news: 2025-08-25

Daggerheart Deluxe Edition Unboxing

Welcome to this, the inaugural post for game hen games’ blog! I’m incredibly fortunate to have gotten my talons on one of the first run of the limited edition Daggerheart Collectors’ Edition boxes! Thank you to our friends over at Phoenix Comics and Games. For those who don’t know, Daggerheart is the new table-top role-playing game (TTRPG) from Darrington Press. Using the Duality Dice to generate Hope and Fear, players dynamically shift the tension throughout the tale, while the streamlined rule system encourages everyone at the table to participate in the worldbuilding and storytelling!

Having watched Age of Umbra and having read through the core rules, I’m comfortable saying that Daggerheart is worth your time. The fear economy looks like it does an excellent job of driving suspense as the players see the growing pile of reserves on which the taleweaver can draw can to slow them down. Meanwhile, every character also has their own means of generating hope to empower their their own abilities, or to improve others’ odds of success. We’ll get more deeply into the mechanics of Daggerheart in a future post; for now, I’m focused on the physicality of the offering.

Priced at $150 retail, even I have to acknowledge this was a luxury purchase. They’ve made the core rules – what’s known as the systems reference document – as well as pretty much all the resources you’d need to play available for download off of their website. You don’t need this to play Daggerheart; you could just buy yourself some dice, making sure to get two twelve-sided dice – d12s, in the lingo – of different colors, and you’d be set!

But then look at what you’d be missing:

No, seriously, look at it. The first visual impression is one of weight. This box is large, it is heavy, and every square centimeter of it is covered in art. The two-tone theme carries through much of the artwork, helping to carry the theme of hope and fear throughout the materials. The lid clasp is magnetic, so it clicks into place with satisfaction and no visible clasps, yet two fingers are more than enough to lift it out of the way. Inside, the attention to detail continues, with two different sections now visible: a well for the book, screen, and character sheets; and a separate, smaller box for cards, tokens and dice. The smaller box, inset in the bottom, comes with its own separate ribbon loop for ease of removal:

Looking in the top well first – the box comes with a nice long satin ribbon for ease of lifting – the first thing that caught our eyes was the pad of character sheets. This feels ingenious in a way I simply cannot explain; this triumphs over both a single printed character sheet in the book the developers expect us to photocopy – inevitably resulting in a crooked copy or, worse, a cracked book spine – and the thin envelope of loose sheets I expected. Here is a whole stack of potential people just waiting to be developed, neatly organized and easily distinguished.

There are class-specific character sheets for folks who know what they want to build immediately, and generic sheets for those of us who can’t make up our minds. This will not be the last time I say, “they basically thought of everything.”

Worried they gave the players a nice thing and left the taleweaver out of it? Don’t worry, they remembered some candy for everyone: check out this screen:

The two-tone design emphasizing the theme is everywhere in the art, and giving the players such a powerful visual representation of the balance of Hope and Fear goes beyond something pretty at which to stare when it’s not your turn in combat, shading over into visual reminder of the metaphors of the game experience. And this is constantly facing the players at the table. It’s just another little touch that shows the degree of thought that went into the design, not just of the game but of this offering itself.

On the other side of the screen, however, it’s a vastly different story, one equally compelling but focused less on theme and more on mechanics. Check out these charts!

The inside screen has pretty much every basic bit of information a taleweaver needs to run a Daggerheart game. No, it’s not everything, but anything you’d need during a session that isn’t on this screen that would reasonably be in your notes, or else it’s written on people’s character sheets. It’s packed pull of information, and yet the trifold screen doesn’t feel cramped. Everything seems readable at the scale provided without anything feeling “hard to find.”

Honestly, while I’m learning to run Daggerheart, I’m going to have this screen set up behind my screen. I may plan to keep using it even after I’ve learned the system, just because this way I don’t have to memorize so much!

Finally, we come to the rulebook itself, and again, please take a moment to just admire not just the art, but the two bookmark ribbons in thematically appropriate colors!

