Sunderfolk finds the middle ground between Jackbox and Dungeons & Dragons

When I hang out with my friends for a game night, we usually do one of two things: play Dungeons & Dragons or a party video game that works with just our phones. The iconic tabletop RPG provides the sandbox for an infinite number of campaigns for my friends to venture through, while Jackbox and King Of The Castle offer variety depending on the actions or answers we provide as players. Sunderfolk is a new game from Dreamhaven that’s finding the middle ground between the two.

Blizzard Entertainment founder Mike Morhaime and others from the World of Warcraft studio founded Dreamhaven in 2020, and it’s finally ramping up to release games such as Lynked: Banner of the Spark and Sunderfolk. Sunderfolk specifically is a card-based tactical RPG set in a fantasy world where animals fight to defend the underground village of Arden from a variety of fantastical threats. The twist is that each player controls their character and cards played from a dedicated phone app that connects to Sunderfolk on PC and console.

Introducing Sunderfolk | A New Way to Play

Digital Trends flew out to Los Angeles to test out Sunderfolk in person ahead of its reveal, and I came away confident that it will be the next video game I add to my game night rotation with friends. It takes some getting used to, but after some playtime, I understood that developer Secret Door wanted to streamline the feeling of playing a tabletop RPG with others. To do so, it drew from games like Jackbox Party Pack just as much as tabletop RPGs.

Opening a Secret Door

Chris Sigaty is best known for his work at Blizzard Entertainment on games like Warcraft III and StarCraft II. In an interview, Sigaty tells Digital Trends that he and many other Blizzard veterans felt that they were “at these junctions in our careers where it made sense to move on to something else.” Sigaty says he felt “entrepreneurial” after being at Blizzard for so many years, so he started the studio Secret Door under the banner of