You'll have many different shuffled decks of cards and decks or bags of shuffled tokens, including one shuffled in the winter mountain piece.

And I'll introduce you to each of these decks as their rules come up through the explanation. On the left of the board is the darkest doom track and the round track and these track the progress of the game. On the right, in addition to the turn order track, you have the alliance track and the daily fame track.

Alliances and daily fame collectively determine your total fame. And it's not a straightforward linear track. At any time, your total fame is equal to your daily fame plus the sum of any numbers under your colored markers. This would be a total fame of 14. Since having the most total fame is the primary win condition, you'll need to watch out for ways to build that total fame.

But at the start of the game, you'll have no alliances and a daily fame of zero. The four player colored acolytes begin at the top of the alliance track, even if playing with fewer than four players. Each player will have a player board and one of the guardians, which shows your starting statistics and special powers.

Set clear cubes at those starting statistics. These are melee, health, witchcraft, and wisdom. Also, set one at zero on your action points track. The blue and red cubes represent your current harm and mana petals, and those are set to match your starting health and your starting witchcraft, respectively.

You can think of health and witchcraft as your maximum in each of these and your harm and mana pedals as your current values. Pick a color and attach the base ring to your mini. Starting it with the blood temple outlined in your color. Also in your color, you'll have two trap tokens, a quest objective token, and three citadel domes.

Around your board, there are spaces for cards, including the player aids. And to finish setup, you draw a starting quest from the Beetle Quest deck. and before looking at it must place two more clear cubes. One in one of these three spaces which represent the game's three different types of relics and the other one in one of these four spaces representing your stats.

These represent the rewards you've declared that you want to gain when you complete this quest. Having chosen, you may now look at your quest, but should keep it secret from the other players. Now give each player three coins of destiny. You can hold at most five of these at any given time. Roll for the starting turn order and give the active player token to the current player.

You'll use this throughout the game to track whose turn it is. Make supplies of the various other components including enemy creature and lake spectre minis. And with that, you're now ready to play. So let's first have a look at an overview of the sequence of play. >> Darkest Doom plays in eight rounds and each round plays in two phases, dawn phase and nightfall phase.

In the dawn phase, players will restock with a hand of Citadel supplies cards. Then take one turn each in turn order. In the nightfall phase, players will restock their mana petals, which they've been spending to take witchcraft types of actions. Then the darkness will take a turn, which will add enemy creatures and other elements to the map, which in turn will take actions to work against the players before each player once again takes one turn in turn order.

That means you'll take a total of two turns in each of the eight rounds. A major part of play is leveling up the strengths of your guardian on these tracks. And there are two main ways to do this. Quests and order achievements. You gain new quests or replenish the ones you complete at the start of the dawn phase and gain or replenish your order achievements in the Nightfall phase.

Both types of cards are tactical objectives to achieve on the board. Completing these cards are among the many actions which will grant you daily fame. As you progress up this track, you'll then be trying to convert or utilize it at citadels to lock some daily fame in as total fame. But at the end of each round, all daily fame returns to zero or perhaps even lower if you have certain penalties like white moths.

And so you need to be thinking about the right times to gain daily fame and when to convert it. Daily fame does not reset at the end of the eighth and final round. So, you'll need to be really tactical about maximizing daily fame within that decisive final round. But, as we saw in the intro, fame is not the only path to victory, as there are several ways in which a player could bypass fame to claim an instant victory.

>> Lots of ways to play and lots of ways to win. So now let's have a look at how to resolve each round's dawn phase. The first step of each dawn phase, including round one, is to replenish Citadel supplies cards. And those are these four decks. There are four different types of these cards, each with the similar back, equipment, encounters, spells, and traps.

In this step, you draw cards from these decks in any combination you wish until you have as many cards in hand as the value of your wisdom statistic. Wisdom is your hand limit at all times. If you ever do draw above your wisdom, you must discard back down to your wisdom immediately. Next, if you have no quest card in your quest slot, draw the next quest face down from the deck.

