At Resolution Games, we love tabletop RPGs as much as anyone. Maybe even more! After all, you don’t make a game like Demeo without spending several hundred nights at the kitchen table rolling dice and fighting bugs.
However, for every board game fan, there are dozens of curious board gamers who are eager to try their hand at the hobby, but feel overwhelmed by the volumes of text and rules they would need to analyze. And that’s even before creating a character sheet! Demeo is built for desktop gamers, but also for the desktop curious.
In short, Demeo is a fantasy board game for everyone.
To make pen-and-paper RPGs more accessible, we’ve focused on the basics of what makes these games great: complex monsters, unique class-based abilities, narrative intrigue, and playing with friends. With this as a foundation, we designed Demeo to present these elements in a way that is easy to understand and keeps the game moving. (Strategy is important, but there’s nothing worse than waiting 15 minutes for the nth level wizard sitting to your left to finish his turn!)
To make the actions intuitive, the available choices for each party member are presented on cards that can be played on your turn. Instead of memorizing a dozen possible actions a player can perform (or memorizing spell lists, or remembering what advantages a character’s magic weapon has given), each possible action is presented on a clear, easy-to-understand card that maintains a stable pace of play.
Some of these cards, like Hunter’s Arrow, are replenished every time and are a standard action for the class. However, most, from the Wizard’s massive fireball to healing potions and repeatable ballistas, are one-shot cards that add an important layer of strategy. Of course, you could use that Charm Scroll to convince the elven archer to fight for you right now; but maybe you’d better save it until you can convince an Ice Elemental to do your bidding in a crowded room full of spiders?
Board games also have an element of luck, and Demeo is no different. Instead of a bag full of versatile dice that determine hits, damage, etc., Demeo’s approach simplifies the rolling experience. A single die with three possible faces determines whether the player misses, hits, or critically hits — and you guessed it: if you’re playing on PlayStation VR2, rolling a die in virtual form is just as good as having a real die in your hands.
In fact, thanks to the capabilities of PS VR2, the Demeo experience is tactile in a way that simply hasn’t been possible before. With the tactile touches of the PlayStation VR2 Sense controllers, picking up your miniature really feels like picking up your own miniature. And if your hero happens to be knocked down or killed by one of the many monsters, the PS VR2 headset’s vibration ensures you’ll never forget it.
The social experience of game night is faithfully recreated through gameplay that benefits from table conversation and collaborative strategy, but Demeo is an experience that works well for solo players as well. As any TTRPG fan will tell you, sometimes the biggest challenge is just getting everyone scheduled for game night. Demeo allows players to scratch an itch on the table, even when no one is around. In fact, one of the biggest compliments we get comes from Game Masters who tell us they turned to Demeo as a replacement game when someone was missing from their group that week. Instead of running a one-off campaign to avoid promoting their tabletop campaign without all of their regular players present, they run Demeo. And it continues to knock us down.
Demeo has a detailed world filled with different settings, monsters and scheming, depraved villains – but as a player you have the ability to immerse yourself in that world rather than building it moment by moment. It doesn’t take a quick dungeon thinker to juggle rules, monsters, and whatever else a player can throw at them. And while five full adventures are included in the game, Demeo lets players enjoy the adventures. Each session in one of these ready-made adventures is unique, thanks to randomly assembled levels, random distribution of monsters and treasures, different action maps in the game, and the ability to mix different heroes in any configuration you want.
We’ve always loved a good dungeon – so we’ve designed an experience that lets you dive right in, even if you’ve never played D20 in your life. If this sounds like your kind of fun, we can’t wait for you to join us in the world of Gilmerra! Demeo is already available on PS VR2.