Edge of Darkness

About this board game

Edge of Darkness is a medium-weight euro-style board game for 1–4 players, with games lasting 60–120 minutes. In the role of powerful guild leaders, players compete to control a city while confronting dangers that can harm everyone.

Guilds send agents to important locations, where they generate resources, unlock abilities, and enable actions. Players build influence by maneuvering agents and loyalists through the city’s districts and organizations, then seek synergies between their positions and the infrastructure they connect to the city.

The game combines several distinctive systems:

• Card Crafting: Sleeve transparent, double-sided crafting slips onto cards to add effects. Improving the beneficial front also strengthens the dangerous back.
• Shared Deck-Building: Everyone draws from and discards to one central deck. Using another guild’s cards requires payment, while adding your seal can establish your allegiance to more cards.
• Card-Driven Worker Placement: Actions and costs are shaped by limited workers, forcing constant choices about which useful opportunities to pursue.
• Threat Tower: Threat cards collect color-coded cubes until they attack a player or, in the case of black threats, the entire table.

Each game uses 10 of 12 available Locations, either selected deliberately or chosen randomly. Location Boards and Crafting Slips can introduce special worker-placement rules and new systems, including a combination that lets players assemble heroes for a Monster Hunt.

Power comes from gaining the allegiance of important citizens and nobles, accumulating wealth, and taking actions that benefit the city, such as defending it from internal and external threats. When the game ends, the guild with the most power wins. With its shared incentives, escalating danger, and modular setup, Edge of Darkness offers varied strategic challenges from game to game.