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In Theory: Warhammer 40k 11th edition – Wish List!

March 12, 2026 5 Minutes Leave a comment

The rumors are over, 11th edition of Warhammer 40,000 is coming. This is no longer speculation, hopeful guessing, or wild internet theorycrafting. It’s confirmed. It’s real. A new edition of the grim darkness of the far future is on its way.

And when a new edition looms on the horizon, it’s only natural to start looking back at the one we’re currently playing. I’ve spent a lot of time with 10th edition, and like every version of 40k before it, it’s been a mixed bag of brilliant ideas, strange design choices, and the occasional rules interaction that makes you wonder if the Emperor himself wrote it during a particularly confusing warp storm.

So with 11th edition approaching, it feels like the perfect moment to reflect a bit on my experience with 10th, what worked, what didn’t, and the things that made me raise an eyebrow across the gaming table. More importantly, it’s a chance to share my own personal wish list for what I hope the next edition might bring.

The 10th edition core set that launched with the game is, without question, one of the best starter sets we ever got, it was the main push for me to get back into the game.

Because at the end of the day, I love this game. I played a lot of 10th edition, and the prospect of a brand new version of Warhammer 40k is always exciting.

So let’s talk about it.

Overview – 10th Edition & Miniature Gaming

10th edition of Warhammer 40,000 was actually my return to the game after a long break. The last time I had played seriously before that was back in 6th edition. But my absence wasn’t really about being fed up with 40k. Instead, it was because the wider world of miniature gaming absolutely exploded around 2012-2014.

Suddenly, there were incredible alternatives everywhere. Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game took the tabletop by storm, followed by exceptional Star Wars: Armada and later Star Wars: Legion. Privateer Press was dominating the competitive scene with Warmachine, and a wave of new titles kept arriving. Games like the outstanding A Song of Ice and Fire: Tabletop Miniatures Game filled the gap that 40k once occupied for me.

For a while, those games completely replaced my need to collect, paint, and play Warhammer 40k.

But as the years passed and the dust settled, something funny happened: I started to miss it. The familiar universe, the armies, the ridiculous over-the-top lore. When 10th edition launched, I noticed that my beloved Tyranids were front and center in the starter set, and that was all the excuse I needed. I picked up an army and dove back in.

And almost immediately, I had a realization: for all its flaws, Warhammer 40k is still the most fun I have ever had pushing miniatures around a table.

Now let’s be honest here. 40k is a flawed game, and Games Workshop is a flawed company. That’s hardly a controversial statement. But the game has something that many of its competitors struggled to maintain: staying power and a steady fan base. It’s been around for decades, and here we are in 2026 with a pretty clear scoreboard.

Many of the games that once “replaced” Warhammer for me are simply gone. X-Wing and Armada are effectively dead. Warmachine and A Song of Ice and Fire both ran into design issues that pushed them into awkward corners. Even games like Legion never quite stuck with me long term and are floundering, trying to reinvent themselves.

Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars X-Wing miniature game was the first game in miniature gaming history that outsold Warhammer 40k. Many believe it is what prompted Games Workshop to rethink their long-term strategy and start modernizing 40k a bit more seriously. It may very well be responsible for the much improved condition 40k is in today, a kick in the ass the GW really needed.

Meanwhile, 40k is still here. It’s the game I still paint for. It’s the one I still want to play. My miniatures are still valid in the game.

And credit where it’s due, 10th edition was a genuine step forward. In fact, it might be the first edition of Warhammer 40k where I found myself thinking, this is actually a fairly well-designed game. Not perfect, and certainly not cutting-edge compared to modern tabletop design (say, compared to Warcrow, for example), but by 40k standards, it was probably the best version of the system we’ve ever had.

It works. It’s fun. And it addressed a lot of long-standing problems that had plagued the game for years.

That said… There are still a few things that kind of suck. Enough for a wish list!

And with 11th edition on the horizon, it feels like the perfect time to talk about them. So today I’m putting together said wish list, ten things I’d love to see improved, fixed, or completely rethought in the next edition of Warhammer 40k.

In no particular order… let’s get into it.

1. Strategems and Command Points

I hate them. There, I said it.

Stratagems and Command Points might be one of the most controversial mechanics in modern Warhammer 40,000 for me; they represent one of the biggest design missteps in the current game, in my humble opinion.

Now I understand why they exist. There’s a huge competitive scene around 40k, and there’s clearly a push to make the game feel more like a modern tactical system. The idea is that stratagems create deeper decision-making, more reactive play, and more strategic layers.

Strategems don’t just add a lot of rules and complexity, slowing down the game, but many of them give inherently unequal advantages to certain factions, creating balance issues.

In theory, that sounds great.

In practice… it just doesn’t work for what 40k actually is.

At its core, Warhammer 40k is still a dice-chucking spectacle. It’s a game of eyeballing distances, rolling handfuls of dice, and watching ridiculous things happen on the table. That’s not a flaw, that’s part of its identity, and 40k should be leaning into that. It’s supposed to be fast and explosive, but strategems act as the complete opposite to that concept, slowing the game down dramatically and adding a lot of complexity to the resolutions of actions.

So when you bolt on this extra layer of “gotcha” mechanics with stratagems and Command Points, the result isn’t deeper strategy, it’s a slower, clunkier game.

Every turn becomes a minefield of “Wait, do you have a stratagem for that?” moments. Games grind to a halt while players scan cards or phone apps. Someone forgets to use half their abilities. Someone else drops a perfectly timed stratagem that feels less like clever play and more like a rules ambush that results in the inevitable “I didn’t know you could do that”. For obvious reasons, few of us have so much time that we can learn every nuance of every army in the game. There is just no way any reasonable person can track all this stuff, and strategems add a whole other layer to an already sprawling amount of faction rules.

Instead of adding meaningful depth, the system mostly creates feel-bad and gotcha moments and a thousand new ways for the game to become wildly unbalanced.

Personally, I’d love to see stratagems massively trimmed down, or preferably removed entirely.

Let the unit cards, army rules, and faction-specific enhancements carry the core gameplay. Those elements are easier to remember, easier to balance, and far more in line with the flow of a traditional 40k battle. The current stratagem system feels like an awkward layer of card-play that never really belonged in the game to begin with. Why are we playing Magic: The Gathering in the middle of our Warhammer 40k game? “What the fuck do you mean you counterspell!?”

To me, stratagems mostly do two things. They add a mountain of rules that nobody remembers, and they introduce a destabilizing factor where there are very obvious winners and losers.

And if you’ve played enough games of 40k, you’ve heard the same conversations after the match:

“Oh man… I forgot to use half my stratagems.”
or
“That stratagem is so unbelievably OP.”

It happens all the time.

Now, if stratagems absolutely must stay in the game, I’d love to see them treated as optional advanced rules. Let players choose whether they want that extra layer of complexity or not. Sometimes you want the full tournament experience. Other times, you just want to throw some dice, move some cool miniatures, and finish a game in a couple of hours without flipping through a deck of tactical tricks. But make those official, established optional rules so that it’s clear to players that “these are extra, not default”.

2. Simpler but More Impactful Terrain Rules

Terrain in Warhammer 40,000 is one of those things that looks incredibly important on the table… but often ends up feeling strangely irrelevant once the dice start rolling.

And that’s a problem.

Right now, the terrain rules are oddly caught between two worlds. On one hand, there are a lot of rules to remember, keywords, cover conditions, line-of-sight quirks, and special terrain interactions. On the other hand, the actual impact on the game is surprisingly small. In many cases, terrain barely changes the outcome of a firefight at all.

In fact, if you played a game of 40k with no terrain whatsoever, the difference in gameplay would often be… minimal, as there are so few units in the game at this point that garner any positive or negative effects from cover.

That’s not great.

The current system ends up feeling like a stack of rules you have to keep in your head that ultimately don’t matter very much. It’s complex to explain, awkward to apply, and yet somehow still underwhelming in terms of gameplay impact. I once wrote a 5,000-word essay just explaining the benefits of cover, which probably tells you everything you need to know about how intuitive the current system is.

What I’d love to see in the next edition is terrain that is both simpler and more meaningful.

The rules should be easy to apply at a glance and based on logic we can quickly eyeball across the table. No complicated chains of conditions, no digging through terrain keywords, and no debates over whether a model’s left kneecap is technically within a ruin footprint.

Just simple questions.

Are you in cover? Yes or no.

If the answer is yes, you get a clear and meaningful benefit, something like +1 to your save, full stop. No exceptions, no extra layers of logic, no obscure edge cases.

Terrain should be something that players actively care about during the game. It should shape movement, influence positioning, and create meaningful tactical decisions. Right now it often feels like decorative scenery with a rules appendix attached.

Even this simple benefit of cover rule, ends up being quite complicated because note that it refers to the model, not the unit. Not only that, but the end result, because most units in 40k have a 3+ save is that cover doesn’t do anything.

This one feels like a no-brainer to me. Terrain rules should be simple to apply and powerful enough that terrain genuinely matters on the battlefield.

After all, if we’re going to fill our tables with beautiful ruins, forests, and industrial complexes… they should probably do something.

3. Eliminate Dice Re-Rolls

I’m going to say something here that might sound extreme, but I genuinely believe it:

There should be no dice re-rolls in Warhammer 40,000. None. Ever.

Re-rolls are one of the most common mechanics in modern 40k, and in my opinion, they are also one of the weakest pieces of game design in the entire system. When designers lean heavily on re-roll mechanics, it usually means they’ve run out of better ways to represent abilities or create meaningful gameplay differences.

In other words, it’s a design crutch.

And in 10th edition, that crutch is everywhere.

Let’s start with the first problem: it slows the game down. Warhammer 40k is already a long game, and re-rolls add a massive amount of extra time to every battle. Roll to hit. Check which dice failed. Pick them up. Roll them again. Then do the same thing for wounds, saves, and sometimes even damage rolls.

For my army, I’d estimate that 40–60% of the dice I roll can be re-rolled in some way. That’s absurd. At that point, you’re not really rolling once, you’re rolling twice for half the game. I’m convinced the mechanic alone adds close to an hour to many matches.

The second issue is that re-rolls kill the drama of dice rolling.

Rolling dice should be exciting. You throw them across the table, everyone leans in, and for a moment, the fate of the battlefield hangs in the balance.

But with re-rolls, that moment gets completely deflated.

You roll the dice.

“Oh man, I missed.”

Pause.

“Wait… I get re-rolls.”

Pick them up. Roll again.

“Never mind, I hit.”

That entire moment of tension just evaporates. The first roll didn’t matter because we were going to do it again anyway. Nothing kills the momentum of a game faster than realizing the dice result you just saw isn’t actually the real result yet.

And then there’s the third issue, which in my view is the biggest one: re-rolls destroy statistical balance.

From a game design perspective, they undermine the entire math behind the system.

Every unit in 40k is built around probability, weapon skill, armor saves, and wound rolls. These numbers are carefully tuned to create expected outcomes. But the moment you introduce widespread re-rolls, those probabilities stop meaning what they’re supposed to mean.

A 3+ save isn’t really a 3+ save anymore if it can be re-rolled. The actual statistical survival rate changes dramatically. The same goes for hit rolls, wound rolls, and everything else. Add re-rolls to a resolution of more than one of these statistics and the numbers are all over the place.

And once you start stacking re-roll mechanics across an army, balancing the game becomes exponentially harder. The baseline math that designers rely on stops being reliable.

When I say re-rolls are bad design, that’s not just personal frustration talking; it’s a fundamental game theory problem. If you take even a basic game design course, one of the early lessons is that mechanics that constantly override probability curves make balancing systems far more difficult. Do it enough and unbalance is a foregone conclusion and cannot be repaired through other mechanical finagling.

Yet 40k leans on them everywhere.

Instead of destabilizing the entire statistical foundation of the game, I’d much rather see abilities expressed through clear modifiers, unique effects, or meaningful unit rules. Those are far easier to understand, easier to balance, and far faster to play.

Because at the end of the day, when the dice hit the table in Warhammer 40k…

That roll should matter.

4. Data Slates – Rules Updates & Faction Books

For this one, I’m going to say something unusual.

Don’t change a thing.

Credit where it’s due, Games Workshop has actually done a really good job supporting Warhammer 40,000 in 10th edition. Balance dataslates, frequent points updates, and quick reactions to what’s happening in the community have been a massive improvement compared to older editions. The game feels actively maintained, and that’s exactly how a modern tabletop system should work.

Do they always nail the changes? No, they don’t, but the effort counts, and I think it beats the hell out of radio silence.

So from that perspective, the current update cadence is excellent. Keep doing it.

However, there is a side effect to this approach that players have been frustrated about for years: codex books becoming outdated almost immediately.

We’ve all seen it happen. A faction book releases, players buy it, and before the ink dries, some dataslate, FAQ, or balance update changes multiple rules inside it. Suddenly, the book you just paid for no longer reflects how the army actually works.

It’s not a new problem, but with the current pace of changes, I think it’s time to rethink what faction books are supposed to be.