Like what we did at the start of the game, upon gaining any new quest, you must now set these two cubes. One on a statistic that you want this quest to increase and one on a relic that you'll search for when you complete the quest. These can be the same or different boxes to your previous quest. Only once you've made these choices can you secretly look at your new quest.

Now each player takes one turn in turn order. On your turn you'll take several actions and you have a total of three action points to spend tracked here. Many actions, especially movement, will cost these action points. While there are also several free and automatic actions which don't cost these points, although may have some other resource cost or restriction.

Once you've finished taking as many actions as you wish to and can afford, play will pass to the next player in turn order. Before I start explaining the individual actions, I want to explain the game's two types of die rolls. Fate rolls and crimson fate rolls. Since these are seen across several actions, a fate roll is a single roll of the d10.

And for each such case, you'll be trying to roll either above or below a certain value. Matching a target counts as a success. So here, a five would be enough. Within a fate roll, you can always spend coins of destiny to adjust the die by one. So here, spending three coins to turn this two to a five and pass the test.

Crimson Fate rolls are made with the Crimson Fate dice. There are red and white dice, but they're functionally the same, and each has six different symbols printed on it. These rolls have various targets. You might be trying to match specific symbols, or you might be trying to roll swords and shields in combat.

For any Crimson Fate roll, you'll follow these steps. Firstly, make the natural roll and then count up the number of natural moon symbols that you rolled. Advance the darkest doom marker that many steps clockwise around this track and resolve the icon it lands on once. Of the eight spaces, there are three helpful ones and five which help the darkness.

These ones are for the darkness evolve and dawn eclipse. And although they happen now on the player turn, I'll come back and explain these when we talk about the darkest doom turn. More helpful are these three spaces which show the six icons that you can roll on a Crimson Fate die. And if the marker finishes there, then you may reset any single one of your rolled Crimson Fate dice to match one of the symbols on that space.

Next, you can further adjust your rolled dice by discarding Citadel supplies cards from hand showing icons in the corners. For each card you discard, pick any one die and set it to the face showing on the card. Remember, Crimson Fate rolls are all about icon matching. And so, these two effects are how you manipulate those rolls.

Be clear that it's only the naturally rolled moons which cause the darkest doom track to move. If you either add or remove moons from your final roll through any of these modifications, it has no further effect on the darkest doom track. >> So that's the die rolls. Now let's see how to use them in each of the actions.

>> First, we'll talk about movement. The most common action is to move. Spend one action point and move your mini from one zone to an adjacent one. You cannot move into a blood temple zone, even one of your own color. These are starting or respawn locations only. Often once you finish moving, you'll aim to take an automatic or extra action in your destination.

But if the zone is not empty, then there are three potential types of impediments you must overcome before doing this. These must be resolved in order. Firstly, if there is another player or an enemy creature in the zone, then you must first survive a battle against that player or creature. Secondly, if there is a dark pool in the zone, you must resolve the dark pool.

And thirdly, if there is a trap in the zone, you must resolve the trap. Resolve these in that order and automatically without spending action points. Only if you survive and remain in the zone after resolving them do you then go on to take any extra actions associated with your zone. First is battles.

A battle occurs automatically when two minis share a space and the mini that entered the zone is the attacker, the other is the defender. We'll look at a player versus player battle first. Firstly, starting with the player who has the higher current witchcraft. Players may go back and forward playing spell cards from their hands into this battle.

Spell cards may have a cost paid in mana petals. Go back and forward until both players have passed in sequence. Then each player makes a Crimson Fate roll with dice based on their current melee value. Both players may roll moons and you'll resolve the attacker's natural moons on the Darkest Doom track before the defenders.

After that and after discarding cards to adjust symbols, there is a further chance back and forward to cast spells. Now, count up hits and parries in battle. The sword and the priestess symbols always count as hits. The dawn symbol is a hit if it's the dawn phase, and the nightfall symbol is a hit if it's the nightfall phase.

