Sunderfolk is a couch co-op tactical RPG you play with a phone. No, really.

Dreamhaven Studios provided a round-trip train from Washington, D.C. to New York and accommodation for one night so that Ars could play Sunderfolk and interview its creators. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

Tabletop board games and video games typically offer ways to reduce their difficulty. But getting and keeping a group together for game nights, across different schedules and experience levels? That can be fiendishly hard.

That, more than anything, is what Sunderfolk wants to make easier. At its core, it’s a turn-based tactical RPG with well-worn hero classes and mechanics familiar to fans of crunchy tabletop games and CRPGs. But this upcoming game from Secret Door, led by Blizzard veteran and tabletop aficionado Chris Sigaty, wants to bring more people into the game-night fold. By fusing Jackbox-like accessibility with tabletop mechanics and letting the game do all the hard work, Sunderfolk aims to reduce learning curves, eliminate setup, and encourage game nights with friends.

Also, you use your phone as a controller, connected to one "big screen," local or remote. But it makes sense, and it worked, at least in the two hours I got to play Sunderfolk. The phone (or tablet) is both a controller and a replacement for all the cards, tokens, and other ephemera a tabletop player would have in front of them. And it allows for quick setup of couch co-op or screencasted play. Sunderfolk is a game that can make use of the QR-code-scanning, Discord-arranging skills many of us learned during the pandemic.

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