One explanation for Dungeons & Dragons' longevity is that the RPG isn’t really a single game; it’s a sprawling collection of rules, mechanics, and stories that have evolved so thoroughly over the past five decades that the original edition would be almost unrecognizable to those playing today, even if a number of core aspects of the game still persist, alongside its iconic name. But what if I told you that D&D itself initially started as a supplement for another game entirely?

"Improv, math, and softcore gambling"

Back in 1971, wargaming hobbyists Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren released Chainmail – a medieval-themed strategy wargame using miniatures to represent military units on a map, as you find with Warhammer today. It was heavily inspired by the existing medieval wargame Siege of Bodenburg, but with a 14-page fantasy supplement that let elves, wizards, and dragons rub shoulders with medieval soldiers.

Gygax reportedly discovered the potential for such a mash-up in his weekly wargaming club, when he "turned a plastic dinosaur into a dragon and mixed in wizards and trolls among the men-at-arms." But while Chainmail went through several iterations, its main legacy is how it laid the groundwork for Dungeons & Dragons, launched in 1974 as the debut product of Gygax and co-founder Dave Arneson’s gaming company TSR (Tactical Studies Rules). The game, however, assumed players already owned Chainmail, as well as one of the then-best board games for exploration and adventure, called Outdoor Survival.

As you can see, D&D’s three pillars of combat, roleplay, and exploration were already coming into focus.

Players chose one of three character classes, which became the archetypes for most classes that followed. There was the 'Fighting-Man,' a weapons-user good for combat and not much else; the 'Magic-User,' a low-health, armor-free wizard with access to powerful spells; and an in-between class 'Cleric' that offered a little of both. You could play as a human, elf, dwarf, or Tolkienesque hobbit. This initial version also laid out the basic idea of a moral alignment, with players choosing to be lawful, neutral, or chaotic. That affected their choices and risk aversion in the game.

Crucially, players rolled to determine their ability scores – still Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Constitution, Dexterity, and Charisma – before making a character, and they would calculate these scores in order and be stuck with the result. Rolled low for intelligence? Good luck playing a Magic-User, Greg.

Other core D&D mechanics like Armor Class (the number rolled to hit something) and classic spells (Light, Detect Magic, Charm Person) from that initial 1974 document will still be recognisable to many playing Fifth Edition today, as well as the 'Vancian' magic system based on Jack Vance’s Dying Earth novels, in which spells were carefully memorized and then forgotten after casting, ensuring some level of resource-management for reality-bending abilities.

Ambitious but unpolished

What wouldn’t be recognisable is the game’s mess of terminology, with unclear rules around turns, movement, calculating probabilities, and how different mechanics intersected – making the act of playing the game one of heavy interpretation and educated guesses. I’m partial to the endearing assessment of the 1974 rulebooks by game master and author Justin Alexander: "It’s as if someone took the rules for a dozen different variants of chess, tossed them in a blender, and published the result."

Despite some copyright worries and unpolished materials, the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons achieved an incredible feat: mixing up wargame mechanics with character roleplay and fantasy tropes in order to transport players into memorable stories, embodying a single hero in dungeons full of arcane traps, treasures, and monsters instead of presiding over a historically-accurate battlefield as a tactical commander in charge of many different troops. 

However, it’s also a chaotic mix, and its early days were marked by two competing impulses in directing the shape of the game: expansion and concision.

On the one hand, Gygax was keen to add more mechanics, tables, classes, and situation-specific rules that hadn’t been covered in the initial release. Follow-up supplements added the sneaky, trap-picking 'Thief' class (now known as the Rogue) and the holy knight Paladin alongside the Assassin, Monk, Druid, and Ranger, as well as other supplements covering demonic enemies, pantheons of gods, more monsters, and specific rules for using miniatures.

These extensive errata and extensions were brought together in a single edition called Advanced D&D. This was the 'serious,' technical version of the game, and it introduced a host of specifications for each spell being cast, including required components and specific duration and casting times, alongside plenty more numerical tables. When you see the term '1E,' meaning First Edition, this is what that refers to – like a formal launch after a game’s messy beta test.

But there was a simultaneous push towards simplifying the product rather than increasing its complexity. In the same year, TSR also released the Basic Set, a streamlined 50-page D&D system that focused on drawing in players who weren’t familiar with traditional wargaming.

This edition catered to the first three levels of play, and acted as an introduction to AD&D’s more complex mechanics, broadly encompassing the original ruleset and Greyhawk supplement with a few quirks – including a rework of races so that elves, dwarves, and halflings were actually classes with their own designated abilities (the elf being a mix of Fighter and Magic-User), simplifying choices a little.

The Basic Set got revised again in 1981, and in 1983 by game designer Frank Mentzer, who created successive rulesets throughout the ‘80s for higher-level play – up to Level 36, at which point the players are essentially gods. The 'Companion' set specifically introduced the idea of classes you could only choose at high levels, something that returned in Third Edition’s Prestige Classes.