Instead of acting as the primary source of army rules, codexes should lean much more heavily into lore, art, strategy, narrative content, missions, and thematic mechanics that capture the identity of the faction. That’s the part of the book people actually enjoy owning.

I love the codexes, I have bought the codex for every edition of Tyranids, even when I wasn’t playing Warhammer 40k. These are awesome books full of art and lore, it’s a piece of the game and you’re going to want to own the one for your favorite faction. There is no reason to make it a requirement to own for the faction rules, people would buy these books anyway.

Because here’s one of the strangest things about playing Warhammer 40k: if you face an opponent whose faction you don’t collect, you often have no idea what their army can do unless you’ve also bought their codex.

Imagine playing a sport where you only know half the rules and your opponent knows the other half. It’s bizarre when you think about it.

Army rules should be freely available online for everyone. That way, players can understand how every faction functions, what the threats are, and how the game actually works across the full range of armies.

The reason to buy faction books shouldn’t be access to the rules, it should be because the book itself is awesome.

The art.
The lore.
The narrative campaigns.
The unique missions and faction flavor.

Players will buy those books regardless. I know I will. I love my Tyranids, if a new codex drops, I’m buying it. But I’m fully aware that the rules printed inside it will probably be outdated before it reaches my house. That’s not why I want the book.

I want it for the atmosphere of the faction and the joy of flipping through a beautiful hardcover full of alien monstrosities.

If it were up to me, I’d go even further: include the full core rulebook inside every faction book.

That way, players only need a single book for their army that contains the lore, the faction content, and the core rules for the game. Charge $60 for it, I honestly wouldn’t mind. Having one complete, self-contained book for my army would be far more useful than juggling multiple rule sources.

Meanwhile, the actual army rules and points values live online, where they can be updated quickly without invalidating the book on your shelf.

To me, that’s the best of both worlds.

5. Crusade Rules Should Use Legacy Architecture

One of my absolute favorite ways to play Warhammer 40,000 is with the Crusade rules. The idea of narrative campaigns, evolving armies, and story-driven battles fits perfectly with what 40k is supposed to be about.

But while I love the idea of Crusade, the actual campaign system leaves a lot to be desired.

The biggest issue is that it tends to follow a classic “winners win more” design. If you win a game, you gain advantages that help you win the next one. Those wins stack, the gap between players grows, and before long, the campaign starts to feel less like a tense war story and more like a slow-motion steamroll.

Tyrannic War is one of my favorite Warhammer 40k supplements ever made, this is exactly the sort of lore books I want to see for Warhammer 40k. I just wish the Crusade rules were a bit better thought out. As they are they are pretty … meh.

That kind of design can quickly drain the drama out of a campaign. Once momentum swings too far in one direction, the narrative becomes predictable, and that’s the last thing you want in a game built on epic storytelling.

But beyond that, Crusade feels like a massive missed opportunity.

If there’s one place where Warhammer 40k could really push the boundaries of tabletop design, it’s here. And honestly, I think the inspiration should come from modern legacy-style board games.

Imagine buying a Crusade campaign book that comes with a box of sealed, unlockable cards or envelopes. As battles unfold in your campaign, certain outcomes trigger hidden content. You rip open a new mission at the table and suddenly discover new lore, special battlefield conditions, or unexpected story developments. Maybe special characters are introduced, new weapons, and more. There is so much sci-fi goodness built into the 40k universe; the options here are quite limitless, and you could tie these concepts into novels, new product releases, and online content.

One battle might unlock a desperate evacuation mission.
Another might reveal a secret objective tied to an ancient alien artifact. A devastating defeat might trigger a revenge scenario two games later.

Each mission pushes the story forward and branches into new paths depending on the results of the previous battle.

Over time, players would experience a living campaign that evolves as they play. Every season, a new expansion pack could add fresh missions, new story arcs, and new unlockables that keep the narrative moving forward.

The crazy thing is that this idea is just one of about a billion ways the Crusade system could evolve. The design space here is enormous, and it feels like something Games Workshop has barely scratched the surface of.

My point is simple: Crusade should be a major pillar of the game.

Lean into the narrative side of Warhammer. Expand the campaign systems. Give players something deep, dynamic, and story-driven to sink their teeth into.

Because if any universe deserves truly epic campaign play… It’s the grim darkness of the 41st millennium.

6. Bring Back Organizational Charts/Requirements

Alright, this one might be a bit controversial.

I know a lot of players love the current “take whatever you want” style of army building in Warhammer 40,000, but I think removing organizational structures from armies has created several problems.

The first issue is lore.

Warhammer 40k isn’t just a game system; it’s a universe. The factions, the military structures, the way armies are organized in the lore… that’s a huge part of the appeal. And honestly, if the lore and atmosphere aren’t important to you, why play Warhammer 40k in the first place?

Let’s be real for a second: the game itself isn’t some cutting-edge masterpiece of modern design. It’s fragile, swingy, and still carries a lot of DNA from older tabletop systems. What makes 40k special is the setting, the factions, the scale, and the spectacle of it all.

Back when organizational charts existed, armies actually looked like armies. When you built a strike force, you expected a core of basic troops, a few vehicles, a couple of command units, exactly the way military forces are described in the lore. The structure gave armies a sense of authenticity.

I really like the idea of organizational charts being based on something. Be it a mission, a campaign or faction detachment based. I don’t want it to be a static thing that becomes part of a meta, its something you should have to decide for each match, and it should change often. The game needs to be shaken up.

Your force on the tabletop resembled something that could plausibly exist in the 41st millennium. That era is gone. I haven’t seen anything that resembles a 40k lore army during the entire 10th edition run; it’s all about optimization of unit selection.

The second issue is game balance.

Right now, one of the biggest reasons games can feel wild and swingy is because players are free to build armies purely around points optimization. The result is a lot of strange, hyper-efficient lists packed with the same units repeated over and over, while the vast majority of the catalogue doesn’t see any play at all.

Three Terminator squads.
Three Devastator squads.
Three of whatever unit happens to be mathematically optimal this month.

Players build armies to maximize efficiency, which makes perfect sense in competitive play, but it often runs completely against the spirit of the game.

This isn’t Magic: The Gathering Arena where you’re crafting the perfect competitive deck. Warhammer 40k is supposed to be a narrative war game about massive armies clashing on the battlefield.

When every list becomes a spreadsheet exercise in optimization, something gets lost.

And that leads to the third issue: collecting armies used to have a purpose.

Organizational charts encouraged players to build complete forces. Even if a particular unit wasn’t the most optimal choice, you still had a reason to include it because it was part of the structure of your army you had to fill.

You might field a unit of Tyranid Warriors not because they were mathematically perfect, but because they belonged in the force you were building.

And the best part? Your opponent was dealing with the same constraints, forcing an equalization.

Those slightly sub-optimal armies often created far more interesting games than the current environment, where every list tries to cram in the most efficient units possible.

Now, I’m not necessarily saying we should go all the way back to the exact force organization charts of older editions.

What I’d really like to see is an organizational structure tied to detachments.

When you choose a detachment, it should influence what units you bring or can bring. Your army should naturally evolve around that theme. Collecting and painting would feel like building toward something specific instead of just optimizing a list.

Your Tyranid army and my Tyranid army could both be powerful, but in completely different ways.

Maybe your detachment encourages units A, B, and C.
Mine encourages D, E, and F. You can have x4 of A unit, but I can’t have any at all!

Now our armies look different. They play differently. They feel like distinct forces instead of slight variations of the same optimized list.

Right now, detachments rarely influence what units you actually bring. Instead, players build the most optimized army possible and then simply choose whichever detachment works best with that list.

Everything else becomes “sub-optimal,” and because everyone else is optimizing too, bringing anything less efficient often means getting crushed by turn one or two.

At that point, the system is forcing players toward the same narrow set of choices just to stay competitive.

And that’s exactly the kind of problem organizational structures used to solve.

Bring back some form of structured army building, and I think you’ll see more thematic armies, more diverse lists, and far more interesting games on the table.

7. Make Internal Balance The Priority

Organizational charts can help encourage a wider spread of units in an army, but they only work if the units themselves are actually worth taking.

And that brings us to one of the biggest long-standing issues in Warhammer 40,000: internal balance.

If the internal balance of a faction is off, then any kind of structural army requirement just forces players into an awkward situation. Instead of encouraging variety, it simply makes people field units they don’t enjoy because they have to, even when those units are clearly underpowered.

And that’s not fun for anyone.

One of the most frustrating things in 40k is looking at your shelf full of beautifully painted miniatures and realizing that half of them just aren’t viable on the table. There are so many fantastic models in this game that players would love to use, but the reality is that many of them are so inefficient compared to other units at the same point cost that they simply never get fielded.

Unless, of course, you’re intentionally running a sub-optimal army.

That’s always a bad feeling.

Take my Tyrannocyte, for example. It’s a really cool model. I love the concept, the look, and the idea of it smashing onto the battlefield like a giant alien drop pod.

But at 105 points, it’s barely worth half that in actual game value. So it sits on the shelf.

And that’s a shame.

Owning models that you love but suck in the game is a real shame. Your options are to use them anyway and probably lose matches as a result, or not use them and be pissed about that. Internal balance is a crucial element to a game’s design, and GW really needs to get it right. I think there is a lot that can be done to make this happen.

This is why internal balance should be a major focus of 11th edition. Every unit in a faction should feel like a legitimate option. Not necessarily the best choice, but at least something you could reasonably include without feeling like you’re handicapping yourself.

At the same time, the game needs to avoid units that become automatic “take three” choices in every list. When one or two units dominate the efficiency curve, the entire faction’s army design collapses into a predictable formula.

And suddenly everyone’s running the exact same army, which is exactly what you saw in 10th edition. Tons of options, but everyone is running variations of the same small selection of lists. Most of the catalogue is just not seeing any play.

Internal balance might sound like a basic concept, but it’s absolutely critical to the health of the game. If every unit has a clear role and a fair point value, players can build armies based on theme, creativity, and personal taste instead of just chasing the most efficient spreadsheet entries.

And that’s the kind of Warhammer 40k most people actually want to play.

8. Improved Mission Design

I touched on this earlier when talking about Crusade, but this issue goes deeper than narrative play. It’s really about the structure of missions and how victories are determined in Warhammer 40k.

Right now, 10th edition often feels less like a battle and more like a Euro-style worker placement board game wearing a Warhammer costume.

You’re not always fighting a war, you’re playing a strange sub-game where units run around the table doing random administrative tasks in order to score points. Scan this objective. Perform that action. Score five points here, two points there.

The result is a bizarre level of victory point granularity that constantly pulls players away from the actual battle happening on the table.

Instead of focusing on the clash of armies, you end up sending units off to perform strategically questionable or thematically nonsensical actions simply because that’s how you score points.

And it feels… weird.

I understand what GW was going for here, and I don’t even think its nescessarily bad design, but it slows the game down, and the result is a kind of disconnect from the main focus of the game, which is the battlefield. Missions need to be a lot simpler, make the game about the fight, not some weird side game about point scoring.

A lot of the current objectives feel forced, as if someone decided the game needed a certain amount of scoring complexity and then a design team had to invent a hundred different ways to make that happen. The design process feels backwards, a chicken before the egg; the points system came first, and the mission ideas were built afterward just to justify it.

Mechanically, the game suffers because of it.

At its core, Warhammer 40k is about two armies colliding on a battlefield. The missions should reinforce that idea, not distract from it. Objectives should be simple, clear, and grounded in the logic of the setting.

Things like: Take that hill and hold it, destroy the shield generator, or secure the landing zone.

You can still build interesting missions around those ideas. You could even introduce phased objectives, capture the objective, plant the explosives, destroy the structure, and escape before reinforcements arrive. Missions like that feel connected to the world of the game and create natural storytelling moments during play.

I especially dislike “surprise” scoring opportunities. Drawing a card and hoping that it gives you a chance to make an easy score somewhere is not a strategy; it’s luck, and neither player can do anything to predict its coming.

Players should always have a clear understanding of how to win the game.

And right now, that’s often not the case.

The current mission system is so packed with scoring mechanics that half the time, a winner is decided because someone forgot about a particular mission card or missed a scoring opportunity buried in the rules, or just got lucky with the card draws.

I’ve played a lot of 10th edition games, and I can honestly say I’ve never sat down after a match and had someone confidently explain every way points could have been scored in that game. There are just too many objectives, too many scoring triggers, and too many little systems layered on top of each other.

So players tend to fall into one of two traps. They either ignore the battle and focus purely on farming points, which is dull. Or they focus on the battle, wipe out the enemy army… and still lose because of the scoring system.

Few things feel stranger than getting tabled and still winning the game.

At that point, the mission system isn’t supporting the battle; it’s supporting a gaming system, and that feels off to me in the backdrop of a Warhammer 40k battle.

What I’d love to see in 11th edition is a complete rethink of the mission design philosophy. Objectives should be intuitive, thematic, and clearly tied to what’s happening on the battlefield, and it would be icing on the cake if they were tied to thematic event-driven stories in the game world.

Because at the end of the day, Warhammer 40k should feel like what it is supposed to be: A massive science-fiction battle in the 40k universe.

