Tactical Tabletop RPG Sunderfolk Available Free for Limited Time

Playing a tabletop RPG sounds great right up until you have to actually schedule one. You need a group of willing players, someone prepared to run the thing, a working knowledge of a small library’s worth of rules, and a night when everyone is free.

Video game adaptations and riffs on tabletop games have become an appealing alternative. Baldur’s Gate 3 drops you into the Forgotten Realms with a mind flayer tadpole wriggling behind your eye and a party of memorable companions. Gloomhaven sends a band of mercenaries into a dark fantasy frontier of ancient ruins and dangerous dungeons. These games handle all the rules for you rather than relying on a friend who skimmed the rulebook an hour before the session.

An easy and free way to try another take on this formula is available for the next few days.

That game is Sunderfolk, a tactical RPG from Secret Door, which is a studio made up of former Blizzard developers. It takes the bones of a tabletop campaign and packages them into a game designed to manage the background rules. From Aug. 13-16, Sunderfolk is free to play on Xbox as part of Xbox Free Play Days.

Sunderfolk is a tabletop campaign that’s easy to set up

Sunderfolk is a turn-based tactical RPG built to capture the feeling of working through a tabletop campaign without requiring anyone to study a rulebook first. Players choose from six animal heroes, including a hulking bear Berserker, a bat Bard, and a fire-slinging Pyromancer. They venture out from the town of Arden on missions played across hex-based battlefields.

Encounters quickly grow more elaborate than simply surrounding monsters and attacking them. Maps are filled with hazards, objectives, and opportunities to shove enemies into pits or, in one memorable mission from our review, directly into the path of giant beetles being used as mine carts.

Players control the game using a phone or tablet as their controller, character sheet, and hand of ability cards while the main game runs on a TV or monitor. The device lets you aim attacks and movement on the shared screen while keeping abilities, equipment, and monster details in your hand. Our review found the setup intuitive because it lets the big screen function like a board sitting in the middle of a table rather than covering it in menus.

Instead of dice, abilities draw from a customizable deck of Fate Cards, adding a deck-building element to the tactical combat. Between quests, you return to Arden to upgrade your party and interact with its residents, with some decisions and conversations delivered privately to individual players’ phones. This design led Polygon to recommend Sunderfolk as a tabletop alternative because it handles the rules and bookkeeping while leaving players to make the decisions.

Sunderfolk is approachable and crunchy enough to scratch that tabletop itch without demanding you clear your calendar for a months-long campaign. With the whole game free to play for a few days, you can round up some friends and give it a shot for a free game night.

Source: Polygon