In other words, the early editions of D&D were a potent mix of conflicting and complementary systems, blending together communal roleplay and improv with the rule-heavy wargaming tradition to create something both messy and magical.

But by the end of the '80s, even the ostensibly simpler version of the game had spiraled into a vast collection of rulesets, alongside the Advanced D&D line – and it soon became clear that one of them would have to give.

This is the first article in our five-part celebration of Dungeons & Dragons. Check back next week for our overview of Advanced D&D 2E (Second Edition) and the development of D&D throughout the '90s.

In a pleasing twist of fate, the deck is currently at its lowest-ever price of $18.70 at Amazon, down from $24.99. So if you too want to get your hands on this mystical Magic merch, I’d recommend taking advantage of this sweet 25% discount while you can. 

Should you buy the Magic: The Gathering Oracle Deck?

The Magic: The Gathering Oracle Deck consists of 52 oversized cards, each depicting a particular concept (i.e. generosity, conflict, etc.) with an associated Magic: The Gathering character or creature. If you’re a fan of the Ancient Greek-inspired plane of Theros, you’ll get a particular kick of the theming here. The pantheon of the plane is very much represented, with gods like Thassa and Iroas making an appearance but the plane’s creatures like the Chimera and the Pegasus are in there too. Even those not native to Theros have their own cards, as Jace and Ajani are a few of the Planeswalkers that use their spark to pop into the Magic: The Gathering Oracle Deck. 

No matter which card I drew in my readings, I was totally struck by how lovely each one looked. The imagery is soft and painterly while still maintaining the slightly dark epicness of a classic fantasy illustration. Added to that, all of this art is printed on glossy linen cardstock. This not only makes for a pleasingly tactile shuffling experience but also provides extra resistance against spills of whatever ritualistic liquids (read: iced coffee) I tend to imbibe during my sessions. A definite win in my book.

If you’ve never done a card reading before, don’t fret; the included booklet offers plenty in the way of guidance for Oracle Deck newbies. It takes you through everything from how to do readings for others or yourself to which layouts to choose to how to understand the meaning behind the cards that you draw. For each card, the booklet provides a possible interpretation, a reverse interpretation (for when you draw a card upside down), and a little chunk of lore about the figure featured on the card. These interpretations aren’t especially prescriptive either, so there’s plenty of room to adjust what you think the cards say depending on your own circumstances.

Will the Magic: The Gathering Oracle Deck help you glimpse into the future and reveal the next ProTour winner? Probably not. I’ll admit I have basically zero connection to the realm of spirituality beyond enjoying its vaguely spooky aesthetic. But like any TCG player, I do have a minor obsession with fancy pieces of cardboard, regardless of what practical purpose they actually have. So, whether you intend to use the Magic: The Gathering Oracle Deck as a legitimate divination tool, a cool party trick, or just a fabulous addition to your bookshelf, it's well worth picking up – especially with the current discount.

If you're looking for the next great addition to your board game nights, check out the best board games or our favorite board games for adults. 

For the most part, these changes are great moves in the right direction; they remove easy objectives and annoying deployment maps from Warhammer 40K while adding in some new ones to replace them. But before we dive into what’s actually changed here, a word of warning (and a scolding for Games Workshop). The Pariah Nexus Mission Deck is currently rarer than Kroot’s teeth. GW seems to have massively underestimated demand and the deck has been sold out everywhere since its release back in late June, an issue it's faced before with the likes of Cursed City (which is somewhat infamous for those stock problems, even if it makes up for this by being one of the best board games the company has put out). Even I don’t have a deck yet — I’m borrowing this one from a buddy who had the foresight to pre-order one. If you don’t have access to the cards and you want to play competitive 40K, then check out the Tabletop Battles app. This app lets you score your games and has all the up-to-date missions and objectives you’ll need.

Back in action

The way that you set-up and play a game of Warhammer 40K goes largely unchanged in Pariah Nexus. You draw a deployment map, primary mission, and mission rule (or use one of Games Workshop’s approved presets). You also draw cards from the Secondary mission deck throughout the game. There have been some notable changes though, starting with the return of Actions.

Anyone who played during 9th Edition 40K will recognise the return of Actions as a formalized rule. Units can perform Actions to score points at the cost of forgoing their option to shoot or charge. These rules kinda existed in the Leviathan Mission Deck, but they weren’t formally codified — some cards just said stand here, don’t shoot, and you score points.

These pseudo-actions caused all sorts of headaches for the rules team. Since your ability to complete them was tied to whether you were eligible to shoot, it meant that units that could advance and shoot, or shoot while in combat, could also do the pseudo-actions too.

Games Workshop clearly got tired of all these shenanigans, so now Actions are back and they’re much more restrictive than before — you can’t do them if you’re in combat, if you fall back from combat, or if you advance. This makes them tougher to pull off, which is one of the many changes that contributes to lower scoring (and hopefully closer) games in Pariah Nexus.