The shield symbol is a parry. It cancels one hit against you. and the moon has no effect. Each player suffers harm based on unparried hits against them. So here, green has dealt two hits with none parried. So orange suffers two harm while orange has done one hit in the dawn phase which was parried. So green suffers no harm.

If neither player's harm reduced to zero, then neither player has died. And regardless of who dealt more hits, this is enough for the attacker to claim the zone and the attacking player pushes the defending mini to any empty adjacent zone. If there are no empty zones, instead push to one with a token but no mini and don't resolve the token.

On the other hand, if one of the players did die in the battle, then the player who caused the death gains three daily fame and the player who died loses three daily fame, returns their mini to their blood temple, ends their turn if they were the active player, and gains a white moth token placed on one of these three spaces.

White moths are bad. They block up these spaces which you would rather later fill with acolytes and they persistently reduce your starting daily fame in all future rounds. In other words, each time you die, you're starting with a handicap on future rounds, making it harder to put up a winning fame score.

Then reset your mana petals to match your current witchcraft and reset your harm to match your current health, unless the darkness has already added three dark filaments to your blood temple, in which case harm would instead return to only one. Do note this sequence occurs for any player death, including the player who caused that death gaining three daily fame.

and causing someone's death could include by catching them in a trap, playing a card against them which harms them out of battle and more. If both players died in a battle, then both players would go through the sequence which would include both gaining and losing an offsetting amount of daily fame.

The player's half of a battle against a creature is resolved in the same way, but the creature half is resolved with a card draw instead of a die roll. There are three standard types of creature in the game. Lightless beaters, lightless hunters, and the leader of the hunt. And for all three creatures, you begin the battle by drawing one of these cards and then first checking whether this icon is yet visible on the round track.

This would mean you've at least reached Nightfall in round five. And if you have, then the first thing you do is resolve this effect in the text box at the top. Next, the player may play spells. Then the player does their Crimson Fate roll. Your hits and parries come from your dice. The creature's hits and harm value come from its column on the creature attack card.

Here for the level one lightless beta, hits would be two and harm would be three. To kill the creature, your hits must meet or exceed the creature's harm. And these hits do not carry over from battle to battle. This card gets discarded after the battle and a new one drawn with all new harm next battle.

If the creature does die, suppose this were a dawn phase attack, so three hits, then remove it and gain the daily fame at the bottom of the card. This will be three, four, or five based on the level of the creature. If the player dies, you'll resolve in the standard way. And if no one dies, then attacker moves defender as before.

Do note that if the player is the defender, and this won't happen during a player turn, this comes later on a darkest doom turn, then the doom will move you on your shortest path towards your blood temple. If you're still in the zone after battles, then you resolve dark pools, then traps in that space.

Dark pools are added to the board by the darkness, and traps are added by players. Both token types are resolved in the same way. First, reveal a card from the dark contamination deck. These have a few different functions, but for this purpose, only this row of icons at the top is important. Check the round track for the highest visible ambush number.

This begins at three, but could go as high as five. You're now going to attempt a Crimson Fate roll using one more die than the current ambush value. And to succeed, you want to match the leftmost symbols up to the ambush value. So here, if after I rolled the four dice and made adjustments for the darkest doom track and discarding cards, then if these first three symbols show on the dice, I have succeeded.

For a dark pool, flip the token. If you succeeded, you'll gain daily fame equal to the ambush level. And if you fail, resolve the negative effect on the bottom half. Either way, discard the token. In the case of a trap, success gives you nothing, while failure lets the traps owner play a trap card from hand against you, resolving the negative effect.

The trap owner retrieves the trap token and discards the played trap while the played dark contamination card is also discarded. Once you're done with battles, dark pools, and traps, you can now take any other actions you wish in that zone. >> So, let's have a look at what all of those options are. >> One of the most important automatic actions to complete in your zone is to complete a quest card.

Each quest shows the map of the board, including all of the buildings to help you get your bearings, and then one specific zone, which is associated with this quest. If you have survived in this zone after combat, pools, and traps, you automatically complete the quest, gain one daily fame, and advance one step on the track you chose.

