Dark Souls board game crowdfunds £3.7m, is second-highest tabletop Kickstarter to date

The crowdfunding campaign for the board game version of Dark Souls has closed with a record-breaking £3.77 million raised.

Steamforged Games’ tabletop reimagining of From Software’s unforgiving video game franchise, which saw its third – and supposedly final – release in April, was originally seeking £50,000. It reached that total within three minutes of opening to backers on April 19th.

Among the records broken by the licensed board game during its campaign are Most Backers for a Board Game and Most Retail Backers for a Board Game.

Dark Souls: The Board Game is also the most-funded board game on Kickstarter to date, and the second highest-funded tabletop project of all time, falling behind Exploding Kittens, the card game co-created by former Xbox execs Elan Lee and Shane Small.

The impressive state also means the board game ranks among the 12 most successful Kickstarters held so far, just behind Koji Igarashi’s campaign for Castlevania spiritual successor Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.

The campaign’s success highlights the growing interest in video game-based board games, with tabletop versions of XCOM, The Banner Saga, This War of Mine, BioShock, The Witcher and Portal all having found a passionate audience in recent years.