Masterful Gambit, sir

While actions are back in, Gambits are gone (sorry, Channing Tatum). These were introduced in 10th edition as a last throw of the dice, a Hail Mary when things weren’t going your way. You gave up your ability to score primary points in exchange for a randomly drawn Gambit — if you completed it, you scored a ton of points. Well, as it turns out, they were too hard, so no one ever took them, and now they’re gone. In their place we have Secret Missions.

With Secret Missions, you don’t have to rest your fate on a card draw. If you’ve scored fewer Primary Mission points than your opponent at the end of the third battle round, you can choose a Secret Mission. Your Primary points get capped at 20, meaning you can still score up to 20 points if you’re currently below that mark. Then, you get another 20 points if you complete your Secret Mission. 

These Secret Missions range from tasks like having your warlord take your opponents homefield objective to crippling every unit in your opponents army. Secret Missions are a massive improvement over Gambits, in that people actually use them. They also force some decisions in the list building stage and offer an exciting catch-up mechanic to players who find themselves trailing in the early stages of the game.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it

The primary missions have received a light touch when compared with some of the more sweeping changes. Some of the old missions have been axed (goodbye Priority Targets, Sites of Power, and Vital Ground) and replaced with new, better designed options, while most of the remaining roster had some tweaks to improve their overall balance.

Secondary missions received the same treatment too, with a load of the old cards getting dumped and replaced. Deploy Teleport Homers and Investigate Signals got the boot for being too easy/too hard to score respectively, being replaced with spiritual successors Establish Locus and Recover Assets — both of which require units to perform actions to complete.

Across the board, Secondary missions now give out fewer points too, which should keep game scores tighter while making each point you can score more valuable. Oh and you can still play fixed secondaries if you hate fun, but, again, the easiest fixed Secondary — Deploy Teleport Homers — is no more, so it’s a less appealing prospect than before.

One of the other big changes in the Pariah Nexus Mission deck is with the deployment maps. In the old Leviathan set, there were a couple of deployment maps that cut diagonal lines across the battlefield. This seemed logical, but it was a real nightmare to set up accurately and you’d get areas of wasted space in the corners. Pariah Nexus solves these issues by swapping out the diagonal lines for deployment zones constructed from larger and smaller rectangular sections.

I’m a big fan of these new layouts, and the 40K community at large seems to agree. They're easier to set up during the deployment phase, and they open up the corners of the board more and let you deploy real assets there.

Overall, Pariah Nexus feels more tightly designed than the Leviathan deck that preceded it. With a year of 10th edition under their belts now, the developers have been able to see what worked and what needed fixes. As a result, almost all of the rough edges have now been sanded off the game.

Combine this new mission update with the latest round of balance updates and Warhammer 40K 10th Edition is in a wonderful place. Pariah Nexus offers real trade offs and decision making to players, resulting in nail-bitingly close games and offering more player agency than Leviathan. Secret Missions are a wonderful second pass at a catch-up mechanic, the new deployment maps make setting up games easier, and the return of Actions smooths out a ton of janky rules interactions.  

It’s just a damn shame nobody can actually buy the Pariah Nexus deck since Games Workshop decided to print like five copies of the bloody thing.

For recommendations on what to play next, check out our guide to board games for adults. As for a change of pace, don't miss the best tabletop RPGs.

It’s been said by those who have played more than just the current iteration of the game that D&D 5e is everyone's second-favorite edition, and it’s hard to disagree. Fourth had its tactical approach, three offered a wealth of character options, Advanced D&D provided an expansion into much of the now-beloved lore, and those original little brown books held in them a world of dark and dangerous dungeons that would prove to be the genesis of the best tabletop RPGs, and the industry as a whole. But even so, and even if it is but a second-favorite, D&D Fifth Edition has a lot to love. The core system is simple and flexible, players and Dungeon Masters have a lot of options for their classes, monsters, and adventures respectively, and perhaps most importantly, 5e has an abundance of resources developed by the community that expand the game endlessly.

Rulings, not rules

In terms of the basics, D&D 2014 works in much the same way as the game always had. Before embarking on any epic adventures from D&D books or your own imagination, one amongst you must take up the fabled mantle of 'Dungeon Master.' They act as the narrator of the adventure, the medium through which the player characters see and interact with the world around them. Whilst the players will hone individual adventurers unique to them by describing their actions and charting progression, the Dungeon Master challenges them with monsters and traps alongside rewarding them with treasure.

