Sunderfolk TTRPG Offers a Thrilling Experience, Perfect for Newcomers Diving into Tabletop Gaming with Friends

At GDC 2025, I got a chance to play Sunderfolk, an upcoming cooperative turn-based tactical RPG adventure that lets you play a tabletop RPG with your friends without the need to set up any physical maps or learn a book of rules. Heck, you don’t even all have to be in the same place, as the game is entirely controlled via players’ cell phones. I had a lot of fun playing Sunderfolk, appreciating how its approachable structure and simple combat system made for a far easier set of mechanics to grasp in comparison to the likes of Dungeons & Dragons 5e, Pathfinder 2e, or Vampire: The Masquerade 5e. Plenty of friend groups who have always wanted to see what all the fuss is about when it comes to tabletop RPGs but simply don’t have the time or money to jump into the hobby are going to find a lot to love with Sunderfolk.

In Sunderfolk, each player picks from one of six characters: the raven Arcanist is your traditional spellcaster, the bat Bard empowers and heals allies through song, the polar bear Berserker dominates the front line with a massive hammer, the goat Ranger outputs more damage the farther they are away from the action, the weasel Rogue dismantles foes from up close, and the salamander Pyromancer unleashes fiery explosions. These six characters have been tasked with defending the Arden, a peaceful town where anthropomorphic animals live together, from a growing shadowy corruption that is transforming previously manageable annoyances into monstrous threats.

I opted for the Ranger, while two members of developer Secret Door played alongside me as the Bard and Berserker. Sunderfolk can be played alone (one player would just be controlling multiple characters, akin to Baldur’s Gate 3), but most of my enjoyment came from strategizing with my teammates and trying to figure out how to best pair our unique abilities together to handle a combat situation. Up to four players can play at a time in Sunderfolk, and grabbing a group of three or four feels like the ideal way to play this game.

While the action happened on the TV in front of us, we each controlled our respective characters with our phones. Each character has their own deck of cards with unique abilities–the Ranger, for example, had a card that when played would release a piercing shot that could hit multiple targets in a line, while the Bard had a card that let them briefly enthral a target and move them to a different space on the hexagonal board. There’s no turn order to Sunderfolk, allowing players to not only choose what they do on their turn but in what order. My teammates and I would have a brief back-and-forth to discuss our options, occasionally having someone cancel their turn in the midst of planning it out so that someone else could go first.

In the combat section I played, our objective was to defeat a bunch of bad guys who were being mutated into powerful monsters, with little timers above their heads letting us know how many turns were left before each of their transformations. The devs told me that Sunderfolk will have combat encounters with plenty of other types of objectives, like defending a point against waves of enemies. I can’t speak to what these other objective types are like, but I’m curious to play them. Some of the characters have cards that felt really out of place in a scenario that was all about defeating enemies as quickly as possible–the Ranger had an option to stop an enemy from moving and then leapfrog away, for instance–and I wonder if those cards would have felt more satisfying to play when faced with a different type of objective.

Between missions, all the players return to the hub-like Arden, usually leveling up and unlocking new passive perks. It is in town where each player can unlock new cards and customize their deck, talk to NPCs to befriend and/or romance them, and use loot to buy upgrades to the town that can net party-wide perks. During this downtime, the action switches from the big screen to each player’s individual phone, allowing people to do whatever they want (or for someone to go to the bathroom or grab a snack while others go work on their card deck or something).

My favorite part of downtime is the option to name things. When our party finished funding repairs for a bridge, the player who put the most gold into the project got to name it, and then, on all of our phones, that name showed up whenever one of us visited the bridge. In addition, the NPCs would use that name when talking about the bridge. There were other fun examples of this, too, like an NPC asking the Bard to remind her what a specific thing was again, and then her using the name the dev typed in when my Ranger went to talk to her. It’s a small narrative touch, but it allows you and your friends to not only build your group’s version of Arden but craft stories for it too. This system of storytelling extends to other parts of the game as well. If one player romances an NPC, that will be reflected in conversations other players have with that NPC, for example, and that player will get a unique gameplay perk that relates to the romance shared between their character and that specific NPC–their connection is regularly reflected in the gameplay.

The story, action, and characters are all voiced by one actor: Anjali Bhimani. From what I’ve heard so far, she does a remarkable job, adjusting her cadence, tone, and pitch to give all the major characters their own voice and then using her natural voice to narrate what’s happening (even during combat!) and help nudge players in the right direction if they need it. This replicates the feeling of playing a tabletop RPG with a Game Master while ensuring no one at the table has to actually step up and be the one responsible for dictating what happens next and bringing the story to life. I like this choice, and after loving Amelia Tyler as the Dungeon Master in Baldur’s Gate 3, I hope that this is just the natural storytelling tool for these types of games going forward. Game Masters do so much and are such a crucial part of the experience for certain tabletop RPGs, that now that I know what we’ve been missing all this time, I do not want to go back and play certain video games–I can feel the void in TTRPG video games that forgo that all-knowing, guiding voice.

All of this is to say that Sunderfolk was my favorite demo at GDC this year and is one of my most anticipated games for 2025. I can’t wait to rope my friends into playing it with me in a few weeks when it launches for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, PC, and Switch on April 23.