Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set #preview #previewcopy #watchitplayed

I don't normally do unboxing videos, but I decided to this time for a game a publisher sent me, which represents the latest version of a product they've released in the past that for me has often fallen short of what I was hoping it would be. And this time around, I feel I can say it not just met, but has exceeded my expectations.

I'm talking about the newest starter set for Dungeons and Dragons. It's called Heroes of the Borderlands, and it comes with all of this stuff. And yes, it's a lot of stuff, but if it's not useful, then who cares? So, let's see what this is. There is a quick start guide. This tells you what comes in the box, how to organize it, and how you'll be using it.

There's also a play guide. This gives you the rules of Dungeons and Dragons as you need to know them to run everything here. What I really like is there's a glossery at the back, so you don't have to memorize all of the rules. You can look things up as necessary when playing. Don't remember what burning is?

You can look it up here and see how it works. There are three different adventure books to play through. Each of these represent different areas that you can explore, and those areas are broken down into smaller sections here for the DM to run. And you can bounce back and forth between these different books over a series of different adventures.

And these will tell you also what equipment or what items you need from the box to help facilitate what you're playing. There's handouts for the players. There are maps to play on, big, colorful, illustrated, double-sided maps. loads of them. So, when you're in a cave and you're having an encounter with monsters, you can play it out on a big map with standees that represent your characters and tokens that represent all the different types of monsters you'll encounter.

There's even gold to hand out to the players when you find that wonderful gold. There are cards for each of the monsters, so you can show the players this large picture of what they're encountering, and then you have all the information as the person running the game for how that monster works. There are player aids for the players.

If they're not sure what actions they can take, it tells them here, as well as what they can do during combat. There's combat trackers. There are all kinds of cards that represent the different types of spells, including how they work on the back. Weapons that you can hand out to the player saying, "Okay, you have a great sword.

Here's what it looks like, and here's how it works." There are NPCs that you'll encounter. And this will tell the person running the game what those NPCs know, kind of their traits. It'll help bring them to life. There are cards for the players to represent. This is a big table to go. I walk around.

They're player sheets. Okay, so you have a cleric. There's the level one player sheet. Gives all the information they need to know to run their character, including spaces to put their equipment in as they gain equipment. And these go up level one. This side is level two, level three, level four. To me, this represents a ton of supporting material to make it easier both for the person running the game and the players experiencing it to get in to do their share of the work and also have the work fall into the background so they can just have fun playing the adventure.

I have to say I'm really impressed.