Former Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 devs' D&D-style RPG has "Blizzard's DNA," but it's a "completely new paradigm" in gaming

Sunderfolk is a game unlike any other. How, you ask? Understandable - true innovation is rare these days. On paper it's a turn-based strategy game with D&D flavorings, and while we've seen a lot of that in a post-Baldur's Gate 3 world, Sunderfolk stands out as something special. First of all, there's literally nothing quite like it on the market. You control the action on the big screen using your phone, where you decide your movements, draw from your roguelike-esque Fate Card deck, and choose your abilities. Then, there's its playfulness. Narrated by the wonderful Anjali Bhimani, who lends her voice to Overwatch's Symmetra and Apex Legends' Rampart, while flexing her DM muscles on Critical Role, her comedic voices contrast starkly with, say, Amelia Tyler's BG3 whisperings. It gives Sunderfolk more of a quirky boardgame night feel when compared to Larian's sprawling epic, which, while genuinely funny in many places, is still a mostly serious story.

But sometimes you just need a bit of outright silliness and fun; something to wind down with. While meandering through BG3's Forgotten Realms certainly achieves that, Sunderfolk's casualness broadens its appeal beyond hardcore RPG players. It has its complexities and min-maxxing if you want to go down that route, sure, but it perfectly balances the need to hone builds to military-grade precision with the ability to just go in with good vibes alone. Secret Door studio head Chris Sigaty and Sunderfolk technical director Alan Dabiri tell me this approachability is at the core of the game during our recent Discord AMA. Their love for boardgames and combined fifty years of experience working on some of Blizzard's biggest games allowed them to strike that balance.

But TTRPGs (and the videogames they inspire) can be difficult to wrap your head around. Dungeons and Dragons alone has countless rule books and modules, as do the likes of Vampire: The Masquerade. While making a character and traversing a fantasy world sounds great, having to juggle the chaos of leveling, spell slots, AC, and other mechanics can sometimes become overwhelming. I certainly felt it coming into Baldur's Gate 3, especially when playing some of the game's more complex classes.

Sigaty's extensive boardgame collection comes up at various points during the AMA, with everything from Gloomhaven to Dune: Imperium flying around. It's clear that the pair love tabletop gaming, and that passion is what prompted Sunderfolk's creation.

"We just love getting together and having that social experience of playing boardgames," Dabiri says. "But we both have a background in videogames, so we think that we can make things more accessible and streamline the experience by making the game handle all of the rules and setup - all of that stuff that just takes forever in traditional tabletop. Basically, our original pitch was like D&D plus Jackbox, trying to recreate that social experience you get with your friends.

"There are these people in our lives that I really want to share deep boardgames or games like Dungeons and Dragons [with], but they can feel intimidating to people - you have to read thick manuals, deal with a lot of rules, and so on," Sigaty continues. "One of the things we're trying to do is remove that; not only to help people see it as more accessible, but also to help provide a tool to [people] who want to bring in family members or friends who may balk at playing under normal circumstances. My favorite thing is reading reviews from players who have brought along a child, parent, or sibling who haven't gamed before."

But part of the game's inspiration also comes from the duo's time at Blizzard. Both Sigaty and Dabiri worked on Warcraft 3, while Sigaty went on to become the lead producer on Starcraft 2, and Dabiri was then lead technical director on one of my all-time favorites, Heroes of the Storm. I ask what learnings they took from their time at Blizzard, especially given that most of their previous work had hardcore PvP elements - the antithesis of Sunderfolk.

"All of those games basically developed our entire basis for game development. Warcraft 3 has the bones of that hero real-time combat that comes out of MOBAs, but the different abilities and the way that heroes synergize with each other is hugely [inspirational]. But I will say that something we've done differently from a lot of the games Chris and I worked on [is that] they're very heavily competition-based. Obviously Heroes of the Storm has a 5v5 team-based nature, but at its core it's just straight up competition. So when we started this new studio, one of the things we talked about was 'what kind of game do we want to make?' and both of us wanted to try something a little bit different and not go so heavy into that competitive space.

"We'd done that a lot," he says. "We'd made hardcore competitive esports with Starcraft 2, as well as Warcraft 3 and Heroes of the Storm; they were all very much esports in their own regard. But with Sunderfolk we wanted to make it more of a cooperative experience where you get together with your friends and overcome challenges. But overall the decades of experience at Blizzard absolutely influenced our game development processes, [both] in a good way on things that we should do again, and also in a way we learned 'hey, maybe we don't do that particular thing anymore."

Sunderfolk's creation has "been fascinating," Sigaty continues. "It was a pretty big step and journey for us to leave Blizzard - I was there almost 24 years, Alan was there 25 - and start something new. Yes, it's still in our DNA; we were raised with particular values because of how Blizzard did stuff, but it's been very interesting just how much the industry has changed, too. There are things that we can take lessons from and look to and think back about, but there's so much change happening that I feel like I'm constantly learning, almost on a daily basis."

On a technical standpoint, there aren't many competitors to draw off of, either. Sunderfolk's unique phone-based controller system isn't something that I've seen before, and Dabiri notes that it's "a completely new paradigm. Obviously there's a game like Jackbox, but it's a different style of game. So when it came to the user experience and how things look, the way you interact, even the movement, where you're literally dragging around on your phone as a track pad - that whole idea didn't exist."

Sunderfolk is an experience unlike any other, and quite an underrated one at that. It's a deeply fun game to play with your pals, while simultaneously having enough complexity to keep more hardcore gamers happy. It's brought to life with vibrant visuals, masterful storytelling and narration, and enough variety to keep you coming back for more. And it's currently 40% off on Steam to celebrate its 1.5 update, so there's that, too.

At a time when so many RPGs are serious, long-winded, high-stakes adventures with sprawling open-world maps, Sunderfolk strips things back without losing what makes the genre great. It's one of my personal picks of the year, and hopefully it becomes a staple at your boardgame nights, too. In the meantime, you'll find me practicing my Pyromancer ahead of our next demo (if the team ever wants to play with me again, no offense taken if not), or maybe I'll just default back to Bard. That's just what I do.