Better Vehicle and Aircraft Rules

At this point, I feel like I’m just pointing out problems that every Warhammer 40k player already knows exist.

And nothing illustrates that better than the vehicle and aircraft rules in Warhammer 40k.

I honestly doubt you could find a player anywhere on God’s green earth who thinks the current system works particularly well. Vehicles and aircraft have been a design headache for years, and they’re still one of the most awkward parts of the game.

The core problem is that these units almost always land in one of two extremes.

Either they are absurdly durable, borderline unkillable unless you’re packing the heaviest anti-tank weapons in the game, or they’re so fragile that they barely function as vehicles at all.

There rarely seems to be a middle ground.

The rules themselves, especially for aircraft, are often strange, overly complicated, and sometimes downright nonsensical. Movement restrictions, special targeting rules, weird interactions with terrain… the whole system often feels like it’s fighting against the rest of the game.

In fact, aircraft have been so problematic over the years that many tournaments and organized play events have simply banned them outright because the rules create too many headaches.

That’s not a great sign.

These are cool models, and I love them, but if Aircraft are going to be in the game they need much better rules than what we have right now, and I think GW knows it.

What vehicles and aircraft really need are simple, cinematic rules that fit the spectacle of Warhammer 40k. These units should feel powerful and exciting on the battlefield without turning into some kind of obscure combo card that breaks the game.

They should be big, dramatic pieces of the battlefield, tanks rumbling forward under heavy fire, gunships screaming across the sky, not strange mechanical puzzles that nobody wants to deal with.

And the funny thing is, if you look around the community, there are hundreds of house rules people have come up with to fix these problems.

At this point, many of those community solutions are honestly better than what Games Workshop has implemented over the years.

So if 11th edition is looking for a place to start cleaning things up, this is an easy win.

Vehicles and aircraft don’t need complicated rules. They just need good ones. I don’t have a suggestion, I’m not a game designer, that’s GW’s job, I just know when something sucks and vehicle and aircraft rules, certainly do suck!

Faster Gameplay

Warhammer 40k has always had a lot of rules, but honestly, I don’t think the rules themselves are the main reason the game feels so slow today.

The real problem is everything else we’ve already talked about on this wish list.

Stratagems and Command Points slow the game down.
Overcomplicated terrain rules slow the game down.
Dice re-rolls slow the game down a lot (like, literally adds at least 1 hour + to the game).

But even beyond those issues, there’s another major factor that rarely gets discussed enough: the game just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

With each edition of Warhammer 40k, the “standard” game size has crept upward. Today, the default expectation is a 2,000-point game, which seems normal, but 2,000 points today is not really 2,000 points.

The problem is that at the same time, unit costs have steadily decreased over each edition. The result is that a modern 2,000-point army contains far more models and units than it used to. In practical terms, a 2,000-point army today feels closer to what a 3,000-point army looked like two editions ago.

That’s a massive increase in size, and that equals a massive increase in time needed to finish a game.

Large, slow games are really bad for the tournament scene as well. People have to rush through games, and it’s common during tournaments that games are “called” rather than finished. The game needs a major improvement in speed, a match should be playable within 2-3 hours maximum without having to speed through it, and it feeling like there is insane time pressure on the players.

There are so many units on the table now that, in some missions, it’s literally not possible to deploy everything because there isn’t enough physical space on the board. And to make matters worse, the boards themselves have actually gotten smaller over time.

So what you end up with is essentially a knife fight in a phone booth, packed with units, abilities, rolls, re-rolls, and re-rolls of re-rolls.

It’s chaos.

Personally, I believe the time it takes to play a game of 40k could be reduced by as much as 75% without sacrificing any of the fun, if the rules were streamlined and the core structure of the game was designed around gameplay rather than simply encouraging players to buy more models.

Now, realistically, I don’t expect Games Workshop to change that philosophy anytime soon. But as a community, it might be time to start questioning the assumption that 2,000 points is the “standard” game size.

Because at today’s unit costs, it really isn’t.

In fact, it’s kind of absurd.

A modern 2,000-point game often feels less like a tactical wargame and more like Yahtzee with miniatures, a chaotic avalanche of dice rolls where the sheer volume of units overwhelms any meaningful strategy.

And the worst part is how long it takes.

At this point, finishing a full game of 40k in a single evening is becoming increasingly difficult. In my experience, about half of our games don’t even finish. Eventually, someone looks at the clock, realizes it’s getting late, and we just call it.

A typical game can easily run four to six hours, and if players aren’t moving quickly, it can stretch to eight hours or more. Happens all the time for me.

That’s just not reasonable.

If there’s one big wish I have for 11th edition, it’s that the designers take a serious look at reducing army sizes and tightening the overall structure of the game. Combine that with improvements to the other issues on this list, and the result could be a faster, smoother, and far more enjoyable experience.

Because at the end of the day, Warhammer 40k should be something you can play and finish in an evening, not an endurance test.

Conclusion

For an article that started out by praising 10th edition of Warhammer 40,000, I sure did spend a lot of time complaining.

But the truth is, I really do think it’s been a great edition. It’s had a strong run and introduced some genuinely good ideas. The problem isn’t that 10th edition is bad, it’s that it’s starting to feel a little rusty.

And the reality is that Warhammer 40k is no longer competing against its own previous editions. The tabletop gaming world has evolved. There are plenty of modern games now proving that with clean mechanics and thoughtful design, you can have a fast, snappy, and highly enjoyable experience at the table. Sure, most of these games don’t have the staying power, but they do illustrate what can be done with good game design.

I’d love to see Warhammer 40k embrace some of that design philosophy.

At the same time, I completely understand that 40k is its own kind of game. It should be bigger, heavier, and more dramatic than most tabletop systems. That’s part of its identity. But I also think it already achieves that depth through its factions, units, and battlefield interactions, even without the extra layers that have accumulated over the years.

Stratagem bloat, overly complex mission scoring, endless re-roll mechanics, none of those things are necessary for the game to feel deep or meaningful. Somewhere in the middle, there’s a sweet spot, and I think Warhammer 40k could absolutely reach it.

I’m not asking for a massive overhaul of the system. What I’d really like to see is optimization and efficiency, small but meaningful improvements that smooth out the rough edges.

More than anything, I want Warhammer 40k to feel less like an ordeal at the table.

Collecting and painting miniatures should absolutely remain a big part of the hobby. That investment of time, creativity, and effort is one of the things that makes Warhammer special, and I would never want to see that aspect simplified or diminished.

But once the models are painted and you’re ready to set up a game, that experience should be lighthearted and fun.

It should feel exciting, not confusing.
Enjoyable, not frustrating.
And above all, it should be fast, smooth, and satisfying to play.

Board Game Reviews, Collectable Card Game, Hidden Gems

Review: Kingdom Legacy – Feudal Kingdom

March 11, 2026 5 Minutes Leave a comment

When my review copy of Fate: Defenders of Grimheim arrived in the mailbox, the folks over at FryxGames slipped in a little bonus: a low-footprint solo legacy card game from 2024 called Kingdom Legacy: Feudal Kingdom.

Naturally, that caught my attention immediately. Not only is it another Jonathan Fryxelius design (love!), but it’s actually part of a whole series of games. I love a good game series with lots of expansions. There is nothing quite like finding a game you enjoy and then having lots of avenues to explore!

Now, before we go any further, I should disclose something: I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to legacy games.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the legacy games conceptually. But I also have a long-standing beef with one of their core components, which puts me in something of a philosophical quandary.

I adore the sense of discovery: opening secret packs, unlocking new rules, and watching the game evolve over time. That part is fantastic. What I don’t love is the idea of marking up boards and cards, tearing components apart, and ultimately playing through a game once before tossing the whole thing in the trash.

Ever since my experience with My City, which, incidentally, is one of my favorite legacy games to date, I’ve made it something of a personal mission to find ways to “cheat the system” and turn legacy games into replayable ones. In other words, I try to enjoy the legacy experience while quietly circumventing its main gimmick.

So when I opened Kingdom Legacy, the very first thing I did was exactly that: figure out how to bypass the whole “play it once” concept.

The most obvious and easiest way to circumvent the whole one-and-done legacy thing is to sleeve the cards and use a whiteboard pen instead of stickers. That effectively turns this legacy game into a replayable…for the lack of a better word, normal game.

My issue with disposable legacy games is really twofold.

First, if I discover a game I genuinely like, for which Kingdoms definitely qualifies, I’m probably going to want to play it more than once. As I learned with My City, simply buying another copy isn’t always an option. Games go out of print, sell out, or become difficult to find. Discovering a game you love, playing it once, and then being unable to replace it can be a frustrating experience.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, it just feels wrong to throw games away. It’s not really about the money; that part is mostly irrelevant to me. But there’s something inherently wasteful and eco-unfriendly about creating a product that is intentionally designed to become garbage. It’s the equivalent of putting bananas in plastic shrinkwrap. Why people? Why? Is there some kind of race to see how fast we can blow up our planet or something that I don’t know about?

Board games already require a fair amount of material to produce; the entire process is very ecosystem-unfriendly. There’s cardboard, paper, ink, plastic, shipping, the whole production chain has a pretty shitty footprint, especially since most things are made in China. Designing a game specifically to be destroyed after one playthrough feels… a little out of step with the spirit of the 21st century. There is enough crap going into the dump without us creating games with that sole purpose.

Alright, rant over.

The good news is that most legacy games aren’t particularly difficult to adapt if you want to make them replayable. Personally, I suspect the “destroy it as you play” concept is more of a marketing trend than a design necessity, and one that will fade over time.

With that said, let’s talk about Kingdom Legacy: Feudal Kingdoms.

I say that with a slightly raised eyebrow, because reviewing a legacy game is always tricky. A big part of the experience is exploration and discovery, uncovering new rules, cards, and surprises as you progress. Spoiling those elements in a review would unravel that fun, and I don’t want to do that.

So instead of giving away details, I’m going to focus on impressions and sensations. Think of this less as a traditional breakdown and more as a guided glimpse into what the experience feels like, without ruining the surprises.

With that in mind…

Let’s get into it.

Overview

Final Score: (3.15 out 5) Good Game!

I always love it when I come across a game that’s difficult to compare to anything else. That usually means we’re dealing with a genuinely original idea, and Kingdom Legacy fits that description remarkably well.

At its core, it’s a solo card game, which on paper might not sound particularly groundbreaking. But the elegance of the design and the flow of the gameplay elevate it into something truly special.

The premise is simple: you are building a feudal kingdom from what feels like its absolute earliest beginnings, essentially planting a flag in the wilderness, and gradually developing it into a thriving micro-empire.

The game begins with a humble deck of just ten cards. Each round, you draw and play four cards face up, deciding how to use the resources on them and whether to upgrade one before they are all discarded. Then you draw four more and continue until your deck runs out.

These are your starting 10 cards as you open the box, which includes 139 cards. It’s a humble begining but before too long, these empty fields and forests are going to be a thriving feudal empire filled with people, structures, and much more.

Once the deck is empty, you reshuffle and begin a new cycle. But this time things are different. Some of your cards may have been upgraded, and two new cards have been added to your deck from a hidden stack, let’s call it the legacy stack.

And just like that, your kingdom grows.

Throughout the game you’ll also discover additional cards from the main hidden box, steadily expanding your deck and unlocking new possibilities. Each cycle through the deck represents another stage in the growth of your kingdom as you develop buildings, resources, people, and capabilities. The goal of the game is to score points, but there is no victory condition; you are effectively competing against everyone else playing the same game in a sort of ladder, which you can review online.

On the surface, the system is incredibly simple.

But once you start playing, you quickly realize that every decision, every card played, every upgrade chosen, every new discovery, nudges the game in a different direction. And thanks to the many surprises hidden within the legacy box, the experience becomes wonderfully varied and highly decision-driven, and quite personalized. Your experience can and will be quite different each run through.

In fact, the idea that this is a “play it once” legacy game, considering how dynamic things are, struck me as almost absurd after my first session.

I don’t just find playing Kingdom Legacy one time an absurd concept; I find that to be true with all the legacy games I have played. My City is one of my all-time favorites. I have played it through the campaign at least a dozen times. I don’t really understand the appeal of making games that you are supposed to play once and then toss. I love these games!

On the very first day I had the game, I had already completed a second run. By the end of the week, I had played through it four times, and I still wasn’t even close to feeling finished with it. A great sign for the game’s addictive nature, not particularly good as a legacy concept. With legacy games, I want to play them once, be satisfied, and be done with it. For it to feel unfinished, which is almost certainly going to be the case here, as if I’m missing out on something, that is a feel-bad moment.

This is a game that I simply could not put down. It was addictive, surprising, and consistently engaging. Even after multiple playthroughs, I was still discovering new cards and exploring different strategic approaches. I can’t imagine anyone being satisfied playing this game through just once.

Simply put, this game is quite brilliant.

I loved it from the word go, and I’m extremely glad I found a clever way to sidestep the “play it once” limitation (sorry, FryxGames!). If I hadn’t, I might have needed to buy this game ten times just to satisfy my curiosity, and even that might not have been enough.

