When revealed, the philosophy behind Dungeon & Dragon‘s new starter set, Heroes of the Borderlands, was unsurprisingly divisive as detractors manufactured dire hypotheticals based on what had been announced. A board game? $50? Will it have levelling? Will it properly honor and preserve the legacy of the setting’s creator, the almighty Gygax?

Now, a lot has already been said about this set. It’s out, and you can go to countless places on the internet to read, see, and/or hear detailed reviews and breakdowns of the set’s content. I don’t intend to add to that noise with this, rather to present a perspective that might be useful for some portion of its potential audience.

When Heroes was announced there was a lot of what I will generously call “concern” from corners of the internet about it being more board-game-like than was tradition. Debates ensued and questions were raised about who the set was for and if it would succeed in reaching and satisfying its intended audience. Is it for longtime 5e players wanting to test the waters of the 2024 revision? Is it for longtime fans wanting to relive classic adventures from the days of Gygax? Is it for casual Target shoppers to grab for their next game night? The answer to each of those is complicated, and while I have opinions on its successes and failures for each of those, they’re outside the scope of this piece.

But first, since this is my first time contributing to D&D content on the site, I should perhaps share a little background about my own history with the game. I started playing D&D in earnest in 2023. Exposition Break‘s own Sean Gandert had introduced me to the game before that and I’d actually been amassing a semi-embarrassingly large collection of 5e books since 2019, but it wasn’t until I found a steady group at my new hometown’s brewery that I truly considered myself someone who knew the game. I had long aspired to play D&D and also knew I wanted it to be something I could do with my children when they were older—hence the semi-embarrassingly large collection of 5e books. Since 2023, I’ve been playing in regular weekly sessions at the brewery and actually started running my own campaign online with friends scattered across the continent. I’ve dabbled in small sessions with my kids, but only so much as they’re four- and six-year-old attention spans can handle.

My kids are why I’m writing this today. Prepping a 45-minute session for my children actually takes more work and time than you’d expect. If they wanted to play, I for various reasons had to often put in as much prep time as I would for a much longer session with my adult players. On one occasion, I tried to run a very simple theater-of-the-mind session with them and, well, they weren’t ready for that. This all meant that D&D was never something we could do on a whim, and as a result we never played as much as any of us would have liked.

This past weekend changed things a bit, though. See, we’d promised my six-year-old that we could play Welcome to Everdell on Sunday. But with household projects and other things taking over the day, my wife and I were quickly coming to realize we just wouldn’t have time to play, not with both of us there, at least. We both knew that this was going to be a massive disappointment to him—though not so much our four-year-old, who finds watching us play Welcome to Everdell horrifically boring. We both felt bad. We wanted to play with him and he had been talking about it for days, but the timing of our projects was non-negotiable. They had to get done. But then I had an idea.

A few days prior, I had picked up a copy of Heroes of the Borderlands from my local game shop, and in that moment, I figured “Hey, let’s see how this thing holds up.” I called the kids into the room and let them know that we weren’t going to be able to play Welcome to Everdell, and as the tears started to well in my eldest’s eyes, I quickly added “but how about we play D&D instead while mom finishes things up?

“YEAH!”

Whew… first barrier past.

I sent them to go pick up their toys while I went downstairs to set things up. I had about 15 minutes to get ready.

I opened the box, skimmed the first few pages of the play guide, grabbed the “Wilderness Adventure Booklet,” popped out some monster tokens, grabbed the reference cards for the NPCs and monsters they’d encounter, laid out the included battle map of the trail they’d be on, and told them I was ready. I was actually probably ready in five minutes, not including dealing with packaging.

We set up their play mats together, which are the set’s stand-in for a traditional character sheet. They got cards for their weapons, spells, and armor, and we were ready to go. Perhaps another five minutes.

And from there I was running our session. They met and talked to some NPCs. They discovered an abandoned wagon that had clearly been looted by bandits. And they were later ambushed by those bandits. Was any of it groundbreaking? Not in the slightest. But the tools the set provided made set-up and play a breeze. They’re talking to an NPC? I have a card that has a picture on one side and some quick notes about their personality on the other. They get into a fight with the bandits? I have a card handy with everything I need to know and their tokens right at my fingertips. The set even supplies handy little combat tracker sheets. As for my kids, their character mats we’re significantly more accessible to them than a standard character sheet, and while I still had to help them a bit, it all made more sense to them how things worked. We had a blast and much of that was thanks to the board-game-ification of it all. But what’s more important is that said board-game-ification didn’t feel like a sacrifice.

Now the set is, of course, not without its shortcomings. Mainly, I think the “Adventure” book I used relied a bit too much on the DM to fill in some pretty massive narrative gaps, and had I not had DMing experience they might have left me a bit lost. But maybe not. It’s hard to truly put myself into that totally ignorant mindset. But that said, I can without a doubt say that I wish this set existed when I first started playing the game. As far as onboarding goes, it’s by FAR the best 5e has to offer.

So that’s my weird little review. The set makes D&D more accessible through its ease of prep and its player onboarding. If you find fault in that, well, I don’t want you at my table.