None of this, of course, is unique to D&D, but the interactions between these stories and the ruleset is where 5e stands apart from its predecessors and its contemporary competitors. Originally, 5e seemed to take a lighter approach to rules, allowing the DM more freedom: "Rulings, not rules" was the toted phrase. In many ways, this has been a great strength of the game in the last decade, and has certainly not hindered its rise to popularity, since much of what is needed in the core gameplay loop can be boiled down to make x skill check (rolling a d20 and adding/subtracting a modifier), potentially with advantage or disadvantage. This is really easy for new players to grasp; making an athletics check to jump a chasm feels intuitive, and doesn’t require a grasp of the rules beyond looking at their sheet to see which number to add to the dice.

But as adventures and adventurers grow beyond Phandelver’s lost mines (that original 5e starter set surely, now, the most played tabletop RPG quest in the world), those lightweight rules became strained. D&D 5e 2014 wasn't quite simple enough to be rules-lite, yet wasn't crunchy enough to fully support an industrious DM or enterprising players.

The rules-lite approach also fell down the moment you put a blank character sheet in front of a new player. I believe that filling the sheet in is the hardest part of the game for someone new to the hobby, and the ability score vs. ability modifier, for example, is a holdover that feels unnecessary when you find yourself having to explain it to a fresh TTRPG convert. The nature of magic and spells also does not lend itself to the rules-lite attitude, and classes that interact with this subsection of the rules most directly are often the most difficult for players to learn and master, which is a shame given the attractiveness of the tropes of playing Wizards and Clerics.

On the other hand, 5e’s aversion to anything too concrete has been a detriment to a DM's ability to adjudicate games quickly and fairly if you ask me. Encounter design, for example, the act of preparing cool, thematic battles for your players, is paper-thin and woefully unbalanced, making it difficult to present challenges that you feel secure will make for epic moments at the table. At higher levels, this is only compounded by the immense powers of the player characters, and the disparity between them too. A level 20 Fighter can whack a mind flayer a few more times than they could at level one, whereas their wizardly companion can remake the world in six seconds. Additionally, I’ve never played a game before or since that necessitated going to the designer’s twitter account for answers on rules questions as many times as 5e did.

Fame and foibles

Still, 5e has had some updates and quality-of-life changes in the form of books like Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything over the course of its release. These unfurled new player options, as well as optional rules, clarifications to original rulings, and additional subsystems that were not game-changing but did bring something fresh to that original Player’s Handbook/the free Core Rules.

Arguably, and with some confusion, the newest edition of the game debuting in 2024 (formally known as 'One D&D,' and now a continuation of 5e) will be more a facelift in the vein of Tasha’s than as dramatic a shift as Fourth Edition to Fifth, but it might still represent a great opportunity to 'onboard' more people into role-playing games. Certainly in the current edition there have been some questionable decisions made, both in writing and in lore, that have not sat well with the community, and the new edition will hopefully excise those parts.

Overall, I really do think that 5e had a lot going for it, but I don’t think much of that is to do with the game’s actual rules. Its main appeal was that you could find no shortage of other people to play it with, and that made up for a lot of the intrinsic weaknesses of the game. Other people, other players, are creative, imaginative, clever, funny, heartfelt, and they are what has made D&D 5e the success it is. For so many people, the memories they associate with this hobby stem from this game in particular, and more often than not those memories are of triumph, joy, and friendship, of unlikely Nat20s, surviving an attack at 1HP, and battling liches and demons and dragons in dungeons deep for the fate of the world. And beyond that, D&D 5e is worth its merit as a stepping stone into other games, for the curious reach for what is familiar to them about D&D, and from there find all the other games, niche or not, that they want to fill their imagination with. 

In other words, the game is not without its foibles despite the fame. Yes, D&D has became as eponymous with dice-rolling, high-fantasy RPGs as Google is to search engines partially thanks to this edition. But for all its fame, it was not without its foibles. 

Basically, D&D 5e was good enough at presenting what many people think TTRPGs are, but I usually recommend exploring other options if it whets your appetite or leaves you dissatisfied. You wouldn't regret playing Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition, but you would regret not moving on once you find what else is out there either. 

Looking for something else to play? Be sure to check out the best board games, or the best card games.

"If you had one image to show somebody who had never played D&D before… what is that? That's what we tried to do in almost every instance," Herman explains when we catch up at Gen Con 2024. "What should a Player's Handbook show? What should a Dungeon Master's Guide show? What should a Monster Manual show? With the Player's Handbook [cover], we're looking at parties. We knew that we wanted to show a party, a composition of people. We wanted to show them with a dragon. That started [things]. What are they doing? What situation could they be in? And so we explored a lot of sketches on the player sample cover specifically to figure out what that moment was." 

What we ended up with feels like quintessential Dungeons & Dragons, but with no holds barred. After spending a couple of days with the revised Player's Handbook, I can comfortably say that this is D&D putting its best foot forward.

Supporting act

With this 2024 update, the Player's Handbook is finally as lavish as you'd expect from what is often labeled as one of the best tabletop RPGs. In the old version, too much was left to your imagination. Class pages, some of the most used in the game, were frequently limited to one or two illustrations and decorative elements apiece, while the spell section was an unrelenting wall of text. But with this update, things are given a premium treatment deserving of that reputation. 

