The Lantern Bearers

What The Lantern Bearers Actually Is

The Lantern Bearers is a cooperative board game designed by Michael R. Elliott and illustrated by Paul Bonner. It came out around 2013 through Starling Games. The premise is straightforward: you and your fellow players take on the roles of lantern bearers walking through a dark, dangerous forest to reach a safe haven before night fully consumes the path. The game uses a deck of cards to represent the journey, with hidden threats lurking in every card draw. I picked this up at a game store in Portland back in 2014, right when it was getting attention for its art direction. What I didn't expect was how thin the mechanics actually are underneath all those beautiful illustrations. The game is elegant in its simplicity, but that simplicity is also where it falls apart after repeated plays.

The Lantern Bearers gameplay breakdown

Here is how the game works in practice. Each round, players draw cards from a shared deck that represents the path ahead. Some cards show safe ground. Others show monsters, darkness, or obstacles. The lantern mechanic is the core resource system: you have a limited amount of light, and every action costs lantern fuel. Moving forward costs fuel. Fighting costs fuel. Resting costs fuel. If your lantern goes out, you lose. The deck is finite. That is the whole tension of the game. You know there are only so many cards before you reach the end, but you do not know which ones are threats and which ones are safe. The card order is set at the start of the game and reshuffled, so each playthrough has a different sequence. I have played this probably thirty times and I can still name the exact shuffle that killed us on night two of a session with my sister.

Setting Up the Game

The setup takes about ten to fifteen minutes depending on how experienced your group is. You separate the card deck, place the monster markers beside the board, and each player takes a lantern token and a character card. The character abilities are minimal: each one grants a single special action like being able to draw an extra card once per game or ignoring one darkness card. These abilities feel underpowered compared to the rest of the system. One thing most new players miss on their first run: the darkness cards are not just obstacles. They actively reduce your lantern fuel at a rate that most groups do not account for until it is too late. I learned this the hard way during a four-player game where we burned through our light reserve in the first third of the deck because nobody had done the math on cumulative darkness penalties. We lost about twelve minutes of gameplay before someone realized what was happening, and by then the game state was unrecoverable.

Common Pitfalls Beginners Should Avoid

The biggest mistake I see groups make is treating this as a combat game. It is not. The monsters in this game are survivable if you manage your resources. They become lethal the moment you start fighting them aggressively because fighting is expensive. The optimal strategy is avoidance and conservation, not confrontation. I watched a group at a convention lose three games in a row by trying to fight their way through, and on the fourth try they won by simply walking around everything. Another pitfall is the resting mechanic. You can rest to restore a small amount of lantern fuel, but resting also advances the turn counter in ways that accelerate the deck depletion. The trade-off is brutal and most players do not model it correctly. I usually tell people to treat resting as a last resort rather than a routine part of their strategy.

Why the Game Struggles Long-Term

After the novelty wears off, The Lantern Bearers reveals some structural weaknesses. The character abilities are too narrow to create meaningful strategic divergence. Every game feels mechanically identical regardless of which characters you pick. The card randomness dominates decision-making to the point where player agency is limited. You are mostly reacting to what the deck gives you rather than executing a plan. The art is genuinely outstanding. Paul Bonner did the illustrations and they are some of the best I have seen in a board game from that era. But beautiful art does not compensate for a thin mechanical framework when you are paying twelve dollars a hour of playtime. I would estimate the average play session runs about forty-five minutes to an hour, and after five or six games the experience degrades significantly because nothing changes.

Who Should Actually Buy This

This game works well as a one-evening experience or a gateway game for people who are new to cooperative board games. If you have never played a co-op game before, The Lantern Bearers introduces the concept without overwhelming you with rules. It is not a game I would recommend for regular play at the table. There are better cooperative games that offer the same tension with deeper mechanics and more replay value. If you find a used copy for under twenty dollars at a thrift store or game meetup, grab it for the art book alone. The component quality is solid. The cards are nice to hold. The box art looks good on a shelf. But do not expect this to become a staple of your game nights. It is a mood piece, not a strategy game.

Where to get it

Starling Games originally published it and they still list it on their website. You can also find it on BoardGameGeek's marketplace section, eBay, and occasionally at local game stores that order used inventory. The game is out of print now so new copies run around forty to sixty dollars, which is not reasonable for what you are getting. A used copy in good condition should cost between fifteen and twenty-five dollars.