There are quite a few mini and larger expansions for the game, so plenty to explore is already available for this one.

In fact, I actually think it would have negatively affected this review had I only played it once. The first go felt very unsatisfying. I realized a bunch of things about the game, and I was eager to correct my mistakes. Had I finished with the game at that moment, I think that addictive aspect would have waned into something I did once and moved on, which is what I usually do with games I don’t like.

This is a legacy game that begs to be played again and again. It’s clever, engaging, and endlessly fun. Even now as I write the review, I think I rather be playing it.

Without question, it’s one of the most enjoyable solo gaming experiences I’ve had in quite a while. Really great discovery.

Components

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Good quality cards, far better quality than you would expect for a game you are intended to play through once. These cards will last.

Cons: It would have taken very little effort to un-legacy this game; it’s an unnecessary gimmick.

Since Kingdom Legacy is essentially a card game, there isn’t a huge amount to say about the components themselves, but what’s here is perfectly solid.

The card quality is more than adequate for the job, in fact, arguably, these cards are as good as any collectable card game you could buy. The artwork maintains a reasonably consistent aesthetic across the deck, and the rulebook is clear and easy to follow.

One particularly nice touch is the inclusion of a QR code that links to a tutorial video. The video is exceptionally well done and walks you through the basics quickly and clearly. After watching it, you’ll be more than ready to start playing.

Fryxgames does bang up job of supporting their games, the tutorial is one of the best I have seen for a game in a really long time. After watching it, you won’t need a rulebook.

There’s also an additional website that provides a card-by-card explanation of the entire deck. It’s almost overkill in terms of support, but it’s certainly appreciated, especially if you run into a card interaction that makes you pause for a moment.

All things considered, it’s a very competent production.

Theme

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: The flow of time and empire building engine support the feeling of progression. The card effects and thematic elements of the cards are on point.

Cons: The use of A.I. art is going to annoy people; this is effectively an A.I. art-generated game; there is nothing original here.

The theme in Kingdom Legacy: Feudal Kingdoms is surprisingly strong for such a small card game. As you progress through the deck, you genuinely get the feeling that time is passing and your tiny outpost is slowly evolving into a functioning kingdom. That steady sense of growth taps directly into the addictive appeal of civilization-building games.

Each new round feels like another step in the development of your realm. You shuffle up, draw your cards, and start experimenting, trying to find clever ways to make your engine run just a little more efficiently. When everything lines up, and your kingdom starts humming along, it’s incredibly satisfying.

The game offers a surprising number of directions you can take your civilization. There are many ways to generate victory points and multiple development paths to pursue. In my experience, the most effective kingdoms tend to become broadly capable across several areas while leaning into one or two specialties.

Over repeated plays, I suspect most players will naturally gravitate toward their own preferred style of kingdom-building.

Even after several playthroughs, it’s difficult to say exactly how far you can push the scoring ceiling, but the important part is that the scoring system feels tightly connected to the theme. You are often faced with the classic “do I advance my engine or do I score points?” dilemma. In most cases, efficient expansion is the path to scoring more points, but eventually, you need to finish projects, which are the main way to get points. Growth and victory are closely intertwined, which reinforces the sense that you’re building a thriving realm rather than simply chasing numbers.

The artwork does a perfectly adequate job of representing the theme, though it’s obvious that all of it was generated using A.I. tools. The styles vary quite a bit, and the level of detail can fluctuate from card to card. The obvious is obvious here.

I’ve been fairly vocal about my position on A.I. art in games, and in short, it doesn’t bother me much. From a practical standpoint, it doesn’t impact gameplay. In a card-heavy game like this, hiring a team of illustrators would dramatically increase production costs, I get it. As it stands, Kingdom Legacy sells for around ten dollars. With fully commissioned artwork, that price could easily triple.

People are quite vocal about A.I. art, to the degree that if a game is discovered to be using it, people will not buy it on principle. While I personally don’t care, it doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of a game; I would not recommend it for professionally published games. A.I. Art is for freeware and print-to-play stuff; it’s for amateurs, not professionals.

Some people feel very strongly about the issue, and that’s fair. Personally, coming from an IT background, I tend to view A.I. as another step in technological evolution, something that will either find its place or fade away over time. Either way, it’s not a battle I feel particularly compelled to fight.

That said, from a purely artistic standpoint, A.I. art does tend to cap the ceiling a bit. At its best, it’s mediocre, but rarely exceptional. And because of that, it does have an impact on the overall presentation of the game.

I think the answer to A.I. art is, if you’re a publisher of professional games, don’t use A.I, period. Find another way.

Gameplay

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Excellent card-building engine, very addictive, hard to put down, big design space to expand into.

Cons: You’re not going to be satisfied playing this as a legacy game once, like most legacy games.

At the heart of Kingdom Legacy is a deceptively simple idea: draw four cards and try to do something clever with them. But as the game unfolds, that simple premise gradually blossoms into a web of interesting decisions and opportunities.

Each round begins with those four cards, which represent the resources, actions, and opportunities available to you at that moment. Your goal is to combine them in ways that allow you to upgrade cards, expand your kingdom, or unlock new elements from the hidden deck.

One of the key decisions each round revolves around the Advance action. The catch is that whenever you upgrade a card, everything else in your hand is immediately discarded. That means a lot of the resources you generate in a turn will often go unused.

However, the Advance action lets you draw two additional cards into your pool. You can repeat this action multiple times if you wish, expanding your options, but the trade-off is that the more cards you draw this way, the fewer you’ll ultimately be able to use efficiently.

This simple decision point ends up driving much of the strategy. Ideally, you want to accomplish upgrades using only the original four cards. The more often you can do that, the more efficient your kingdom-building engine becomes.

When you play your opening hand at the start of the game, it’s not hard to imagine where the game is going. The coins on the top left are resources you have to spend, and the middle right shows you the cost to upgrade the card, which allows you to flip it for the improved version of it. This is kind of the core procedure in the game. The catch is that, regardless of how many resources you have, you can only upgrade 1 card, and then everything is discarded.

Another fascinating aspect of the design is how the card pool is structured. Roughly half of the cards in the game are not part of the standard legacy draw deck. While you might encounter around seventy cards during the normal flow of the game, the rest can only be accessed through specific upgrades or special effects.

In a typical playthrough, you might only acquire a third of those cards. That means if you play the game once and move on, as the traditional legacy format suggests, you’ll never even see a huge portion of the content.

Which is exactly why the “play it once” idea feels a bit absurd here.

There are 139 cards in the deck, but in an average game, you might see around 100 of them. If you played this game only once, you would be effectively throwing out close to 40 cards you never even saw or used. That is so strange to me, I can’t get my head around it.

Even after my sixth playthrough, I was still discovering cards I had never seen before.

On top of that, each card has four possible upgrade levels, and they’re not always linear. Some upgrades branch left or right, forcing you to choose between different development paths. Because of this branching structure, it’s practically impossible to see every upgrade chain in a single game.

This is why I described the game earlier as a kind of card-based crack. Once you start discovering new cards and exploring different upgrade paths, it becomes very hard to stop. I ended up playing 3-4 hours at a time.

Another important element of the game is the appearance of enemy cards in your deck. Without spoiling anything, these cards represent threats to your kingdom and can seriously hinder your development if left unresolved. Having a plan on how to deal with them is crucial to success.

The good news is that there are often multiple ways to deal with them. The game rarely forces you into a single solution. Instead, you’re constantly weighing different approaches and considering which path will serve your long-term strategy best.

And that’s really the beauty of the design. Very rarely are you staring at only one or two possible actions. Most turns involve several viable choices, each with its own risks and rewards.

For me, this is exactly what I want from a solo game: something thoughtful, puzzle-like, challenging, and highly replayable. Kingdom Legacy: Feudal Kingdoms absolutely nails that formula.

There is one minor issue worth mentioning, though it’s more of a physical component quirk than a gameplay problem.

The orientation of cards in your deck actually matters. As a result, when shuffling, you have to be careful to keep every card facing the same direction. Inevitably, at some point during play, you’ll drop a few cards, or perhaps the entire deck, and when that happens, it can be difficult to remember which way everything was facing.

Late in the game, especially, that can be a bit of a headache.

It’s not a major problem, but it does mean you’ll want to shuffle carefully and treat your deck with a little respect.

That small quirk aside, from a gameplay standpoint, Feudal Kingdoms is superbly designed.

Replayability and Longevity

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: If you circumvent the legacy gimmick, this game is highly replayable with lots of expansions you can get into.

Cons: Like all legacy games, replayability is technically not a thing at all.

Feudal Kingdoms is an addictive game for all the classic reasons that empire-building games tend to be addictive. There’s that familiar “one more turn” feeling, the excitement of resetting and trying a different approach, and the satisfying sense of time passing as your tiny settlement slowly grows into something resembling a proper kingdom. All of that works together to make the game very easy to play repeatedly.

That said, this is a legacy game. If you strictly follow the intended “play it once and retire the game” philosophy, then the replayability score is effectively zero.

So this puts me in a bit of an awkward position when it comes to scoring replayability in the review.

If you approach the game the way I do, finding a way to keep everything reusable so you can play it multiple times, then the replayability is outstanding. Under that approach, I would easily rate it 5 out of 5 stars.

If, however, you follow the traditional legacy model and treat the game as a one-and-done experience, then what you really have is a 5–6 hour campaign. After that, the game has essentially completed its life cycle. Under that interpretation, the replayability score drops dramatically, probably to a 0 or 1 at best.

Even then, it’s worth noting that the value proposition is still pretty good. It’s honestly hard to think of many ways to entertain yourself for five or six hours for around ten bucks. So it would feel a little unfair to judge it too harshly purely on that basis.

In the end, I decided to split the difference. I scored it a 2, but applied a tilt of 1 so that the overall review isn’t overly penalized by a design choice that is, in many ways, inherent to the legacy format itself.

Conclusion

Whether you buy into the legacy model or not, for 10 bucks, this game is an absolute steal. I have already gotten more enjoyment out of it than most of the 40-50 dollar games on my shelf; it’s a fantastic value and an awesome night’s entertainment.

I do, however, think that circumventing the legacy thing is something you will want to do so that you can enjoy this game over and over again, and I do think most people will want to. It’s a great game, and it deserves repeated plays.

High recommendation from me, especially if you like empire-building games and don’t have any sort of affliction about playing a solo game. For me personally, it triggered an almost immediate response to buy up all of the other expansions for this game series, of which there are several.

Great game, great time

Board Game Reviews, Kick-Starer

Review: Fate – Defenders of Grimheim

March 8, 2026 5 Minutes Leave a comment

If you read this blog with any regularity, you already know that my relationship with co-op games is… complicated. Hot and cold might be the best way to describe it. If I’m being honest, I’d estimate that about 70% of the co-op games I try land somewhere between “pretty abysmal” and “tolerable”.

For a typical group looking for a fun Friday night game, this one really sticks the landing. I think it’s a great family game.

But every now and then a co-op game comes along that, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, just clicks. When that happens, it tends to turn into a full-blown love affair.

A couple of prime examples are Spirit Island and my beloved Lord of the Rings: The Living Card Game. I don’t just like these games, I love them. I quite literally own everything ever printed for The Lord of the Rings card game, and when it comes to Spirit Island, I’m ready to play anytime, anywhere.

I try very hard not to be a hardliner; I don’t want to say “I hate cooperative games”, because I know there are always exceptions, so I’m always ready and willing to try anything. The truth is, however, I have very few co-op games in my collection, and I think that says a lot about where I usually stand with them. Lord of the Rings: The Living Card Game is such an exception. I absolutely adore this game.

Because of this somewhat turbulent relationship with the genre, I usually avoid reviewing co-op games. I like to keep things positive on this blog as much as possible. I simply don’t see myself as the ideal target audience, so why would I offer an opinion on one?

I made an exception for Fate: Defenders of Grimheim for one very important reason: the designer is none other than Jonathan Fryxelius.

If that name rings a bell, it should. Fryxelius is the mastermind behind Terraforming Mars, which I consider to be one of the best competitive board games ever made. It still sits comfortably at number 12 on my Best Games list, an impressive feat considering it was released back in 2016, which has given the entire gaming industry 10 years to come up with something better, and while there have been a couple I could argue for, it stands strong. It also took home the Gamersdungeon Award for Best Game of the Year.

Terraforming Mars is one of the best competitive board games ever made, in my humble opinion, but I also consider it an absolute masterpiece in game design.

Suffice it to say, I’m a fan of Jonathan’s work. While he has spent the past decade steadily pumping out Terraforming Mars expansions, most of them excellent, I’ve always been curious to see how versatile he is as a designer.

So what happens when the man behind Terraforming Mars, one of the best competitive games ever made, decides to tackle the co-operative genre?

Well… that’s exactly what we’re here to find out!

Overview

Final Score: (3.95 out 5) Great Game!

The premise of Fate: Defenders of Grimheim is refreshingly simple. Players take on the roles of Viking-inspired fantasy heroes tasked with defending the town of Grimheim from an assortment of mythical monsters attacking from all sides.