Then attempt the fate roll in the center of the quest card. And if you're successful, also gain the relic that you chose. You can carry at most three relics of the same or different types at any time. And each different relic type helps you in a different way in the other actions, which we'll see later.

Now, discard the quest. You'll gain a new one next dawn phase. As a free action, if you are at least four movement spaces away from the destination on your quest, then you can declare it, reveal it, and mark the destination with your quest objective token. A declared quest is worth three daily fame instead of one, as well as all the other rewards when you complete it.

These are the beetle zone effects associated with the specific type of zone you're in. At a forest, you can spend two mana petals and no action points to discard any two Citadel supply cards from your hand and redraw with whichever type of card you wish. You can do this multiple times in a row. At the mountain, you can rest and heal.

Spend action points to heal one harm per action. These four zones are the entries to the black lodge, and these are tunnels that are interconnected across the board. Spend an action point to move from one lodge entry to any other. In the plains, you can shuffle your hand and discard one random card to gain adjacent attack for the rest of this turn.

That means that as a free action, once you've navigated any battles, traps, or pools in your zone, you can now attack a player or creature in an adjacent zone. This works like any other combat, except that nobody gets pushed out of a zone if no one dies. A few different things can be done in a citadel zone, and these can be done whether it's your color, an opponent's color, or an unused color.

as an automatic action, including if you start your turn there, check whether there is a current alliance at that colored citadel. If there is no alliance and you have at least one daily fame, then form an alliance. Mark that citadel with your dome and mark your current daily fame value on that colored citadel's track.

If that citadel is already in an alliance, then compare your current daily fame with the fame value of that alliance. And if yours is equal or higher, then you take over the alliance. Replace the dome with your dome and replace the marker with your marker at your daily fame. The first time a player claims each citadel with a daily fame of six or more, then in addition to marking the track, the player gets to claim the acolyte from the matching citadel.

This goes on the player's board in one of these three slots. as long as there's a slot available. If they're all filled with moths and acolytes, you do not gain an acolyte. You can never lose an acolyte you've gained, but you can be displaced for that citadel's alliance. The other option from a citadel, whether you're allied there or not, is to pay a coin of destiny and no action points to move up to a number of spaces equal to 2 + one per citadel you're currently allied with.

You can't use this movement to enter another citadel zone. Through the game, the darkness will add dark filaments to the citadels. And once a citadel has three filaments, it is considered contaminated. It still behaves exactly like any other citadel, except that it now costs two movement points to enter that zone instead of one.

In a lake zone, a player may invoke the lake spectre as long as no other player currently has it. This is the function of your lantern relics. You take the spectre card, place it into one of the two equipment slots down the left of your playerboard, and pay between one and three lanterns to the card.

Place your mini inside the lake's mini. While with the lake spectre, you get plus one sword and plus one shield result per lantern you paid to the card. And you can attack adjacent, but you can't move to citadels and can't hold relics. You keep this card either until the next time you die or until you voluntarily discard it.

And in each case, it returns to the available supply and all the lanterns that are on it are discarded. These are the paths to the winter mountain. They have no special zone actions. Finally, we'll talk about the various actions which are not associated with a specific zone. You can play one of the four types of Citadel supply cards from hand.

If this has a cost, it will be shown here. And if it doesn't have an action point cost, then it's a free action. Spells we've mostly seen before. They often cost mana petals and you resolve them before discarding them. Some can be used only in battle, but some can be used outside battle. Encounter cards always have an action point cost.

So, pay that action point, resolve the card, and discard it. To play an equipment card, you'll pay the cost. This will often be coins for basic equipment. And you'll slot the card into one of your two equipment slots. You can discard equipment to make room for new equipment. Place decay tokens on the card based on the value showing here.

And then every time you use the special effect on that card, remove a decay. Once all decay is gone, discard the card. Some of the most valuable equipment will cost you an elers's urn to play, and that's the function of this particular relic. Lastly, you can lay a trap. And we saw an aspect of this before, but now we'll learn how to play them.

