Steamforged Games

Steamforged Games is a British tabletop game publisher founded in 2014 by Mat Hart and Rich Loxam. The company first attracted major attention through its Kickstarter campaign for Dark Souls: The Board Game, launched in 2016. The campaign raised more than £3.7 million from over 31,000 backers, making it one of Kickstarter’s prominent tabletop successes at the time. Designed as a cooperative dungeon-crawling game for one to four players, it adapted FromSoftware’s Dark Souls into a system built around exploration, tactical combat, character development, and deliberately punishing encounters. The company continued developing licensed adaptations of video games. Resident Evil 2: The Board Game, released in 2018, translated Capcom’s survival-horror setting into a cooperative campaign involving exploration, resource management, zombies, and other threats in Raccoon City. Steamforged later published Resident Evil 3: The Board Game and Resident Evil: The Board Game, the latter drawing on the original game and its mansion setting. Its other adaptations include Horizon Zero Dawn: The Board Game, based on Guerrilla’s science-fiction action role-playing game, and Monster Hunter: World – The Board Game, developed with Capcom and focused on hunting large monsters, crafting equipment, and improving hunters between battles. Steamforged has also produced original settings rather than relying exclusively on established electronic-game properties. Euthia: Torment of Resurrection, originally created by Diea Games and supported through crowdfunding, is an open-world fantasy adventure featuring character growth, exploration, crafting, and scenario-based quests. Bardsung: Legend of the Ancient Forge is a cooperative dungeon-crawling campaign centered on a group of adventurers and a substantial collection of miniatures. The company has additionally worked on tabletop versions of Dark Souls role-playing content and other fantasy products connected to its broader games portfolio. Its publishing model often combines crowdfunding, licensed intellectual property, detailed miniatures, and campaign-driven play. That approach has enabled Steamforged to turn recognizable game worlds into physical products while preserving recognizable themes: Dark Souls emphasizes risk and endurance, Resident Evil emphasizes scarcity and fear, Horizon emphasizes machines and hunting, and Monster Hunter emphasizes preparation and targeted combat. Steamforged’s history therefore reflects the growth of licensed tabletop adaptations during the 2010s and 2020s, while its original projects demonstrate an effort to establish proprietary worlds alongside high-profile partnerships. Through these releases, the company became especially associated with cooperative adventure games that combine narrative progression, miniature-based battles, and repeatable campaign systems.