There’s a term in tabletop gaming: “beer and pretzels.” It’s an epithet you’ll find tacked on to any game best played with unserious intentions and inebriants aplenty. I’ve described Deep Rock Galactic to friends as a “beer and pretzels” sort of horde shooter, so I don’t know why it never occurred to me that one of the best co-op games on Steam would also make a great party-friendly board game. It absolutely did from the looks of it, and three expansions are now inbound after publisher MOOD’s Kickstarter for the addons secured full funding in all of five minutes.
You can follow the board game expansions’ Kickstarter here, where at the time of writing it’s amassed over $900,000 in crowdfunding—well past the target of $23,540. The first update blog confirms that a legion of 3,732 backers carried the campaign to 3788% funding in the first 24 hours.
The expansions—Rival Incursion, Horrors of Hoxxes, and the Shockwyrm mini-expansion—each come with their own glut of new environments, miniatures, and cards to flesh out the existing game’s mineral-hoarding, bug-blasting action. There are a lot of familiar treats for fans, like snazzy new miniatures for the Glyphid Dreadnought twins and a “flick the barrel” minigame recognizable to anyone who’s gotten bored in DRG’s in-game lobby.
If you weren’t aware that Steam’s favorite space dwarves even had a board game, it’s a passion project that started germinating within Ghost Ship back in 2020. It’s a dice-rolling dungeon crawler where you pick a dwarf, your equipment, and a premade scenario, praying you make it out with your riches before giant alien bugs slurp your brain out. It’s been remarkably well-received, currently sitting at a comfortably high 8.1 average rating on BoardGameGeek.
On top of sounding like an all-around good time, it’s another victory lap for the breakout hit spelunk ’em up. In case you’ve been living under a yet-to-be-mined rock, Deep Rock spinoffs include an upcoming roguelike, a Vampire Survivors-style auto-shooter, and a heavy metal crossover song by a band that, admittedly, already had dwarves as their whole thing. Given that it’s one of the only games I can play without randoms teaching me the latest innovations in profanity, it’s hard not to cheer on the game’s continued success.
There are 27 days left to support the Kickstarter, which runs until August 1. If you only play games if a keyboard and mouse is involved, the videogame version of Deep Rock Galactic is going for $9.89 on Steam through July 10.