The core game comes with four heroes, but there are two additional heroes (Sindra & Finkel) available in an expansion that is already out now.

At its heart, the game is an endurance battle. One, you technically have no hope of winning. But that’s fine, because victory doesn’t require you to defeat the invading hordes. You simply have to survive long enough for the timer to run out.

That timer comes in the form of a fixed number of turns, and most of the game revolves around plugging holes in your defenses and responding to threats before they get too close to town. It’s all about squeezing the most efficiency out of every action turn. Whenever the heroes fail to stop an enemy, one of Grimheim’s buildings is destroyed. Think of the town itself as a pool of hit points, and when those buildings are gone, so are you.

Fate can be quite brutal if you are not paying attention, this is not a simple dice chucker; there is a fair amount of strategy and tactics to this game. Failing to deal with the swarm of enemies coming at you can cause a collapse in short order.

Running parallel to this defensive struggle is the game’s progression system, which is arguably the real engine driving the experience. Your heroes begin the game relatively weak, armed with limited abilities and modest gear. As the game progresses, however, they gain new equipment and abilities that make them increasingly efficient at doing what heroes do best: killing monsters. That will sound like a relatively familiar game loop to most gamers, it quite literally describes every adventure game ever made.

It’s a simple but addictive concept built on one of the oldest traditions in gaming, a game loop that dates all the way back to the early days of Dungeons & Dragons: kill monsters, gain experience, level up, and become better at killing monsters.

Like Dungeons & Dragons, each hero (think class) comes with unique strengths and weaknesses. Success requires coordination, planning, and careful positioning between players to leverage the strengths of each hero. A little luck certainly helps, too.

The primary luck factor comes from the attack dice. Much like the classic D20, a good roll can turn a desperate situation into a heroic victory, while a bad roll can leave your carefully laid plans lying in the snow. That said, the game does offer enough tactical flexibility that clever play can often mitigate the whims of fate.

Luck does play its part in Fate. The dice are certainly a major component of that luck, but you also have the monster deck, which describes which monsters come out and where. This can create some wild board states, creating a wide range of interesting puzzles to solve.

In many ways, Fate feels a bit like a tower defense game. You’re constantly trying to eliminate monsters as efficiently as possible before they break through your defenses. The key difference is that you’re not trying to wipe out the invading force; you’re simply trying to outlast it.

Given the strategic depth of Jonathan’s Terraforming Mars, I’ll admit I expected something a bit heavier from him. I’m not entirely sure what I was hoping for, but the core gameplay loop here felt a little simpler than anticipated, I would say, kind of predictable.

That’s not to say the game is easy, it definitely isn’t. There are plenty of tactical decisions that will determine whether you win or lose. This isn’t a “roll some dice and hope for the best” kind of experience. There’s enough strategy here to chew on for a while.

The problem is that the puzzle begins to reveal itself fairly quickly, especially to seasoned gamers. After a few plays, veteran gamers will start to see the optimal approaches emerge.

After my first playthrough, I was quite satisfied. The game was fun, engaging, and held my attention. By the third or fourth session, however, the primary challenge began to feel less about solving the puzzle and more about managing the luck of the draw.

Because enemies enter play via card draws, sometimes the game simply overwhelms you. Other times, the threats line up in ways that allow careful planning to shine. In the long run, I suspect this is the kind of game where repeated plays will eventually leave players wanting new scenarios, new monsters, and new challenges to keep things fresh.

And in fairness, the design almost feels built for that. Fate seems perfectly positioned for expansions. If you enjoy the core gameplay loop, it’s easy to imagine eagerly awaiting additional content. There’s plenty of design space here for new enemies, new mechanics, and creative twists on the formula.

While the game does include ways to adjust the difficulty, I don’t think Fate has the near-infinite replayability of Terraforming Mars by contrast. That said, it’s certainly good for several enjoyable evenings at the table.

Which brings me to my general point and core issue I have with co-op games. They have a way of reaching the end of the fun. At some point, you solve the puzzle, and it feels kind of finished. That doesn’t diminish your experience of solving that puzzle, but I think the reason I prefer competitive games is that the puzzle is the other players strategy, which by its very nature is a new puzzle each time you play a game.

Cooperative games, even ones you play through just one time, can still make for an amazing experience; a game’s success is rarely tied to replayability, and I think in the case of Fate that is very true. It’s a fun game that you will experience and feel content that you got your money’s worth, very much as the case might be with something like Gloomhaven.

I suspect the game may have more staying power with a younger audience. Younger players tend to live in the experience of playing “a fun game” more than someone like me, who is dissecting the game. There’s quite a bit of fun to be squeezed out of this particular Viking cow if you simply enjoy pushing miniatures around, fighting monsters, rolling dice, and leveling up. It’s all quite satisfying from that perspective.

For me, however, the experience never quite reached the point where I was eagerly planning the next game night just to get Fate back on the table.

It’s a fun and interesting distraction, a perfectly solid take on cooperative gaming, and certainly a game I might pull out among some fresh-faced youngsters. But like many co-op games I’ve played, it ultimately landed in that familiar category of “that was fine, let’s move on.”

Better than many co-op games I have tried, certainly, but not really of the caliber that holds my interest long term.

But it also reinforced a conclusion I’ve reached many times before: cooperative games just might not be my thing. And even an excellent designer like Jonathan Fryxelius wasn’t quite enough to change my mind on that front.

Components

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: Exceptional component quality, fantastic presentation, solid interface for enhancing the efficiency of play.

Cons: You could go bigger with a box full of miniatures, but I think they did that in the Kickstarter.

When it comes to components, Fate: Defenders of Grimheim delivers exactly what I expect from a $50–$60 board game, and then some. The production quality is excellent across the board.

The artwork deserves special mention. It’s crisp, colorful, and full of personality, immediately selling the theme the moment the game hits the table. That matters a lot in a game like this, especially if your target audience is a younger crowd. When you’re fighting mythical monsters as Viking heroes, the visuals need to carry some weight, and Fate absolutely does.

The game is gorgous laid out on the table, a visual feast that will attract attention.

Just as importantly, the components aren’t just attractive, they’re functional. A lot of thought clearly went into making sure the design supports the gameplay. Information is presented cleanly and logically, allowing players to understand what’s happening at a glance and make informed decisions without constantly reaching for the rulebook.

I’ve always believed that one of the hallmarks of great game design is when you can look at the board of a new game you have never played before, make an educated guess about what things do, and turn out to be right. When that happens, it means the interface is doing its job.

That’s very much the case here.

The main board itself looks like a terrain map straight out of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. It’s not only visually appealing, but also communicates key information clearly. Enemy movement paths, terrain effects, and automated enemy behaviors are all easy to understand just by looking at the board.

The player boards, cards, and miniatures follow the same philosophy. They strike a near-perfect balance between aesthetics and usability. The cards in particular are excellent: the iconography is clear, the layout is intuitive, and it’s immediately obvious what each card does and how it fits into your strategy. At no point did anyone ask, “What does this card do?”

I barely mention the miniatures in the review, and that’s a bit criminal on my part, but they are nice, certainly something you could paint up. Packaged into pairs, they come in a nice protective case so that you can keep your cards and minis safe.

That clarity becomes especially valuable in a game like this, where the table can quickly fill up with heroes, monsters, tokens, and abilities. When a game has a lot of moving parts, clean design isn’t just nice, it’s essential.

The tokens and components themselves are also high quality, with sharp iconography and solid production values throughout.

Put simply, from a component standpoint, this is about as good as it gets. I genuinely tried to find something to nitpick here, if only to avoid sounding overly enthusiastic, but came up empty.

The truth is, the component execution is pretty much flawless.

Theme

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: The fantasy Viking theme is a nice aesthetic choice, and I really like the comic book art style.

Cons: The theme here is kind of arbitrary; you could have put just about anything in here. I think it’s a missed opportunity to do something really original.

The theme in Fate: Defenders of Grimheim is fun, engaging, and well executed, but it’s also the kind of game where they could have swapped out the theme without fundamentally changing the experience.

You could just as easily imagine this system wrapped in a Star Wars, Star Trek, or Samurai epic, and it would function just as well. The underlying mechanics are fairly theme-agnostic, the core concept quite basic. Defend the base with your heroes.

And that’s not necessarily a criticism. It simply means the theme isn’t doing the heavy lifting in the design. In a way, I think it’s a missed opportunity to do something weird/cool/gonzo, aka original. Simply picking a theme and wrapping it around a mechanic is fine, but it kind of becomes less relevant to the game experience at the table.

I often get challenged on my comments about theme. What constitutes an original theme? It’s hard to point to it exactly, I just know it when I see it. Root is a great example. It’s a war game, they could have used Vikings, Samurai’s or whatever else, but creating original factions, wrapped up in there own seting with truly original art this is what an original theme looks like. It’s so good they ended up having to make an RPG out of it.

That said, the Viking setting chosen here works very well. I’ve always had a soft spot for Viking mythology, and Fate blends Norse flavor with fantasy elements in a way that feels natural and cohesive. The monsters, heroes, and abilities all fit together logically, and nothing ever feels out of place or forced.

If anything, the real star of the show here is the artwork. The visual style is consistent, atmospheric, and full of personality. It does a tremendous amount of work in selling the world and giving the game its identity.

Beyond that, there isn’t much more to say. The theme is well implemented and enjoyable, but it isn’t a defining pillar of the game’s design.

It’s a solid execution, just not a critical ingredient.

Gameplay

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: The mechanics are a master class in game design, smooth as silk.

Cons: Veteran gamers might find the game a bit too easy.

Gameplay, the real engine under the hood of Fate: Defenders of Grimheim, is where the game distinguishes itself. There’s some subtle but genuinely clever design at work here.

I’ll try not to get overly long-winded… though as a fan of the designer, I may fail spectacularly at that goal.

The first thing that stands out is how smooth the mechanics are. The flow of the game is remarkably efficient, keeping everyone at the table engaged almost constantly. In fact, the sequence of play is so clean that the game doesn’t even need a player’s aid. After each player completes their first turn, everyone at the table will understand exactly how the system works.

Jonathan Fryxelius makes it look easy, but anyone who has ever tried to design a game knows how hard it is to make something both fun and mechanically elegant. Achieving this level of clarity without sacrificing engagement is genuinely impressive. From a structural standpoint, it’s a masterclass in game design.

At its core, the game gives you a village to defend. The problem, of course, is that you’re defending it with a handful of heroes against what quickly feels like an endless swarm of monsters approaching from all directions. That imbalance is the heart of the puzzle.

Although Fate is cooperative, the reality is that each player largely ends up responsible for defending one direction of attack. You can occasionally assist one another, but even with four heroes on the board, covering every approach is nearly impossible.

Interestingly, this structure solves one of the classic problems of cooperative games: the dreaded “alpha player.” Because there’s simply too much happening in too many places, no single player can realistically dictate the optimal move for everyone else. Each hero has their own situation to manage, which keeps decision-making personal and engaging.

It might look like these two heroes are fighting side by side, but three spaces away might as well be a different zip code. These heroes are in the trenches fighting their own battles.

The overall goal is to leverage your hero’s strengths against enemy weaknesses while developing your character into a more efficient monster-slaying machine. But there are complications.

Heroes will take damage, sometimes a lot of it, and eventually they’ll need to retreat back to the village to heal before returning to the fight. Every action matters, every movement counts, and even a small miscalculation can result in losing a building or two. If a hero actually gets knocked out, it’s an absolute disaster!

The margin between victory and disaster is razor-thin. That tension creates a constant sense of pressure, and within that pressure lies the excitement.

In fact, losing in Fate can be almost as entertaining as winning. When you win, everyone celebrates and congratulates themselves on a job well done. When you lose, the post-game conversation tends to be much more animated as players dissect the moment things went wrong, debating mistakes, bad luck, and missed opportunities before inevitably suggesting, “Alright… let’s try that again.”

Thanks to the game’s streamlined mechanics, these discussions rarely devolve into rules debates. The system is clean enough that players spend their time thinking about strategy rather than arguing about edge cases. When the game ends, win or lose, you know exactly which decisions led you there.

A major part of the gameplay revolves around three different types of hero cards.

First are the Quest and Equipment cards. These function as small missions that reward you with new gear once completed, essentially the board game equivalent of finishing a side quest and receiving a magical item.

The catch is that these quests often require you to do something inefficient, such as traveling to a specific location or defeating a particular monster type. Pursuing equipment can therefore, pull you away from more urgent threats. Chasing powerful gear can be tempting, but if you get too greedy, you might doom the entire group. On the other hand, ignoring upgrades entirely can leave you underpowered in the late game. It’s a beautifully designed tension that forces players to make imperfect decisions.

Equipment cards are crucial to success, but also typically the most difficult to get because of the quest requirements. It’s a good balance between risk vs. reward.

Second are the Event cards. These are one-shot abilities that can dramatically influence a turn, granting extra movement, healing, bonus attacks, or additional damage. They’re powerful tools that reward clever timing and creative combinations. A well-played event card can turn a desperate situation into a heroic moment.