Alongside a much grander piece of hero art for each class (which proudly takes up a whole page this time), each subclass also gets an evocative illustration that teases readers with what they might be. Whether it's a fantasy rockstar from the Bard's College of Glamor or the Paladin's colorful Oath of Ancients build, it's hard not to be inspired by the wildly different takes on offer. Equally, you'll get artwork displaying how a spell works every page or two – and it's actually quite compelling, showing off how magic works where before you'd have to guess what something like 'Chromatic Orb' looked like. 

Rather than feeling limiting, these illustrations help kickstart your creativity. Each background has its own painting of a landscape or scene that begs you to imagine your character there, for example, and I found myself piecing together a story based on them without even realizing it. Does the Charlatan run that dubious stall of goods in the carnival? Is the underground lair full of heist plans and weapons the Criminal's, or does it belong to their gang? And why have mugshots of ne'er-do-wells been crossed out in red along the wall? Backstories begin forming themselves with minimal effort, and this alone makes the 2024 Player's Handbook more compelling than its 2014 equivalent. I can see this section being a hit with newcomers in particular.

That's because the art isn't just there to look pretty – part of the draw is that it all tells a story. As Herman notes, artwork in D&D books is about "supporting the text, whether it's a monster or a place, or a villain, or a character class. Because in essence, D&D is the text – the rules of the game. And so the art is really there to support that, and to show what is on the page as much as possible. Because the text is incredibly juicy and filled with really interesting things, right? And there's a lot of ways to take that."

This is why the new artwork often takes place before or after climactic events – such as goblins preparing to launch an ambush, or a horse-drawn carriage charging away from a menacing castle. According to Herman, that allows readers to fill in the gaps. Otherwise, you'll "rob the player of the agency" to create their own narrative, subconsciously or otherwise. 

An easier read

"A critique on the 2014 Player's Handbook, especially the bigger classes, is there's just not that many [illustrations]," says Herman, who explains that the team wanted to bring more personality to D&D's classes and characters. "You know, there's a handful of selections. You get a couple illustrations of, like, a dwarf, so you just don't really get that many views on what that character can look like. And I think that creates a relatively narrow view of what players think that they can make. So we wanted to add a lot more stuff, a lot more flavor."

With the sheer amount of art and content filling up this 384-page tome, however, overwhelming readers proved a real risk. That was a major concern for Herman and co as a result, and the attention shows. The book is much easier to skim than before, and your eye is immediately drawn to crucial info via boxouts, tables, and icons to represent classes or stats. Yes, there's still a lot of text to parse through. But in direct contrast to previous editions where sections bled together and thus were tricky to find quickly during a session, it's a more logical read this time around.

"How do we support the text better from a UX player experience?" Herman says. "There's been 10 years since the last [core rulebooks] came out. So there are evolutions in the way that people read things and look at things, and people are a lot more visual. I think a good example would be the class spreads. We intentionally designed all of those from the beginning, which is different to the 2014 [rulebook]. Every time you get to a class, there's an iconic image of what that class looks like. And then the subclasses are all vertical half majors that go along the sides. And what that does is… it's a sort of subconscious thing. So every time [readers] get to a class, they know that when they get to [art on] the left-hand side, that is the beginning of a new section."

In a nutshell, the new Player's Handbook is trying to set up D&D for the next several years; there's an emphasis on being more accessible than ever whilst adding new perspectives that should revitalize existing players. As Herman concludes, it aims to be "nostalgic but exciting and fresh." And from what I've seen so far – who am I to argue with the have-a-go-if-you-think-you're-hard-enough party on the cover? – it hits that target with gusto.

For recommendations on what you should play next while you wait for the new D&D Player's Handbook, check out the best board games or our guide to the best card games.

Collector Boosters are never cheap but there are ways to get better value on these premium card packs. One of these methods is picking up a Bundle or Booster Box. However, the former of these is definitely the more affordable option. Thankfully, once you can score a sale price on these products, indulging in the best card games becomes far easier on your wallet.

In fact, the MTG Modern Horizons 3 Bundle: Gift Edition is only $81 on Amazon right now, down from its usual asking price of $110. Not only is the Gift Edition of the Modern Horizons Bundle currently seeing a larger discount than its standard counterpart, it also boasts some absolutely gorgeous box art of everyone’s favorite Moonfolk, Tamiyo – and that’s got to count for something, right? 

Should you buy the MTG Modern Horizons 3 Bundle: Gift Edition?

The main thing that differentiates the Gift Edition bundle from the standard Modern Horizons 3 bundle is the inclusion of a Collector Booster, which is geared towards players who like their cards to be as pretty as they are powerful. In this 15-card booster, you’re guaranteed to get five cards of Rare rarity or high in each pack and 10-12 Traditional Foil cards. You even have the chance of pulling a valuable Collector Booster exclusive like a Textured Foil, Foil-Etched, or Serialized card. 