There's actually two different types of traps. Traps that target players and traps that target creatures. When you lay a trap, you don't play the card. You keep it in hand and instead lay one of your trap tokens on the board at a cost of one coin of destiny, placing it in any zone except for an entry to the winter mountain.

When a player enters a zone with your trap, then if they fail their ambush roll, you reveal and resolve a player targeting trap card. While for a creature, anytime a creature meets the conditions on the trap card, that's when you reveal and resolve the card before discarding it and retrieving your trap.

Finally, once per dawn phase, regardless of your location, you can resolve your blood temple action, and this is where you gain benefits for having collected acolytes. This action gives you two choices. either gain one daily fame for each acolyte you've collected or discard a dark contamination card from your hand for each acolyte you've collected.

We've seen these dark contamination cards once before being flipped and resolved as part of a Crimson Fate ambush roll. However, these can also end up in your hand whenever you have an effect or a cost with this icon. So here the cost to play the assassin's cloak equipment would be to gain one dark contamination to hand.

These are essentially useless cards which choke up your hand and count towards your hand limit. Other than this blood temple action, you're not allowed to discard or remove these from hand, meaning they'll otherwise choke up your hand indefinitely. And so that covers all actions available on a player turn.

Ooh, it looks like night is falling. Tarant, >> each player does three things to begin the Nightfall phase. First, restore mana petals to match your current witchcraft. Then, draw order achievements until you have two. You'll draw your first two in the first Nightfall phase, and you're also allowed to discard unwanted order achievements at the start of this phase before replenishing.

Each of these is a free or automatic effect. As soon as you achieve it, whether on your turn or a different phase, gain the benefits and then discard it, waiting until the next Nightfall to replenish. Thirdly, if you have Dark Contamination, you may discard any number of them and redraw the same number.

There's only two different types of cards in the Dark Contamination deck. this one which chokes up your hand and this special leader of the hunt card. Recall that you can win the game with the darkness if you swap to the dark side and it's the leader of the hunt card which will help you do that. Then is the darkest doom turn.

Firstly, take this round's heart of the high priestess token and add it to the creature target bag. In round five, when this icon is revealed, find the five darkest Doom event cards which have this icon on it. You'll have been instructed to set these aside during setup and shuffle them in with the rest of the Darkest Doom event cards.

Now, draw a Darkest Doom event and a Darkest Doom event map and resolve each circled icon on the event. This icon adds creatures to the board. And if there are no creatures on the board at the moment, you'll find the three spaces on the map card showing the beta icon and add beatas to those zones. There can be at most three total creatures of any type on the map.

And if you reach the limit, it's the current first player who chooses which ones are placed. Beaters attack players in the zones they enter. This icon adds dark pools to the board. Remove all dark pools currently on the board. Shuffle up the pile and then add one to each of the six spaces showing the pool.

Pools that spawn with players are not resolved immediately. They resolve only when a player enters that zone. These colored icons add dark filaments to the board on the matching building. So this would be on the gray player's blood temple. This would be on the purple citadel. Resolve these even if that color player is not in the game.

Ignore the effect if there are already three filaments at that building. This icon is the dawn eclipse. Look over the entire board and add a dark filament to each building adjacent to a dark pool. Then remove that pool. Recall as well that this effect can be triggered off the darkest doom track. After resolving both event icons in sequence, resolve the text underneath them on the event card.

Then discard the event. Next, activate each creature, including ones who've already attacked when spawning this turn. If a creature has a targeting token from a previous round, discard it to a discard pile. Now, draw a targeting token from the bag for each creature. Inspect both sides of the token and if the token is a heart of the high priestess token, then that creature evolves to the next level if there's a mini available.

There are three beaters in the game which can evolve to one of the two hunters, which could in turn evolve to the single leader of the hunt. This is one of the ways to trigger evolution. This icon on the darkest doom track also triggers it, causing the nearest creature to whoever rolled that Crimson Fate roll to evolve if possible.

Determine each creature's target according to the priorities on the tokens. So, this would be targeting the orange guardian or if invalid would then target the orange citadel, then orange blood temple. A guardian is invalid if it's already engaged by another creature, while a building is invalid if it already has three dark filaments.