Even cards are less reliable since they are one-time use, so it’s all about timing. By the way, how about this art? So good, I mean, I know I complained a bit about the originality of the theme, there are so many Viking games these days, but man, you can’t complain about the originality of this art, so amazing, I love it.

Finally, there are the Ability cards. These are purchased using gold (which also doubles as experience) earned primarily by killing monsters. Ability cards represent permanent upgrades to your hero and are arguably the most reliable way to grow stronger over the course of the game, though this can be a slow process.

Many of the more powerful abilities require charging before they can be used, meaning you might only unleash them every couple of turns. But when the moment is right, they can produce spectacular results.

Abilities have big effects on the game, things like Suppressive Fire can completetly shutdown an enemy movement, for example. Stuff like that is the difference between winning and losing in Fate; these are key progressions, must-haves to win the game.

In many ways, the game becomes a race to unlock your stronger abilities before the board state spirals out of control. Event cards alone won’t carry you through the late game; you’ll need a solid combination of equipment and abilities if you hope to survive the final rounds.

Each hero begins the game with a unique ability and piece of equipment that effectively defines their class. Some heroes are stronger, some are tougher, some are faster, and others rely on trickery. It’s a very classic design philosophy, straight out of the old Gygaxian playbook, but it works extremely well here. Each hero feels distinct and useful without any of them feeling clearly superior.

The game also includes several setup options that adjust difficulty and length. Importantly, none of these add extra complexity; they simply make the same game harder.

The time tracker offers both short and long game options, though in practice, Fate will usually take a couple of hours unless the players lose early. The tracker mostly affects how long the game lasts when you actually manage to survive.

Another option I strongly recommend is the Monster Dice variant. This die is rolled during the monster phase and introduces small, unpredictable twists to enemy behavior. Once you become familiar with the base system, this rule adds a welcome bit of chaos that keeps things from becoming too predictable.

I think the monster die is probably one of the most effective ways to disrupt game mastery that I think most people will attain on repeat plays. An unscheduled charge or push, for example, can create a whole lot of unexpected chaos, and I think that is really good for this game. It’s a vital part that keeps the players on their toes.

The monster AI itself is straightforward. Enemies move and attack according to clear rules, advancing steadily toward the village. They appear faster than you can realistically eliminate them, which creates the constant feeling of being overwhelmed.

At its heart, Fate is a game about damage control. You’re managing a crisis that is slowly spiraling out of control while trying to survive inside what feels like a steadily tightening pressure cooker.

It’s a compelling system that keeps everyone thinking, planning, and adapting. That said, there are a couple of observations worth mentioning.

For my group, the difficulty wasn’t especially great. On our very first play, we used the highest difficulty setting along with the Monster Dice variant. The game came down to the final turn and the final die roll, a dramatic finish that had everyone cheering when we pulled off the win.

The surprising part was that this was our first game. I was expecting to get crushed.

We had just learned the rules and already managed to beat it at maximum difficulty? For my group, that made the challenge feel a bit soft.

To be fair, my gaming group is extremely competitive and very experienced with strategy games. Designing a cooperative game that truly challenges players like that would probably make the game nearly impossible for everyone else.

And when I later played the game with my daughter and her friends, we were crushed almost immediately.

Their reaction was simple and immediate:
“Wow… this game is so hard.”

So in the end, the difficulty really depends on who’s sitting at the table.

All said and done, I found little to complain about when it comes to Fate other than my own personal bias against cooperative games. I’m clearly not the target audience here, and that is not an issue with Fate; that is just a preference thing. I think this is a really well-designed cooperative strategy game, and I think fans of the genre and this style of play, will find that Jonathan’s take on it is exceptionally well done and polished.

Replay-ability and Longevity

Score:
Tilt:

Pros: The game is easy to teach and learn, making it an attractive choice with a younger crowd or even potentially as a sort of quasi-party game.

Cons: Once you find the groove and win a few games, the fire will die down.

Even if you’re a big fan of cooperative games, I think it’s fair to say that Fate: Defenders of Grimheim has a somewhat limited shelf life. After you’ve beaten it a few times, the urgency to jump back in starts to fade. That’s not necessarily a flaw of this particular game, it’s simply the nature of many player-versus-AI designs.

There are, of course, exceptions. I mentioned The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game earlier, and one of the reasons that game has such extraordinary replayability is the sheer mountain of content available for it. With countless expansions and new quests, every play session can feel like a completely different experience.

Fate, on the other hand, largely offers a single core scenario. The specific circumstances of each game will vary, the enemies drawn, the dice rolls, the choices players make, but the overall structure of the experience remains largely the same.

That said, the design clearly leaves a lot of room for expansion. In fact, the core box almost feels like the starting point for what could easily become a broader game line. New monsters, heroes, scenarios, and objectives could dramatically increase the longevity of the system.

As it stands, I ended up playing the game about half a dozen times with my daughter. Most of those games were losses, and interestingly enough, that actually fuels replayability. Nothing motivates another round quite like getting crushed by a swarm of monsters and wanting revenge.

Until you start winning consistently, that competitive itch will probably keep pulling you back to the table.

Overall, I do think Fate offers enough replay value to justify its price. It’s simple enough to teach quickly, yet engaging enough to satisfy experienced gamers. In fact, the game has a bit of a “party game” energy to it, winning is fun, but losing can be just as entertaining thanks to the post-game analysis and table chatter.

For that reason, I can easily see it occupying a nice niche spot on the shelf. It’s the kind of game you can pull out with a mixed group or a younger audience without worrying about overwhelming them with complexity.

And in that regard, it worked wonderfully with my daughter.

Conclusion

One of the main reasons I like my review system is the use of Tilts. It allows a game to push through to a strong overall score if it excels where it truly matters, even if it’s a little weaker in areas that aren’t as critical to the experience.

I don’t usually explain that in the conclusion, but this review is actually a perfect example of the system working exactly as intended. And I’ll admit, I’m rather pleased with myself about that, because the final score reflects my feelings about this game very accurately.

Yes, the replayability and theme fall a bit into the “perfectly fine, nothing spectacular” category. But that’s not really where this game lives or dies. The real strength of Fate: Defenders of Grimheim lies in its gameplay and its presentation.

This is an incredibly approachable game. It’s easy to get to the table, easy to teach, and within minutes, everyone is rolling dice, fighting monsters, and having a good time. The visual presentation does a lot of heavy lifting here, the artwork, board, and components make the game instantly inviting, and the clarity of the design keeps things running smoothly once the action starts.

While the mechanics are simple to grasp, the game still presents a respectable challenge for the right group. I probably wouldn’t break this out very often for my veteran gaming crew, they’d likely solve the puzzle fairly quickly, but for a typical group looking for a fun Friday night game, this one really sticks the landing. I think it’s a great family game.

And it clearly works well with younger players too. As I’m writing this review, my daughter is already asking if we can play again. Last night we got absolutely crushed, and she’s apparently been developing a new strategy that she’s convinced will win the game “for sure this time.”

So credit where it’s due.

Jonathan Fryxelius is a brilliant designer, and Fate: Defenders of Grimheim is a genuinely fun addition to the cooperative genre. I have a strong feeling that a lot of people are going to enjoy this one.

Best of List, D&D, Role-Player Game Reviews

Top 10 Versions of Dungeons and Dragons

February 19, 2026 5 Minutes Leave a comment

One question that shows up in my inbox again and again is simple on the surface but surprisingly loaded underneath. What is your favorite edition of Dungeons and Dragons?

I have done broader best RPG lists before, but that is not really what people are asking. They are not looking for my thoughts on the entire hobby. They want to know which banner I fly when it comes to D&D. Which version sits closest to my heart? Which books I reach for when someone says, do you want to play.

So I decided to answer properly.

Instead of naming a single winner, I pulled together a top 10 list that includes not just official editions, but also variants, clones, and offshoots that belong to the larger D&D family. Some are obvious. Some are unexpected. All of them, in one way or another, carry the torch of dungeon-crawling fantasy adventure.

It turned out to be a fun exercise. And with so much debate swirling around modern Dungeons and Dragons right now, it feels like a good time to zoom out a little. There is a vast landscape beyond the latest edition war. Plenty of roads to travel. Plenty of dragons to slay.

10. Forbidden Lands

I will start with what might be the most controversial entry on this list. Controversial only because it is the least mechanically related to D&D of anything here. Its core system comes from a completely different lineage. It does not descend from TSR or the d20 tree.

And yet, thematically, Forbidden Lands often feels more like classic D&D than some official editions. If we are willing to call 5th edition D&D, then I say by right, Forbidden Lands deserves a seat at the table.

What makes it unique is that it is tightly bound to its setting and intended campaign style. This is not a generic fantasy engine. It is a game about survival in a harsh and broken land, well defined, illustrated, and presented in beautiful detail. The players are not chosen heroes destined for greatness. They are desperate adventurers trying to carve out a place in a world that does not care if they live or die.

The mechanics are not perfect. There are a few rough edges, oddly familiar if you play a lot of D&D-style games. But what it does extremely well is align rules with tone. The system reinforces scarcity, risk, and tension. It avoids the incoherent sprawl that some classic D&D editions suffered from while still capturing that old school edge.

It is brutal. Life is cheap. Characters can and will struggle to survive. That feeling is deeply reminiscent of early D&D, when survival was not assumed and advancement had to be earned the hard way. Maybe it is not quite as unforgiving as the earliest editions, but it carries that same weight. Every journey into the wild feels risky. Every campfire feels temporary.

The boxed set presentation helps enormously. Forbidden Lands is largely self-contained. Yes, there are expansions, but the core box gives you everything you need. System, setting, campaign framework. It is all there, cohesive and focused. There is something refreshing about that. No endless stream of mandatory supplements. No sprawling library required. Just a complete experience in one package.

I have not played as much Forbidden Lands as some of the other games on this list, but the campaign I did experience was enough to convince me. It had that unmistakable D&D flavor. Exploration. Danger. Treasure. Hard choices. The difference was simply that the tone leaned darker and the system carried its weight more cleanly.

For that reason alone, it earns its place here. It may not share D&D’s mechanical ancestry, but in spirit it absolutely belongs to the same school of adventure.

9. Pathfinder 2nd Edition

I am not entirely sure I am a natural fan of the tactical RPG genre. I appreciate it. I respect it. But it is not my default preference. That said, when it comes to D&D style tactical systems, Pathfinder 2nd edition is undeniably solid.

I spent a fair amount of time running and playing it, and for good reason. It answers a very specific question. What happens if you take 3rd edition, modernize it completely, and then dive even deeper into tactical precision and character customization?

The answer is a beast.

Pathfinder 2e is enormous. Over six hundred pages of tightly engineered rules. Layers of customization. Class feats, ancestry feats, skill feats, archetypes, options within options. It likely contains more meaningful character choices in a single core rulebook than most of the other games on this list combined.

And yet, for all that weight, it is remarkably well organized. If you love deep mechanical play, Pathfinder 2e executes it in the most streamlined and optimized way possible. It is complex, but it is disciplined complexity. The math works. The action economy is elegant. The system is balanced with almost obsessive care.

What I admire most is something it shares with Pathfinder 1e. It takes a core concept and refines it relentlessly. Then it builds outward with themed expansions, adventure paths, and supplemental books that feel purposeful rather than random. It supports its own vision thoroughly.

At the same time, it is simply too heavy for me to run these days. I do not have the time I once did. There is no winging Pathfinder 2e. You cannot improvise your way through it casually and expect the system to carry you. To run it well, you need to put in the hours. Real preparation. Real system mastery. Without that effort, the experience suffers.

In my current stage of life, that level of demand is hard to justify.

As a player, however, I am far more open. If someone else is willing to do the work behind the screen, I am happy to show up and engage with the system. From the player side, Pathfinder 2e is a rewarding tactical experience. Fights are dynamic. Choices matter. Encounters can be genuinely challenging. And when paired with one of its strong adventure paths, it can deliver some truly memorable campaigns.

The Kingmaker adaptation for Pathfinder 2e is a great example. A massive kingdom-building saga, packed with depth and scale. As a player, I would gladly dive into something like that.

As a Game Master, though, I have to be honest. It is a hard no. Not because it fails, but because it demands more than I am willing to give at this point. Pathfinder 2e absolutely earns its place on this list. It is a masterfully engineered system. It is just one that requires a level of commitment I have long since outgrown.

8. Castles and Crusades

There are games on this list that I have spent years playing, systems that shaped entire eras of my D&D life. Castles and Crusades is not one of them. And yet it still earns a place here, because it fills a very specific role in the broader world of Dungeons and Dragons.

It covers a niche that I do not often need, but once in a while, it is exactly the right tool for the job.

Castles and Crusades emerged at a time when 3rd and 3.5 edition Dungeons and Dragons had grown increasingly complex. Character builds became intricate, rules interactions multiplied, and system mastery was often rewarded over good old-fashioned adventuring fun. Castles and Crusades stepped in as a lighter alternative, a rebuttal to the question, what does modern D&D look like. It felt like a modern continuation of 2nd edition AD&D, but with a cleaner and more unified core mechanic. In another timeline where TSR had remained in control and refined AD&D using a more streamlined approach, this might have been the result.