I think here I have my first tiniest complaint; it’s the same art as on the screen and the box. I appreciate the continuity, but perhaps different art using the same color scheme could’ve been applied? This feels like the most trifling of complaints, like sniffing about a lack of cup-holders on the Space Shuttle. Yes, visually, having the same piece of art in all three places ties the contents of the set together, but they could’ve relied on the two-tone motif to do that connection while providing a bit more visual distinction between “box art” and “screen art” and “book art.” It’s still a gorgeous piece of art; it’s just the same gorgeous piece of art in three separate places.

Still, the book is beautiful, and not just because of the cover art. The design of the book is beautiful as well, and it starts before ever opening the cover; check out the color-coding on the fore-edge!

Right away I can see some pretty careful selection; I put that pic through a colorblindness simulator and most of them are pretty distinct! Plus, the color swatches are all in distinct places, which helps a lot as well. Very impressive for a first look!

That’s all apéritif; behold the art:

This book is full of full-color artwork that still strongly carries color palettes. The clank druid in this picture visually pops on the page, but the strong theming color – green for nature, in this case – helps emotionally convey what the text says.

Meanwhile, the text itself is just… well, damnit, it’s pretty:

My spouse has been doing graphic design work for years, professionally for a number of them, and I have to say, it is a rare day when they say to me of any printed material, “I can’t find anything wrong.” The headers are clear and the text is well-spaced. Both columns are justified ragged-right, giving the text the feel closer to “storybook” than “newspaper.” It’s easy to read and it feels good to do so.

Of course, story is all well and good, but narrative is only part of playing Daggerheart; another part is dice, and dice require numbers, and numbers require charts, so there have to be charts, yes? Yes!

Check out the full-page chart on the right. Yes, it’s a lot of data. It’s also one of the first charts I found in the book and it’s on page 115. Where the rules need to use charts, the book is unafraid to do so, and the designers brazenly take up the space the information needs to be presented clearly and without feeling “grindy.” Where the book doesn’t need to use a chart, the designers typically opt for plain text. Daggerheart’s design team have said they want their game to put the story forward, and I think their choice of when and how to include charts, and even what is chart-worthy, helps show their commitment to that aspiration.

That said, I also want to comment their use of infographics throughout the book. I think those will do a tremendous job of helping novice players map what they’re reading onto how the game represents all this information using the visual design language of the included character sheets we mentioned before. Of course, you don’t have to use their character sheets, but given how easy they make it to make copies, and with a whole pad of sheets included, using the official sheets seems like a great way for newcomers to learn the system while they’re playing. Again, the folks who make Daggerheart have said being newcomer-friendly is one of the goals of the game’s design, and I think the consistent visual language goes a long way to help support that goal.

And with that, we come to the bottom of the well; beneath the book is a ribbon for ease of access to the contents. But that’s hardly the end of the adventure; we still have the entire second inner box to explore!

Lifting the lid on this inner chamber, we find four neat stacks of cards – another major feature of the game’s newcomer-friendly design – as well as two side compartments with cute black drawstring bags with the Daggerheart logo! Let’s leave the cards for now – there’s a lot to discuss there – and peek in those two bags first:

The larger of the two bags has several full sets of six Hope tokens for a number of different players, as well as a full set of twelve Fear tokens for the taleweaver! Hope is a critical resource for many player actions, and the “fear economy” is one of the main tools Daggerheart uses to drive narrative tension at the table. So, they’ve very kindly included tokens for you so you don’t have to go find your own!

Of course, you can always just write the numbers down, or track them on dice at the table – the designers are very clear you don’t need the tokens to play the game – but they do make for a fun visual representation; there’s something satisfying about seeing a little horde of Hope in front of you and knowing you can call on it to protect you… and something unsettling about that pile being empty and hoping nothing bad happens.