If there are no valid targets, then the target becomes the nearest building which doesn't have three dark filaments with ties broken by whichever currently has the most filaments. And if still tied, first player chooses. Move each creature up to three spaces in the most direct path towards its target.

And this could include using the lodge. The orange citadel here, which is not in vision, is nearest by moving through that black lodge entry. Creatures can move through other minis, but will not finish their turn on one. All creatures have the ability to attack adjacent. And so if the creature has reached adjacent to its target, then it has successfully reached the target, the targeting token will be removed from the game.

That is not added to the discard pile and the creature attacks. So for a creature versus guardian battle, you'll resolve that as described before. While if a creature attacks a citadel or a blood temple, add one, two, or three dark filaments according to the level of the creature. If a creature fails to engage its target, then leave the token there until the start of the next Nightfall phase.

That way, if there is any effect between now and then, which moves that creature, the targeting token will tell you how it moves. Once the bag is empty, any of the unfulfilled targeting tokens are reshuffled in the bag to continue being drawn, but the fulfilled tokens that were removed from the game are never seen again.

If you ever get to the point where there are no targeting tokens remaining, then creatures will ignore the guardians and solely go to attack the nearest buildings. After the creatures are done, all players take their Nightfall phase turns again in turn order. Remember, you get two turns per round, one in dawn and one in Nightfall.

Once those are done, reset turn order based on the current daily fame from highest to lowest. In the event of a tie, the tie is broken by whoever has the higher total fame. Now reset all players daily fame back to zero minus one for each white moth on your board. So we've seen dawn and nightfall player turns and darkest doom turns.

>> Now finally it's time for how to win the game. Hopefully >> the game can end in one of five ways. Four of which involve victory for one of the players and the fifth of which is a common loss. If you play through all eight rounds, then the winner will be the player with the highest total fame. Here, green has 15, orange has 14.

So, green would win. If tied, then whoever holds the most coins of destiny wins. If still tied, fewest dark contamination cards, and if still tied, victory is shared. The second way is to free Mosh the shadow shaman at the monolith. To go here, you must have three sigil stones in your possession, and you must spend them to attempt the victory.

This is a one-off attempt. Attempt an ambush check and crimson fate roll following the standard rules for a trap or darkpool. And if you can match all the required icons, then you win. If you fail, you suffer one harm and are ejected, unable to try again. So, be sure you're ready with lots of wisdom and cards to manipulate that role before you try.

The third option is to battle the darkness within the high priestess at the winter mountain. This mostly works like a regular player versus creature battle. But to determine the priestess's stats, count up the number of blue circles on the round track. This will be her base hits. and the number of orange circles.

This will be her base harm. To that, you flip a creature attack card and add the values in the final column. So, for this combat, the priestess would deal nine hits and have three harm. Roll your dice in attack. And if you manage to kill the priestess and remain alive yourself, then you win the game.

If you fail without dying, you're ejected to the winter mountain path, able to move up and try again later. Finally, there is the path of darkness. If all eight buildings on the board have three dark filaments and no player has switched to the side of darkness, then all players lose. But there is a way to join the dark side.

If you defeat the leader of the hunt in battle and you are holding a leader of the hunt dark contamination card in your hand at that time, then reveal this card. You are now one with the leader. From now on, you play under a new set of rules. You no longer use your playerboard and you no longer have fame.

Instead, you get to draw dark contamination cards in each Nightfall phase, and spend them to gain benefits in combat. And note, you use the creature attack cards, not your own stats to determine your combat. Your opponents can still battle against you, and if you're ever killed as the leader of the hunt, then you're eliminated from the game.

And those are the rules of the game. Darkest Doom can be played solo, in which case you would use bot guardians and wanted by the order cards in order to determine the neutral turns. You can also choose to optionally use these to make the game feel as though it's playing at four. Thanks for watching and if you like this video, maybe you'd like to watch this next one.

Have a great day. Bye.