It was clearly dedicated to preserving the feel of classic AD&D. The classes, the tone, and the emphasis on medieval fantasy adventure all remained intact. The goal was not to reinvent Dungeons and Dragons, but to refine it. To keep the spirit while trimming away the layers of complexity that 3rd edition became known for.

For me the difficulty has always been the audience. The people I play with tend to fall into one of two camps. They are either committed old school players who want early TSR editions or faithful retro clones, or they prefer whatever the latest official version happens to be. At one time, that was 3rd edition, then Pathfinder, then 4th edition, and so on.

Castles and Crusades sits squarely in the middle. It preserves early D&D while presenting it in a modern framework. In theory, that should make it a perfect compromise. In practice, D&D players are rarely looking for compromise. They usually know exactly what they want.

As a result, my copy has often stayed on the shelf. A bit of a dust collector.

That said, from a design perspective, I have a great deal of respect for it. The system is elegant, focused, and confident in what it is trying to do. It is unapologetically both old school and modern at the same time, and it manages to pull that off remarkably well.

I’m not sure I love the Siege Engine, which is the core resolution system for C&C’s answer to skill checks. I always found the dice odds and results of that particular rules mechanic off, but as I tend to avoid the use of skills in my games whenever possible, it’s not that big of a deal. I think the game would have been better off either using the D20 skill system or the AD&D non-weapon proficiencies, but the middle ground kind of didn’t work as well as either one of those did.

That caveat aside, if you have a group that enjoys modern Dungeons and Dragons but is willing to simplify things a bit, and you are a Dungeon Master who prefers the feel of classic adventures without all the classic mechanical baggage, Castles and Crusades can be an excellent choice. It may not be the game I reach for most often, but I am glad it exists; it earns its rightful place on this list.

7. 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons

I know some of my old school D&D friends will raise an eyebrow at this one. Especially after the 2024 update and all the noise that surrounded it. But here is the simple truth. I am a gamer. I care about what happens at the table far more than what happens on social media. I am here to roll dice, tell stories, and have a good time. The rest is just background chatter.

For me, 5th edition is the most polished and efficient power fantasy version of Dungeons and Dragons ever made. It knows exactly what it is doing. You are not a struggling adventurer scraping by with four hit points and a rusty sword. You are a force of nature. A fantasy superhero with spells, abilities, and enough resilience to stare down a fantasy monster without breaking a sweat.

And that is fun.

5th edition is about bold moves and dramatic victories. It is about kicking in the door and believing you might actually survive what is on the other side. The system is flexible, easy to learn, and offers a huge range of character options without drowning players in mechanical detail. It gives you variety without demanding spreadsheets.

That matters.

It also matters that this style of play speaks to a lot of people, especially younger players. My kids love it. They want to charge into battle against multiple dragons and come out standing. They want big moments and spectacular powers. 5th edition delivers that in a way that feels smooth and accessible.

As a writer, I love working in the 5th edition design space. It is easy to create adventures when you can assume the characters are competent and durable. You can focus on cool scenarios, memorable villains, and cinematic set pieces without constantly worrying whether the mechanics will collapse under pressure. Yes, it is difficult to create truly punishing challenges, and the game gets truly wacky at high levels. But if you approach 5e expecting it to be a brutal survival simulator, you are probably aiming at the wrong target.

Above all else, 5th edition is simply fun to play. If you are old school like me, you do have to let go of certain expectations. Once you stop trying to make it something it is not and just lean into what it does well, it becomes clear why it has brought so many people into the hobby.

The starter sets are a perfect example. They are some of the best introductory products Dungeons and Dragons has ever produced. I own them all, and despite having shelves full of adventures, my kids are perfectly happy replaying The Dragon of Icespire Peek again and again. We defeat the dragon, celebrate, and then roll up new characters to do it all over. It is like rewatching a favorite movie for the tenth time and still enjoying every scene.

Wizards of the Coast clearly understands how to speak to the current generation of players. What might look unusual or unnecessary to older fans feels completely natural to younger ones. They do not carry the same expectations or nostalgia. They just see a game full of possibilities.

If someone comes to me today and says they have never played a roleplaying game but want to learn D&D, 5th edition with one of the starter kits is still my go-to recommendation. It is welcoming, flexible, and immediately rewarding. And sometimes that is exactly what the hobby needs.

6. Pathfinder 1st edition

For me, Pathfinder 1st edition represents the entire 3rd edition era. When I put Pathfinder on this list, I am also tipping my hat to 3rd and 3.5 edition Dungeons and Dragons. Pathfinder 1st edition feels like the definitive final form of that lineage. The system was refined, expanded, and pushed right to its natural limit.

I played an absurd amount of 3rd edition era D&D. From the original launch of 3rd edition to the sprawling Adventure Paths of Pathfinder, no other game on this list has generated more memories or consumed more hours of my life. We practically lived at the gaming table. Twelve to fourteen-hour sessions were normal. Several times a week was normal. We were young, obsessed, and fully committed.

That era was a golden age for me, and part of that is simply timing. I was in my late teens when 3rd edition arrived. No wife. No kids. No career clawing at my schedule. Just friends, dice, and time. So much time. We learned the system inside and out. We did not just play it. We mastered it.

It also felt like a second great age of settings. Much like the early TSR days, the 3rd edition era exploded with new worlds. Scarred Lands. Eberron. Golarion. Midnight. Iron Kingdoms. Each one with its own flavor, its own tone, its own promise of adventure. The writing was ambitious and plentiful. You could jump from gothic horror to pulp intrigue to mythic war without ever leaving the broader d20 umbrella.

And the adventures. Some of the best campaign material ever written for the game came out during this time. Kingmaker stands tall in my memory as a near perfect expression of what long form campaign design could look like. Big ideas. Player agency. Epic payoff.

Mechanically, this was the age of prestige classes and intricate character builds. We loved it. We loved planning out ten levels in advance. We loved squeezing every advantage out of feats, skills, and class combinations. Looking back now, it feels excessive, but at the time it was exactly what we wanted. Video games were deep and complex. Miniature games rewarded optimization. We wanted systems with moving parts, and 3rd edition delivered.

That said, this is probably the one game on the list I would not return to today. Not because it failed. Quite the opposite. It demands time, focus, and energy. It rewards dedication. Back then I had those resources in abundance. Today, with family and career taking their rightful place, the thought of diving back into that level of mechanical depth feels exhausting.

That is not a flaw in Pathfinder. It is simply a shift in who I am now.

I regret nothing about those years. They were loud, ambitious, rules-heavy, and absolutely glorious. Pathfinder 1st edition stands as the monument to that chapter of my gaming life, and it earned every hour I gave it.

5. Dungeon Crawl Classics

Dungeon Crawl Classics is another brilliant offshoot of D&D that might be just a little too niche for its own good.

If Castles and Crusades is a careful bridge between eras, Dungeon Crawl Classics is what happens when you hand the keys to a group of wildly creative designers and simply say go. Goodman Games has assembled one of the most imaginative teams in the hobby. Their adventures and supplements do not feel restrained or filtered. They feel unleashed.

The result is a game bursting with ideas. Strange ideas. Loud ideas. Ideas that do not ask for permission and no sane person would ever approve them, but Goodman Games is …special.

For many D&D fans, whether old school traditionalists or modern build-focused players, it can be too much. Dungeon Crawl Classics demands an open mind. It asks you to step outside your expectations of what D&D is supposed to look like. You have to let go…a lot. Let the dice take over. Let the chaos breathe.

I ran a single Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign during the pandemic, when we were all locked in our homes and playing digitally. It was the perfect time to experiment. My group was ultimately lukewarm on the whole thing, and I understood why. DCC is strange. Its magic system alone feels like a deliberate rebellion against predictability. Spells can spiral into glorious disasters or explode into legendary triumphs. Control is not guaranteed or even expected.

In fact, that loss of control is part of the point. Where most RPGs try to smooth out volatility, DCC leans into it. It takes the core tropes of Dungeons and Dragons and turns every dial as far as it will go. The tone becomes gonzo. The situations become outrageous. At times, it feels like a fever dream version of classic fantasy adventure.

To really enjoy it, you almost have to take off your traditional D&D hat. If you cling too tightly to balance, careful planning, or long-term character optimization, the game will fight you. But if you embrace the madness, it becomes something special.

I personally love it. I think Dungeon Crawl Classics is an absolute blast to run and play. The shenanigans that unfold at the table often feel like a wild fantasy cartoon brought to life by dice. almost a kind of comedic parody of D&D. It is not sloppy design. Beneath the chaos is a carefully constructed engine built to generate those moments on purpose.

Still, it takes a very specific kind of group to truly enjoy it. It pushes both old school brutality and modern spectacle to their extremes at the same time. That combination is not for everyone.

I admire it deeply. I have tremendous respect for its creativity. But I completely understand why it might not click for most players. Dungeon Crawl Classics is less about comfort and more about curiosity. It rewards those who love bold design and fearless imagination as much as they love playing D&D itself.

4. 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons

1st edition AD&D is a true old school classic for me. I played it in the mid-eighties, when I was still very young, but even today I feel a surge of energy when I pull those old books off the shelf. The covers alone still have power.

That said, of all the games on this list, this is probably the one that has aged the worst.

Let me start with why I loved it, and in many ways still do.

It had style. It had mystique. Being a Dungeon Master felt like stepping into a secret order; being a player felt like you were stepping into a mystery. These were not just roles at the table. They were positions of either authority and deep knowledge, or explorers of a great mystery. The game expected Dungeon Masters to study it, internalize it, and guard it. Players, on the other hand, were meant to discover it through play, not through reading the books. This unspoken understanding was a social contract, and there was a clear purpose behind it.

As a player, the game was a mystery. We did not read the Dungeon Masters Guide. We did not flip through the Monster Manual. Doing so was forbidden. You learned by playing. You learned by surviving. You learned by making mistakes.

Knowledge was power, and that knowledge was earned; it was a trial by fire.

The first time we encountered a gelatinous cube, it was not a stat block. It was a horrifying surprise, but the next time, the players knew how to deal with it. Experience was earned by players and characters alike. The first time we got lost in the woods, found a magical lock, picked up an unidentified scroll, or crossed an ocean, there was no safety net. No clear mechanical explanation was handed to us ahead of time, we didn’t know the odds or even fully grasp the dangers. We discovered how the game and the world worked by interacting with it, by suffering at its cruelty and learning as we went.

The result was a game where the world felt real in a way that is hard to describe. Your character lived in it, but you as a player were also navigating something unknown. Characters died. That happened often. But the player gained experience. We remembered where the dangerous forest was. We remembered that troll and the hard lesson about fire. We made our own maps because none were provided. We built keeps for safety, opened taverns with our ill-gotten gains for fame and glory, and followed storylines that unfolded over years out of personal attachment to the events. Events in which characters perished to the plots of evil villains that lingered despite our best efforts to stop them. There were personal agendas, oaths of vengeance, we cursed the DM for cruelty and unfairness, but secretly we applauded the experience because it was so vivid.

There was a veil over the whole game, and we didn’t peek. The rules themselves were part of the exploration; the DMG was a mysterious book, and we could only imagine what was inside.

In modern D&D, that veil is usually gone. Players know the system inside and out. They know what monsters do. They can look up spells, effects, and optimal builds between sessions. The mystery is replaced with transparency. That is not necessarily bad, but it is different.

The hard truth is that maintaining that veil was never sustainable back then, either. Eventually, we all wanted to try being Dungeon Masters. We read the books. We saw behind the curtain. Once you understand the machinery, it never quite feels the same again.

Today, when I look at 1st edition AD&D with experienced and unveiled eyes, I see flawed mechanics, inconsistent rules, and some genuinely questionable design decisions. The structure is messy. The balance is uneven. The clarity we now expect simply is not there.

And yet, I can still feel what it was meant to be. I can still sense the potential. The idea that the game itself is something you uncover over time. That the rules are not just tools, but secrets.

Modern players ask more questions. They want clarity. They want consistency. They want to know how things work before committing to an action. They are less willing to let the system itself be part of the mystery. Without that mystery, 1st edition AD&D can feel fragile and awkward.

But when it worked, when that veil was intact, and the world felt unknown, AD&D had a kind of magic that was indescribably wonderful. I can understand the OSR for wanting to keep this version of the game alive and immortal. I’m 100% convinced that no other RPG in existence can offer the experience AD&D can, and if you haven’t experienced it yourself, I pity you.

If this were a list of the best RPG experiences of all time, AD&D would be at the top of the list by a margin so wide that there would be no point in adding any other games to the list.

3. 1st edition BECMI (Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, Immortal): AKA The Dungeons and Dragons Rules Cyclopedia

Yes, that is a mouthful.

The unified BECMI line is an interesting creature. The original purpose of Basic and Expert was simple. It was meant to be an entry path into Dungeons and Dragons, a starting point before players graduated to 1st edition AD&D.

