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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, most daunting of all, a night when everyone is free.
There’s a reason video game adaptations and riffs on tabletop games have become such 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 equally doomed, deeply memorable companions, while Gloomhaven sends a band of mercenaries into a dark fantasy frontier of ancient ruins, dangerous dungeons, and increasingly deadly contracts. Better yet, the games handle all the rules for you, rather than relying on your friend who skimmed the campaign setting and rulebook an hour before everyone showed up.
And for the next few days, there’s an especially easy — and free — way to try another take on the formula.
That game is Sunderfolk, a tactical RPG from Secret Door, a studio made up of former Blizzard developers. It takes the bones of a tabletop campaign — a party of colorful heroes, turn-based battles, quests, loot, and plenty of monsters — and packages them into a game designed to take care of the fiddly stuff for you. 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
At its core, 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 — and venture out from the town of Arden on missions played across hex-based battlefields.
Those encounters quickly get more elaborate than simply surrounding monsters and whacking 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.
The unusual part is how you control all of this. Sunderfolk runs on your TV or monitor, but each player uses a phone or tablet as their controller, character sheet, and hand of ability cards. Your device lets you aim attacks and movement on the shared screen while keeping all the crunchy RPG information — abilities, equipment, monster details, and more — in your hand. Our review found the setup surprisingly intuitive, particularly because it lets the big screen function like the 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 light deck-building element to Sunderfolk’s 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. It’s part of why we’ve recommended Sunderfolk as a great tabletop alternative — it handles the rules and bookkeeping while leaving you to make the fun decisions.
Sunderfolk is charming, approachable, and just crunchy enough to scratch that tabletop itch without demanding you clear your calendar for a months-long campaign. And with the whole thing free to play for a few days, there’s not much downside to rounding up some friends and giving it a shot. At the very least, you’ve got yourself a free game night.