If you’re a passionate Magic: The Gathering collector or are looking to make some cash selling your cards, Collector Boosters offer your best shot at finding sought-after picks. There’s really no promise that you’ll come across anything close to a $1,899-value Serialized Ulamog, the Defiler but no matter what you find inside, this booster delivers a healthy range of more top-shelf cards and the classic thrill of cracking a pack. 

Alongside this, the Bundle also includes a Traditional Foil alternate art card, nine 14-card Play Boosters, and 30 land cards (10 of which feature striking Full-Art treatment). Of course, you also get the familiar extras like a Spindown life counter and a fold-out storage box. If you’re not the type to fork out $400 for a Collector Booster box but still want a healthy mix of quantity and quality, the MTG Modern Horizons 3 Bundle: Gift Edition is an excellent compromise. Once you factor in the current discount, you’re onto even more of a winner.

Missed out on the details of MH3? Catch up on everything we know about MTG Modern Horizons 3. If you're looking for the next great addition to your board game nights, check out the best board games or our favorite board games for adults. 

Nothing quite compares to the experience of playing the best tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder. However, if you need something to hold you over between sessions or are having a tough time getting an adventuring party together, these CRPGs offer an alternative way to explore these fantasy worlds. Not to mention, they’re just pretty great games in their own right.

So, if you’re hoping to infuse your Steam library with some Dungeons & Dragons flavor or dive into the dark sci-fi of Warhammer 40K, you’ll want to check out this jam packed bundle. For just $35/£27 at Humble, you can get your hands on seven classic and contemporary CRPGs and a selection of season passes to give you even more adventure to play through. You’ll also receive a 85% off coupon for MythForce, a dungeon-delving roguelike inspired by 80s D&D cartoons. All in all, you’re looking at $347 worth of roleplaying goodness – what a steal!

Like many of Humble’s bundles, what you receive will depend on how much you opt to spend. Here’s what you receive in each tier:

Spend $4 or more:
Planechase: Torment Enhanced Edition
Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition
85% off MythForce

Spend $7 or more:
Pathfinder: Kingmaker – Enhanced Plus Edition
Baldur’s Gate Deluxe Edition
Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition
Planechase: Torment Enhanced Edition
Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition
85% off MythForce

Spend $10 or more:
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous
Neverwinter Nights: Complete Adventures
Pathfinder: Kingmaker – Enhanced Plus Edition
Baldur’s Gate Deluxe Edition
Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition
Planechase: Torment Enhanced Edition
Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition
85% off MythForce

Spend $15 or more:
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous – Season Pass
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous – Season Pass 2
Pathfinder: Kingmaker – Season Pass
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous
Neverwinter Nights: Complete Adventures
Pathfinder: Kingmaker – Enhanced Plus Edition
Baldur’s Gate Deluxe Edition
Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition
Planechase: Torment Enhanced Edition
Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition
85% off MythForce

Spend $35 or more:
Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous – Season Pass
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous – Season Pass 2
Pathfinder: Kingmaker – Season Pass
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous
Neverwinter Nights: Complete Adventures
Pathfinder: Kingmaker – Enhanced Plus Edition
Baldur’s Gate Deluxe Edition
Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition
Planechase: Torment Enhanced Edition
Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition
85% off MythForce

While each tier has a minimum cost, you can choose to spend a little extra to make a donation to Humble and the games’ publishers. As always, a portion of what you contribute goes to supporting Humble’s charity partner. In this case, that’s the Girls Make Games Scholarship Fund, which supports girls and young women in their efforts to pursue games development with summer camps, workshops, and undergraduate programs. So, not only will this bundle let you play some of the most beloved RPGs of yesteryear, but your contribution will help support creators make the best RPGs of the future.

For more great deals on your tabletop favorites, swing by our round up of board game deals. Alternatively, if you’re on the hunt for what to play next, check out the best board games or the best board games for adults.

Listen, I still think Warhammer Kill Team is one of the best tabletop wargames out there (and because each pack is so self-contained, it's a good gateway to the hobby for those more used to the best board games). But there have always been some wrinkles that feel needlessly confusing, the main culprit being measurements. Before now, everything used a system based on shapes to judge distance – one inch was a triangle, two inches was a circle, and so on. Because literally every other wargame under the sun uses inches, this seemed unnecessarily awkward and not entirely logical. How far off is that soldier? Oh, easy – he's a square away. Clear as mud.

Anyway, the new edition is finally swapping to inches. Thank the Emperor for that.

There are plenty of other changes on the way for this fresh edition of Kill Team, of course. Warhammer's announcement notes that streamlining was the name of the game here, and "everything has been rewritten from the ground up to make the lore and rules clearer and easier to read than ever before, with design notes and examples in the margins to clarify any tricky situations that might occur." 

