Dungeons & Dragons 5e’s accessible rules vastly increased the popularity of tabletop role-playing games, but Wizards of the Coast is continuing to look for ways to expand its audience. While D&D starter sets have traditionally been presented as an easy way to try the game with pregenerated characters, dice, and short or medium-sized adventures packed in one box, Wizards is positioning the new Heroes of the Borderlands bundle, releasing Sept. 16, as a board game that can introduce players to the world of D&D.
Dungeon crawler board games are extremely popular, with some like HeroQuest requiring one player to act as a Dungeon Master of sorts, while others like Descent: Legends of the Dark and Gloomhaven are fully collaborative experiences. Mastering a dungeon crawler’s rules and the tactics needed to succeed in their sometimes unforgiving fights can be every bit as hard as learning to play D&D, but they can be less intimidating than reading through several hundred pages of a hardcover book and finding the time to schedule regular play sessions.
Heroes of the Borderlands makes the D&D experience far more tactical than previous starter sets like Dragons of Stormwreck Isle. Miniatures, maps, and spell cards have typically been marketed as optional accessories to enhance your game, but they’re included in Heroes of the Borderlands, which is D&D’s largest starter set ever. Rather than using a character sheet to track your abilities and equipment, the set provides more than 200 cards representing every aspect of your character. It’s a system that will feel more familiar to dungeon crawler players, and one also used in Darrington Press’ new D&D rival Daggerheart.
The setting of the adventures is inspired by the classic and beloved module B2, The Keep on the Borderlands, designed by D&D creator Gary Gygax in 1979. Three adventure booklets are designed to provide 40 to 60 hours of gameplay through a mix of combat, exploration, and roleplaying that can be divided into sessions that take as little as an hour. That’s also likely to encourage new players who might be intimidated by spending an hour making a character and then committing to four hours to play through an adventure. The set also aims to make things easier on new DMs with a quick-start guide and a Combat Tracker for managing initiatives in combat. The bundle also includes a whopping 18 maps and over 200 tokens for creatures and terrain, making this starter set a great resource even for experienced players and DMs.
Heroes on the Borderlands is available to preorder for $49.99 through D&D Beyond. A digital version is $14.99 and both can be combined for $54.99. The set will be released on Sept. 16.