There’s also something just visually menacing – in a good way, I promise! – about watching the taleweaver’s pile grow every time a player rolls with Fear. Having watched Age of Umbra, I have to commend the designers; watching Matt Mercer slide his entire remaining stack of spare Fear tokens into his active pool after the group took a long rest gave me anxiety. Well done.

Inside the other, smaller bag, of course, we have dice!

These dice are just gorgeous; again, I know I’m using that word and others like it a lot, but I can’t stress enough just how consistent the visual language is. Purple dice with gold numbers – the standard five Platonic solids, plus a pair of percentile dice – thematically suggest flashes of hope in a fearful world, carrying through the visual language of the box/screen/cover art in a subtle but powerful way. Again, it really feels like it they thought of everything.

But that’s only seven, and there are nine dice in the set. That brings us to these two, at the heart of Daggerheart-the-game-system: the Duality Dice:

These dice – rhombic dodecahedrons – get rolled and added together, anlong with any relevant bonuses, for every player character action roll, which is how characters who want to Do Things in Daggerheart determine whether they succeed at Doing the Thing or not. If the Hope die is higher, the roll is “with hope,” and even if the sum is below the threshold – a failure – they character gains a Hope. If the Fear die is higher, the taleweaver gains a Fear, even if the character succeeds! and lastly, if they roll a pair, that’s a critical success: the character gains a Hope and clears a Stress.

We’re going to talk about those numbers, and how they play into making dramatic narratives, at a later date. For now, what I’ll say is that this combination of “how criticals are determined” plus “what dice are used” plus “how the Hope and Fear economies are designed to work” all come together to create a deeply mechanically-satisfying system.

And if there is any place where I’m disappointed, its in these. Consistently through this boxed set, the game has relied on a specific visual metaphor: Hope is gold, Fear is purple. This is reflected in the box/screen/cover art, the book tails, the rest of the dice in the set. But when it comes to the two dice in the set around which the game system is styled… one white, one black, both with all-gold numbering. What happened to the motif that had been so carefully built to this point? At least put purple numbers on the Fear die!

And for anyone who started to respond with, “but purple numbers wouldn’t look good on the black die,” why is the black die the Fear die? The game designers worked really hard to stress the theme Hope is gold, Fear is purple for what I think – and what I believe the folks at Darrington Press would agree – are some very good reasons. And I want to say I think It’s very impressive they got all the way to this point before missing something comparatively tiny. Hard to overlook, but tiny.

<sarcasm>Not only are there no cup-holders on this Space Shuttle, there’s no sun visor on the window. I guess I’m just forced to behold this breathtaking view of Earth from orbit. Bummer.</sarcasm>

Speaking of breathtaking, let’s take a look at the cards:

For starters, these cards aren’t just cardstock; they’re weighty, and the gilded edges look amazing when the cards are held in a stack. They feel important, which they should, because these are one of the other principal character building tools in the game.

Every character selects two domains at character creation, based on their class. Then, you pick two cards from your available domains to determine your starting powers. Then, when you levels up, one of your options is to take an additional domain card, giving you more tools with which to work.

Also at character creation, you get to pick your heritage, a combination of ancestry and community aspects that help give shape to who you are and where you came from. And again, the cards to represent these different backgrounds and peoples are just stunning. So much care has been put into representation throughout the material.

And if none of what’s here will help you represent how you want your characters to exist, well… there’s the card creator, and the homebrew kit for the adventuresome. Both of those we can talk about at another time.

So, what’s in the box? So much. So very much. I can only hope they make another, similar offering available in the future, because what they’ve produced here is incredible. Do you need all this to play the game? No, absolutely not. That said, what they’ve included here is enough to not just play the game, but to help elevate it to an art.

What is available right now is the Daggerheart Deluxe Set, which retails for USD59.99 and comes with the core rulebook and a complete base set of cards. The Daggerheart Dice Set is sadly currently out of stock as of this writing. I hope they bring back a similar set of Hope and Fear tokens to the shop, as well.

Credit for photographs to Electric Keet.