You're also getting new accessories to deploy as well. Alongside the classic barricades, you can put down physical barbed wire, smoke grenade, mine, and ladder models to help or hinder.

These miniatures, the new core rules, all-new cardboard tokens, a board's worth of terrain, and two Kill Teams are included within the edition's launch box – Kill Team: Hivestorm. This brings us a new campaign setting in the Chalnath Expanse sector called Volkus, a human planet dominated by hive cities and massive, settlement sized guns that loom over the warzone. This is why the scenery you're getting inside the box is based on ruined city buildings rather than the oil rig-esque terrain of Bheta-Decima introduced via Kill Team: Salvation. In fact, Volkus will be our battlefield for the next year's worth of Kill Team expansions.

Unsurprisingly, those multi-tier buildings are perfect for the two groups included in the box. These warring factions revolve around flight and claiming the high ground, with the jetpack-weilding Tempestus Aquilons (a squad of hard-as-nails humans) going up against the insectoid Vespid Stingwings. The latter recreate aliens we've not seen in Warhammer for around 20 years, and the modern Vespids – which are auxiliaries of the Tau Empire faction – are much more dynamically posed than their predecessors. I'm not normally a fan of gribbly xenomorphs, but these gun-toting bugs look as if they'll be a lot of fun to paint.

We don't have an exact release date for Kill Team: Hivestorm yet, but it'll go up for preorder this September ahead of an October launch.

Want something new to get your teeth into while you wait for the new Kill Team edition? Be sure to check out these must-have board games for adults. To boost your collection for less, it's also worth checking in with the latest board game deals.

While the art is beautiful and the pieces well designed, Wyrmspan is missing a lot of the charm of the original. There is so little interaction in the game it almost feels like turns could be taken simultaneously with a bit of different design. That would have been an improvement because as players build up their engine, it can take a while for turns to play out and there’s very little need to pay attention to what they’re doing since everyone will form their own strategy. Trying to interrupt an opponent is more likely to hurt you than them.

If you don’t mind just chatting with other players between turns or if you liked Wingspan a lot and are really into dragons, Wyrmspan can still be worth adding to your collection. It offers some deep strategy and plenty of replayability that can be tested in a solid solo mode, too. But is it one of the best board games? Sadly, no.

Wyrmspan features & design

• An 'engine-building' game where you collect dragons that allow you to collect even more dragons later
• Uses Wingspan mechanics as a base
• Incredibly high production values and gorgeous artwork

Wyrmspan’s components are beautiful, particularly the 183 different dragon cards, each with unique art. A book of dragon facts included with the game provides creative snippets about their imagined behaviors and traits along with their in-game mechanics. It’s a shame that they didn’t go the same route as Wingspan and include this flavor text on the cards, as it would provide a little fun reading to do between turns.

Clementine Campardou’s art runs from archetypal Eastern and Western-style dragons to more whimsical critters that resemble foxes, fish, and cats. Beyond being stylish, the variety ensures each game plays differently when combined with the 75 cave cards that serve as homes for the dragons once you add them to your game board. Also adding to the replayability are dragon guilds that players will want to build reputation with, with each one having two sides based on the number of players.

Player boards have three color-coded rows representing cave systems for roosting dragons and have a lovely watercolor style, while the shared board where caves and dragons are drafted from resembles a scholar’s notebook to go with the flavor that you’re playing as an amateur dracologist. The colors of the caves and the wide selection of speckled eggs look like they should be restrictive based on game board or dragon type, but they’re not — it’s a purely aesthetic choice that beautifies your board as you build. 

All the tokens are high quality, especially the shiny coins used to represent how many actions you can take each turn, and the game comes with convenient boxes with lids to place resources and eggs in. Wyrmspan eliminates Wingspan’s bird feeder, which involves more luck and competition with other players. While that might be appreciated by players who prefer pure strategy, it’s a shame to lose such a fun central component.

There are cards for every player describing the basic rules and tips for how to take your first turns, plus a deck for solo mode that can be modified to up the difficulty or make the automata’s strategy a bit more dynamic. Once you have the hang of the basic rules, which you’ll grasp especially quickly if you’ve played Wingspan, games can be started up very quickly and packing up also doesn't take much time.

Wyrmspan gameplay

• More strategic than Wingspan
• Lacks incentive to stay invested during opponent turns
• Highly replayable

Wyrmspan players want to fill their caves with dragons that will give them the most points at the end of the game. Each board starts with three open caves — one for each biome — and you’ll need to excavate additional spaces that become progressively more expensive as you move from left to right. Caves give you some sort of reward when played, like food needed to entice dragons to move in or eggs used to pay for actions or as end-of-game points, and the first decision players need to make is choosing between their initial starting cards and picking out some free resources that will get their engine humming.

