The Dark Quarter Review

Vampires and Casket Girls rule the night. Privileged information about grisly murders is the currency of the land. You’re a detective for a paranormal investigation agency for ‘The Wet Grave’ that is New Orleans in 1981, and you’re lucky if you’ll make it out alive.

The Dark Quarter, an app-dependent storytelling board game by Lucky Duck Games and Van Ryder Games, takes on the well-trod New Orleans Noir genre. If you’ve read Anne Rice or played any of Vampire The Masquerade’s offerings, you’ll be familiar with the vibe. The streets are mean, the language is ugly, and death could be lurking around any corner.

App based games have been busy carving out a niche for themselves in the specialty gaming market for the better part of the last ten years, and Dark Quarter takes the bold swing of being fully app dependent, to the extent that those who received their kickstarted physical copies before the app was available were unable to play for several months. Now that both pieces are ready and available at the same time, how does a 100% app-dependent game hold up? Can you survive what lurks in the darkest corners of the night?

Gameplay Overview:

For character creation, the players refer to the app for their individual character set up. Everyone gets a unique character board with slots and cubes to track four stats, the app telling you what those stats should start at. Characters get a miniature, a unique deck of ability cards that they can slowly unlock, a few items, and their own pool of D6.

Player turns are also simple. You choose any location on the map (there’s no travel time and all players have immediate access to all information about unveiled locations) and select it in the app. You roll dice to investigate the location or question someone there. Different dice check situations align with different stats: Talent, Combat, Arcane, and Charisma. Good dice rolls may improve your stats and give your team experience points that can be split up later to buy abilities.

Poor rolls may generate additional dice in your pool for your next try. If you roll a Fleur de Lis on a dice you can add your stats for the correct category to the total, and your abilities may also let you increase your roll totals. Items may have minor impacts, unlocking extra dialogue or story options. Combat is also done through dice checks. The game can be played solo, but it’s just done by one player administering multiple characters at a time.

As you explore, you may unlock clues about the mystery, new locations to investigate, or trigger text that helps develop your character. Every turn boils down to move, roll a skill check, read a long block of text, and repeat.

Game Experience:

What really works well for this game is the flavor and setting. New Orleans lends itself perfectly to the dark paranormal investigation, and they throw in a lot of specific details, like mentions to the historic levee failures during Hurricane Betsy and Annie Christmas. The plot is dark and grim, and there’s an enormous amount of story content to sink your teeth into. The first of three scenarios took us about three and a half hours to play straight through, but the app offers frequent and convenient intermission points where you can take stock of your stats and items and pause for picking up at a later time.

In the base game, your character options are limited, and once you choose, you are locked in. There is no option for adding players as the campaign progresses or dropping them out unless they die, so if you plan to play across multiple sessions, you’ll need to have a committed game group. There isn’t a lot of functional difference between the characters, especially at the beginning.

As you progress and are able to increase your stats, there is some opportunity to specialize, although the impact feels pretty minimal. There are moments when you have to make character choices against a timer, which can impact the story later down the line, but those moments are few and far between.

The character backstories are what set them apart. Each of them have their own interesting mysteries to uncover, wound tightly into the main plot. The designers mean it when they say 18+. The content of this story is immediately disturbing, and the language is salty. By turn two you may or may not have murdered a dog. It’s not a game to play at the kitchen table with your kids in the next room. The plot itself feels less like a puzzle-forward mystery for you to detect and more like a character study in a visual novel.

I had mixed feelings about the app. In the positive column, it ran smoothly on my iPad and was easy to download and navigate. I think a phone screen would have been too small to easily work together with multiple players from, and QR code scanning from a computer with the Steam app can be cumbersome. It was awkward to find a way to fit us all around the table in a way that we could both easily read the text and reach to scan cards, but the scanning function did work well.

There were sections where the text was cut off on my screen, making us miss instructions and important story points. None of our troubleshooting fixed this. There’s no going back to previous screens, so if you finger fumble or input something wrong when saving at intermissions there is no way to correct the error.  While the ambient music is evocative, I really can’t stress enough how much text you’ll be reading because the app does not have narration tracks. In fact, the amount of time you’ll spend reading for your character makes me hesitate to suggest this to players that don’t already enjoy roleplaying games, because that’s really the bulk of the play experience here.

For me, the redeeming quality of app-based games is that they do a lot of the teaching and upkeep for you, but that’s not the case here. It has no tutorial mode, so you’ll spend a lot of time flipping back and forth with the rulebook. Most problematic, the app manages so much of the game that the physical board and miniatures feel like unwelcome upkeep. We kept realizing that we had spent several turns in a row moving our digital avatars but not our physical ones, with no perceptible impact on gameplay. Location cards, which can eventually take up a big chunk of your table, similarly repeat information that is set up for you in the app, making them feel unnecessary on the play space. Scanning in item cards is one of the few circumstances that truly requires the components. The game is 100% dependent on a free app, to the extent that it doesn’t feel like the $50 physical game brings enough to the table to justify taking up the shelf space.

Final Thoughts:

While the story is heavy, The Dark Quarter itself is deceptively light. It boils down to a roll and move, with intensive storytelling facilitated by the app. If you’re looking for a campaign game that prioritizes story progression over complex gameplay, this is a solid choice. If you tried Vampire The Masquerade: Chapters and were intimidated by the upkeep and difficulty curve, this is a much more approachable option. If you want a visual novel that you can experience side by side with your friends, this will give you a memorable experience. But if you’re looking for a game that challenges your strategy skills, or that asks something more from you beyond rolling dice and clicking buttons, you can pass on this one.

Final Score: 2.5 Stars – Storytelling is top notch, but gameplay leaves a lot to be desired

Hits:
• The storytelling is compelling with interesting character backgrounds
• There’s a lot of content in the base box to explore
• Set up of the physical components is simple, letting you dive into the game quickly

Misses:
• We had issues with the app cutting off text
• The mechanics are very simple and heavily weighted towards luck, requiring almost no strategy
• 95% of your play time is spent reading text aloud