Learn to Play: The Last of Us: Escape the Dark

Join us at Pandemonium for our 3-hour, bi-weekly session to learn and play games! You’re especially welcome if you’ve never before played hobby board games (and are curious about where to start). 

Today, we’ll be exploring The Last of Us: Escape the Dark, a narrative-survival board game set in the world of the video game and TV series. 

In Escape the Dark, you and up to 4 other players win by fleeing the FEDRA Quarantine Zone and making your way to the rumored-free city of Jackson. To get there, you’ll have to pass through different locations along the way, clearing out their zombie — and human — threats before advancing. In-between stops, you can heal (a little), scavenge for items, and craft or upgrade gear. If you can do this before 16 rounds (or before a character dies), you’ll succeed!

It’s important to think of this game less as a 1:1 adaptation of The Last of Us and more as the next iteration of Themeborne’s Escape the Dark series. To that point — especially if we have more than 5 players — we’ll also have Escape the Dark Castle and Escape the Dark Sector on hand if you want to try them out. What you need to know is that these games emphasize a narrative experience more than fairness, where most actions you take come down, ultimately, to dice rolls. To that point, if you go in expecting the dice to save you, you may not do as well as if you go in with planning, teamwork, and plenty of resources to mitigate bad luck. But if you fail, remember — it is a zombie apocalypse. Such things happen.