Playing cards is simple, but the real meat of Wyrmspan comes from exploring caves. The more dragons you have, the more fruitful explorations will be. Starting off, the three zones just provide one food or a dragon or cave card, respectively. But as the board fills with dragons, exploring provides more of those staple rewards and reputation with the dragon guild. That’s represented by a shared map that provides a wide variety of resources as players race to earn bigger bonuses and reserve end-of-game points.

Many dragons have abilities that trigger during an 'explore' action that can provide free resources or allow you to cache resources that will provide end-of-game points. Hatchlings are especially powerful early in the game as they provide a reward every time you activate them, with a sizeable bonus the third time they’re fed a resource or card.

The trick is deciding where to invest your cards. Fill up a biome and you’ll be able to spend resources and cards to gain an extra action and will be able to earn big points on further explore actions. That makes focusing very appealing, but ignoring any of them is going to force you to take some unimpressive actions when you find yourself with a shortage of cards or resources. There are many cards that allow a player to gain resources and opponents to gain a lesser amount which mitigates this problem a bit in larger games. It’s one of the few elements of interaction in Wyrmspan but it’s rarely worth trying to starve your opponents since the benefits you gain from these cards are so much greater.

While some dragons can be played in any row, most have restrictions which will shape your strategy. Many dragons also are synergistic, offering bonus points at the end of the game if you focused on their type (like 'shy' or 'helpful') or positioned them in a full row. Plus, each round has its own objective, like most large dragons or most eggs being worth bonus points based on your ranking. Again, this seems like it should mean you have to pay attention to what your opponents are up to, but the rewards aren’t quite big enough to bend over backwards shaping your strategy around them. Even though players share a pool of dragons and caves, there’s not too much real competition over the resources since everyone is very quickly going to be crafting their own strategy.

As with any engine-building game, you’ll want a balance between dragons that can activate for resources that will make it easier for you to play more cards and ones that are just worth a lot of points at the end of the game. In Wyrmspan you can often make that pivot relatively quickly and still do well. While it’s a valid strategy, it’s a bit dull to sit there with a bunch of high value dragons that don’t do anything while watching your opponents take complex turns involving lots of activations.

Wyrmspan feels like playing solitaire with other people at the table, which makes it well suited to solo gaming. The AI deck’s actions are simple to adjudicate but well balanced against the points a player will score, especially when you’re testing out new strategies. If you want more of a challenge, you can add in different cards to ramp up the difficulty.

Should you buy Wyrmspan?

If you’re a big fan of dragons and either love Wingspan or generally enjoy low-interaction board games, you’ll likely appreciate Wyrmspan. It’s a beautifully-produced game with plenty of replayability thanks to the wide variety of dragon cards. It doesn’t take long to learn or play either, but has some satisfying crunch to its strategy that might appeal to people that found Wingspan a bit too light.

If you want at least a bit of tension around the table, though, Wyrmspan might not be the game for you. Play can get especially frustrating if you haven’t developed much of an engine and are watching your opponents show off, even if the choices you made will actually earn you a decent score at the end of the game.

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

How we tested Wyrmspan

Our reviewer ran multiple in-person sessions of Wyrmspan with different player counts (from solo play upwards) to get a better sense of how the experience differed each time. They also directly compared it to competing games and its predecessor, Wingspan.

You can find out more about our process via the GamesRadar+ review policy, or by visiting our guide to how we test board games.

In the 'Board Game Night' offer, you can pick up digital versions of everything from Dune: Imperium and Wingspan to Scythe for just $18 / £13.93 at Humble. Because you're getting 13 items here (nine digital board games and a couple of expansions), that's a value of $166 reduced to a tiny fraction of what it should be. Crucially, the proceeds go to a good cause - the World Wildlife Fund.

Seeing as the roundup includes what are arguably some of the best board games, it's an eye-catching deal. Just be aware, it'll end in a few days - the sale comes to a close on August 23.

As with most Humble roundups, there is a lot of bang for buck crammed into this bundle. Indeed, it includes some huge names in the tabletop world that would cost an awful lot if you were to buy them physically. As such, it's a great choice if you were on the fence about getting the real-world equivalents or just want to try them out.

Here's what you're getting:

• Dune: Imperium Digital
• Quilts and Cats of Calico
• Terraforming Mars
• Terraforming Mars: Prelude DLC
• Terraforming Mars: Hellas & Elysium DLC
• Everdell
• Wingspan
• Munchkin Digital
• Root
• Scythe: Digital Edition
• Sagrada
• 30% off Munchkin: The Unnatural Axe
• 50% off Root: The Riverfolk Expansion

I've been covering board game deals for quite a while, and suffice to say, it's rare to see so many top-tier games struck down to such a low price. While only getting codes for the Riverfolk Expansion and Munchkin DLC is a bit disappointing, I really can't complain because you're saving such an absurd amount on everything else. Plus, once again, some of the proceeds are going to the World Wildlife Fund, so it's all for a good cause.

For recommendations on what to play next, be sure to check out these board games for adults or the best 2-player board games.