Heroes of the Borderlands Feels Like a Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set for Board Game Fans

By Cameron Kunzelman | September 11, 2025 | 1:23pm

Tabletop Features dungeons & dragons

Heroes of the Borderlands Feels Like a Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set for Board Game Fans

Heroes of the Borderlands, the new starter set that’s out from Dungeons & Dragons, is weird. It is one of the weirdest D&D products that I have ever seen, and it signals a new direction for the game: toward comprehensibility, toward board game sensibility, and toward wide-open roleplaying. Frankly, opening the box is shocking to someone who has been covering Wizards of the Coast’s mainline TTRPG for a decade. It’s good.

Let me run it down for you. Heroes of the Borderlands is a boxed set that you buy for a little short of $60. In the box (or in the digital packet found on D&D Beyond) you get a lot of stuff. There’s a play guide of the basic rules of Dungeons & Dragons’ current edition, some dice, and an adventure. This is all predictable. It’s the other 75% of the box that’s a little bewildering: a narrative-less adventure split into a wilderness crawl, a Keep on the Borderlands with a series of character encounters and small missions to complete, and a robust dungeon delve that takes adventurers through a series of enemy lairs to find a chaos cult. There’s a grip of eight double-sided adventure maps to help with wilderness adventuring and combat encounters. There are several complete characters that are rolled up for immediate play, and perhaps most shockingly, two huge stacks of printed cards to represent nearly everything in the game, from character backgrounds to items in inventories. There’s a combat tracker tearaway sheet pad. There’s cardboard punch tokens to keep track of both gold and hit points. There are handouts to give players so they can order at the bar and shop at the blacksmith. This box is absolutely crammed full of things to help players understand, and get into, a roleplaying game at the tabletop.

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I’ve looked at nearly every starter set and introductory product for D&D that has been released for 5th Edition forward, and this is a radically different approach. Those other starter sets all seem to begin with the assumption that you are already into the idea of playing the game, and that the work of creating a starter set is giving you tools to get going with an adventure. At the core of that has been a narrative adventure and a set of dice, with everything else revolving around that. This is fine if the bet is that someone who opens a starter set has all the motivation to play but not the capacity to buy a set of dice or an adventure module. This does not seem to describe many people, and I think the general opinion of those previous starter sets is pretty low.

By contrast, Heroes of the Borderlands is clearly inspired by board game culture and standards. It is treating Dungeons & Dragons as, essentially, the weird cousin to a Eurogame. It has a four-page quick start game that tells you everything to get started. Its rulebook, called a “Play Guide Reference Booklet,” is robust, but it is linearly laid out with clear directions on how to Dungeon Master a game and how to be a good player for your DM. It has a bare-bones, clear set of operations for the basics of the game—exploration, roleplaying, combat, and looping through those experiences in an adventure. Beyond explaining how to read all the cards and sheets in the box, the first thing the game does is explain that D&D has a rhythm of play, and attaining (and maintaining) it is paramount for a good experience. I mean, my god, if you’ve been paying attention to this game for any amount of time, the very idea that the first important information that players are encountering is about experiences and how to maintain them is downright revolutionary (for this game, which has always lingered behind other TTRPGs in key ways like this).

Most importantly, and perhaps most board game-y, it recognizes that customization is a huge time hurdle to jump over. To create a character, you take a classed character sheet (cleric, fighter, rogue, or wizard) and add a species (elf, human, etc) and a background (farmer, soldier, etc). Put some equipment on there and some spells if you have them, all with cards of their own for easy access, and you’ve got a character. This is not a profound experience for a veteran player of the game, but as an onboarding experience it is one of the best I have seen in a starter set, period, especially in adapting a complex game like D&D. The Pendragon starter set does not function this well, let me tell you…although they do have wonderful character sheets.

This reduction of complexity allows players to jump straight into the action, and Heroes from the Borderlands is a distinct throwback experience that feels both in conversation with older editions of the game and recent OSR forays into capturing freeform sandbox play in TTRPGs. Heroes is schematically based around the 1979 module Keep on the Borderlands, a personal favorite of mine, and it holds to a kind of originalist D&D sense that a story will find players once they get into a game. Bluntly, there’s a book for a keep, there’s a book for the wilds, and there’s a book for a dungeon full of monsters. Start in one of those places and go hog wild. There’s no overarching narrative other than one you might find by talking to NPCs that want you to clear out a local cult or solve the iron crisis (that’s not in here, but I wish it was). It’s just giving you tools to experience a few flavors that D&D is good at and expecting that to be where the fun is. If you want to explore a lot, you’ve got tokens and maps to help you to walk around; if you want to fight, there’s a combat map for anywhere you want to get into a scrap. Clear out the baddies, do some quests, find your own fun.

It’s clear that some real thought has gone into what a D&D starter set should offer. Backing off of a particular narrative means that the game can be driven by situations that the DM describes and adjudicates rather than asking the Dungeon Master player to be a facilitator for a particular story. No one has to do any voices, and no one has to set up plot beats and payoffs while trying to keep brand-new players on a narrative track. Heroes of the Borderlands is straightforward and clear, and it obviously understands the strengths of D&D being in the gameplay and the communication rather than in the provided books. I think that’s a very strong gambit.

My one criticism of the product is in terms of readability for some sections of the books. In following the traditional 5th Edition formatting, with boxes and sidebars and columns of text, things can get very messy, especially when the game is attempting to explain or evoke to the DM how to run an encounter with specific emotions or goals. Readability suffers in a few places, but I am unclear on how that’s solvable in a product that is dedicated to robust explanations. I have a lot of empathy here for the people who put this together, but that doesn’t change that reading through the books was a little bit of a struggle for me.

Overall, I think that Heroes is an extremely impressive product, and I think it can actually help people who want to get into roleplaying find their feet easily there. The Dungeons & Dragons brand name is synonymous with this hobby for many people, and Heroes is delightfully generic in terms of its presentation—one could use this as a ramp to get people into a D&D module, or you could just as easily use it as a way of getting them used to comfortable roleplaying before moving into an OSR module or another system entirely. Surprisingly, I think this starter set might be good for the hobby in a way that I have never thought before. This is a thing that someone can pick up at Barnes & Noble to help them enter into a whole new mode of game, and it is profoundly legible to the board game crowd in a way that I think will actually allow them to experiment with a game style that they might not have before.

Heroes of the Borderlands is a deeply interesting starter set that I would seriously consider getting for friends interested in the game. It’s sleek, clear, and not weighed down with a thousand pitches outward to buying more Wizards of the Coast products. It’s a box you can buy to help people play a game, or a style of game, that they might have always wanted to get into. It’s a new high bar for a D&D starter set, and I look forward to seeing what avenues it opens up for players.

Cameron Kunzelman is an academic, critic, co-host of the podcasts Ranged Touch and Game Studies Study Buddies, and author of The World Is Born from Zero. He tweets at @ckunzelman.