Board game Kickstarter is live - already funded!

So the Dead by Daylight Board Game Kickstarter went live today and it funded in just a few hours! The goal was $250k and it's already at over $323k. Grats to Level 99 and Behaviour on that! 😄

There's a pretty decent video prereview of the game on the Kickstarter from a channel called Quackalope where he lays out how the game works. The components are still prototype at this point so they're not completely polished yet but even so they looked pretty decent, especially the minis. Some things that stick out for me so far:

• The game is listed as 3-5 players, but really it's always 1 killer versus 4 survivors, so if you play with less players someone is doubling up. Technically you could play with 2 but it might be a little cumbersome with one person running all four survivors. And there's no official solo mode, although I would be really surprised if unofficial solo variants don't pop up pretty much immediately since the game seems to be kind of screaming for one.
• One difference between the board game and the video game is that there is no player elimination. Instead the killer's objective is to generate a total of 8 sacrifice tokens, and when a survivor is hooked they generate 1 such token per turn until they're rescued. So if the killer can manage to get 2 or even 3 survivors on hooks simultaneously it's a massive snowball toward that 8. It almost makes me wonder what the video game would have been like if it had no player elimination but instead the more often survivors were hooked the more a "ritual token stack" built up until if it reached, say, 8-12 tokens the ritual was complete and the killer won the game. Hard to say if that hypothetical is better or worse but it would certainly be a different dynamic!
• This is a simultaneous movement game where everybody puts their movement cards face down and reveals them. If the killer ends up in the same spot as the survivors they get to try and injure or carry them to hooks. If not then the survivors are free to do stuff in their space like fix generators and get items and heal, etc. The killer's main advantage stems from two things: they play two movement cards and choose what order they use them after seeing what the survivors do, and unlike the survivors the killer has a Wait card that allows them to stay in place for one of those two actions. (Survivors are more frantic, if they fail to move on a turn they don't get to act at all. So the killer has a little more control over the timing and pace of the chase.) On the other hand survivors get the usual suspects of items and pallets and sprints and vaults, etc. I generally like this genre of game, and given how many special abilities and perks and items and everything are in this it seems like it has a ton of replay value.
• Pricewise the game is pretty reasonable for a board game - $50 for the standard edition, $100 for the deluxe edition with all the non-licensed survivors and killers through Trickster (plus shipping and tax). It looks like a light to medium weight game that runs about an hour probably (box says 45 minutes). So yeah, I'm almost certainly backing this one. The game looks good mechanically and the theme is obviously something I really like with a price that's not too crazy. Aside from missing a solo mode I'm not seeing any red flags.🙂