But TSR being TSR, things did not unfold quite so cleanly. Business decisions and internal dynamics led to Basic and Expert continuing to expand. Companion added domain play. Master pushed power levels higher. Immortal went cosmic. By the time you had the full BECMI spread, you were looking at a system that rivaled Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in scope and complexity.

In a sense, it became an alternate evolution of AD&D. Not the same tone, not the same mystique, but just as ambitious.

Where AD&D felt mysterious and almost arcane, BECMI felt structured and purposeful. To me, its true strength was scale. This was a game built to sustain an epic campaign. Characters could progress from level 1 all the way to 36. No other version of D&D committed so fully to that kind of long-term arc, nor did most systems support game elements beyond simple adventuring.

It is the only edition that truly embraced the idea that a campaign might run indefinitely without slamming into a hard ceiling. I have never met anyone who actually reached Immortal play at level 36, but the mere existence of that ladder is inspiring. It suggests a game designed for years of development, not just months.

I ran a Mystara campaign that lasted nearly six years. Same world. Same characters, we reached level 21 if memory serves, we could have easily gone on for another decade. We began with Keep on the Borderlands, rusty swords and no backstories. Over time, those same characters ruled kingdoms, negotiated wars, shaped politics, and watched the consequences of their choices ripple outward. It became generational storytelling. Legends built at the table.

You can tell stories like that in other systems, certainly. But BECMI supports it directly. It has mechanics for domain management, armies, mass combat, and high-level play baked into the structure. From dungeon delving to empire building, it provides a framework.

Of all the old TSR-era systems, this is one that I believe still holds up remarkably well. It is robust, deep, and surprisingly cohesive when taken as a whole. The Rules Cyclopedia in particular stands out as one of the most practical and usable single-volume rulebooks TSR ever produced.

That said, like all TSR games, it expects house ruling. No version from that era arrived perfectly tuned. But the underlying design space is strong enough to support that tinkering, it was quite flexible. Not only as a design space, but because it had such a close relationship with AD&D, you could pull elements from the supplements supporting that game as well.

It is also important not to confuse BECMI with the earlier B and X sets. They are the same game, or at least share DNA, but BECMI grows far beyond a simple introductory game. This is not a basic experience. It is a complex and demanding system for players who want a long and detailed journey. In terms of commitment, it sits comfortably beside AD&D and 3rd edition.

Which is why I do not really run it anymore. Like those other deep systems, it asks for time and focus that I simply do not have.

But if someone came to me and said can you run BECMI for us, I would struggle to say no. It remains one of the strongest designs TSR ever produced, and it absolutely still works at the table; it’s worth the stretch.

2. Dolmenwood & Old School Essentials & B/X

I group these three games because they are directly connected. Old School Essentials is a beautifully organized and clarified presentation of B/X. Dolmenwood builds on Old School Essentials and wraps it in a rich, self-contained setting. They have interchangeable structures so adventures for any of them will work with any of the systems without alteration; they are, in a word the same game.

What I love about this architecture, especially as a Dungeon Master, is its simplicity and its immediate focus on adventure. I would even argue that these are not role-playing games in the modern sense. They are adventure games.

The difference, at least in my mind, is subtle but important. In most modern role-playing games, the character as an identity becomes central. Backstory, personal arcs, emotional journeys. In B/X and its descendants, the character is more of an avatar. An extension of the player exploring dangerous places. The focus is on what you do, not who you are.

My expectation with these systems is simple. I can say hey, do you want to play D&D, and ten minutes later we are rolling dice and kicking in doors. There is very little friction between the idea of playing and actually playing, which I can with confidence is ALWAYS a problem in almost all RPG’s. Character creation is quick. The rules are clear. The goal is obvious and explicit in the metagame (1 gold = 1 XP). Go into the dungeon. Survive if you can. Bring back the treasure.

Dolmenwood adds tremendous flavor to that formula. It provides a fully realized setting, strange and whimsical and dark in equal measure, with locations and hooks ready to use. It feels open and alive, but it does not demand hours of preparation. You can point to a map, choose a direction, and the adventure is already waiting.

I have never had an easier time getting a game to the table than with B/X or Old School Essentials or Dolmenwood. That immediacy is part of what made B/X so powerful in the eighties, and it is why its descendants still work so well today.

I often prefer pulling one of these off the shelf over 5th edition. But it is important to understand the tone. These games have teeth. They are not about cinematic heroics. They are about risk and survival. When you play a 5e starter set, character death is possible but unlikely. When you play B/X or Old School Essentials or Dolmenwood, death is not just possible. It is expected. The real story is often how your character meets their end.

And somehow that makes the victories sweeter.

Because the rules are light and direct, it is easy to get everyone aligned around the core premise. We are here to explore dangerous places, fight monsters, and haul treasure back to town. There is very little barrier between intention and action.

If I had to choose a line of D&D that gets from do you want to play to actually playing faster than anything else, this would be it. The kicker its, a stupid amount of relaxed fun, pure joy at the table without any of the weight.

1. 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons

We have a winner!

When I think about the most complete and most authentic expression of Dungeons and Dragons, the version that captures the tone, the aesthetic, and the core gameplay in its purest form, I land on 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.

That is a bold claim, I know. But when I picture what D&D is supposed to feel like, this is the game that comes to mind. The art. The writing. The atmosphere. The balance between danger and possibility. Just the right blend of low and high fantasy. It embodies the identity of Dungeons and Dragons in a way no other edition quite does for me.

There is nothing in it that I would remove at the level of essence. Nothing I feel compelled to replace with something from another system. It feels whole.

At the same time, it is a deeply flawed game in many ways. In fact, of all the systems I have run over the years, this is the one I modified the most. That may sound contradictory, but when I talk about modification, I mean adjustment and tuning, not rewriting its soul. I balanced numbers. I clarified mechanics. I nudged pieces into alignment. I did not change what the game was trying to be.

One of the recurring issues with 2nd edition is the gap between description and execution. Especially in the expanded supplements, I would read the flavor text of a spell, a race, a class, or a weapon and think this is perfect. This is exactly what it should be. Then I would look at the mechanical implementation and feel the disconnect. The rules did not always deliver what the text promised.

That tension drove me to tinker, and 2nd edition is wonderfully suited for tinkering. It has a flexible design space and an enormous body of supplements. You can adjust it without breaking it. You can shape it to your table without losing its identity.

It is also the most adaptable edition in this lineup. Hand me almost any fantasy setting and, with the right books and a few mechanical tweaks, I can make it sing in 2nd edition. It sits comfortably within the grooves of traditional fantasy. It feels like the natural engine for the kind of worlds D&D was built to explore.

I also consider it the fairest of the classic systems. Earlier editions could be brutally lethal, especially for certain classes. Magic users and thieves often felt like they were one unlucky roll away from oblivion. In 2nd edition, you still faced real danger, but you had tools. You had options. You had a fighting chance. It struck a rare balance between survival horror and modern power fantasy. It was tense without being hopeless. Dangerous without being absurd.

I love this system. It is the only edition for which I own a truly massive library. Even now, I still collect for it. The material produced during that era feels rich and valuable. There is depth there that I continue to appreciate. I will admit the adventure writing for AD&D was hit and miss, but the settings were chef’s kiss. 2nd edition AD&D era settings were the best we ever got for any edition by a considerable margin.

If someone walks up to me and says hey, do you want to play D&D, and they do not specify an edition, I assume they mean 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. In my mind, that is the default form of the game.

D&D, Gaming Articles

In Theory: D&D 6th edition in 2027?

February 17, 2026 5 Minutes 1 Comment

There is absolutely no debate that 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons, released in 2014, was a runaway hit. It did not just do well. It did not quietly succeed. It kicked in the tavern door, rolled a natural 20 on persuasion, and walked out with the entire hobby under its arm.

Now, yes, those of us with a few decades of dice scars may have a list of complaints. We have opinions. We have feelings. We have binders. But even the grumpiest old school gamer has to admit that 5e was a phenomenon. The numbers do not lie. The dragon was awake again.

There are many reasons for this success, but the big three are as clear as a freshly laminated character sheet.

First, 5e was a course correction. After the bold, shiny, heavily gamified experiment of 4th edition, Wizards of the Coast gently steered the ship back toward something that felt like classic D&D. Not a full retreat. Not a full reboot. More like returning home after a semester abroad with some new ideas and a slightly different haircut. It felt familiar again. That mattered.

What D&D should look like, what it should feel like, and in general what it should be mechanically has been debated for as long as the game has existed. There is, however, one universal thing that I think everyone can agree on, which is that it should be fun. And fun is the most subjective and incurably based on personal taste. You cannot create a game that everyone will love, but 5e came pretty damn close.

Second, Dungeons and Dragons escaped the basement and walked onto the stage. Thanks to groups like Critical Role and other streaming pioneers, playing D&D became entertainment. People were not just rolling dice. They were performing. They were voice acting. They were crying on camera. At one point, it was entirely possible that more people were watching D&D than actually playing it. Somewhere, Gary Gygax probably raised an eyebrow.

Third, Wizards of the Coast embraced the digital age instead of pretending it was a passing fad at the perfect time. The pandemic hit, and we were all trapped in our houses, and playing D&D online swung the door open. Unearthed Arcana gave players a peek behind the curtain. DnD Beyond made character creation less of a paper management mini-game. The DM Guild let aspiring designers throw their ideas into the wild (myself included), and the age of VTT’s blossomed. The game was not just something you bought in a bookstore anymore. It was something you interacted with online, argued about, homebrewed, and refreshed your browser for.

All of this helped, of course. But there was one more crucial factor.

The game was fun again. I know many people in the old school space hated it, but I think a lot of that hate comes from a general hate of change and is pretty misguided and mostly an assessment offered by a group of people that never even tried it.

Not exactly the same fun as the red box days, I get it. Not quite the ruthless, unforgiving dungeon crawls of our youth. But it hit a sweet spot with a wide audience. It welcomed new players without demanding they memorize a rulebook the size of a small nation’s tax code. At the same time, it did not completely exile the veterans to the wilderness.

I played it. I still play it from time to time. It is not perfect. It is not sacred. But it is, undeniably, a good time. And sometimes that is all a game really needs to be.

Gender Politics and Woke Agenda

All right. Deep breath. Let us wade into the dragon’s lair.

At some point, about two-thirds of the way through the 2014 edition’s ten-year reign, the world outside the hobby started changing at a rather brisk pace. Culture wars went from being something discussed on late-night talk shows to something that seemed to leak into every possible corner of entertainment. Television, movies, comics, novels, blockbuster franchises with laser swords and capes, nothing felt untouched.

Dungeons and Dragons did not exist in a vacuum. It never has. And eventually, Wizards of the Coast made it clear that they were going to plant a flag. The company leaned into contemporary social themes and made an effort to reflect modern values directly in the game’s language, art, and presentation. From their perspective, this was not reckless. It was responsible. It was being on the right side of history. It was aligning the brand with the audience they believed would carry it forward.

On paper, that sounds perfectly reasonable. No company wants to look outdated or hostile to its audience. The problem, as many entertainment giants have discovered over the past decade, is that audiences are rarely as unified as marketing departments hope they are.

Large franchises such as Star Wars and Marvel have had very public struggles navigating this terrain. For some fans, changes feel refreshing and overdue. For most, they feel intrusive, even if you support the ideology and purpose behind them. The result is often less a calm evolution and more a noisy food fight on the internet. And once the food starts flying, it tends to splatter everywhere, bumping against the bottom line.

Going woke with shows like Acolyte has cost Disney millions, but they are perfectly capable of creating insanely successful shows like Andor that stay away from political messaging and just let themselves be awesome. At some point, you have to pick. Do you want to make money or do you want to be political?

By the time D&D’s fiftieth anniversary update arrived in late 2024 and early 2025, rebranding the system as the 2024 edition of Dungeons and Dragons, tensions were already simmering in the wider culture; people were frankly kind of sick of the fight. The DEI and Tumblr warriors who never actually played D&D to begin with were gone, and the only people remaining were fans of the game, not so much the politics. The new core books sold quickly at launch. Wizards of the Coast proudly announced record breaking performance. Critics, however, have not been kind to these books. As is often the case, the marketing headlines were louder than the spreadsheets.

The reception itself felt different from 2014. The original 5th edition was greeted with near universal enthusiasm. The 2024 refresh, while mechanically very similar at its core, received a far more mixed response. Some players praised clarifications and refinements. Others felt uneasy about tonal shifts in the writing and presentation. The game had become very…preachy, as did the company running the franchise.

Then vs. now. How far the mighty have fallen. I understand that this is a bit out of context, a comparison designed to create outrage. My point is that the image on the left is indisputably Dungeons and Dragons, through and through. The one on the right is a parody and has nothing to do with Dungeons and Dragons at all. Period.

One of the loudest points of friction centered on the game’s language around ancestry, identity, and morality. Longstanding fantasy concepts were reexamined. Half-race people were reframed or removed. Traditional assumptions about inherently evil creatures were softened or rewritten. Orcs were no longer automatically villains. The language around alignment and culture became more cautious, more nuanced. Real-world politics and political positions were infused into the game on every page, in the words, in the design, in the art.

For some players, this was overdue housekeeping. For others, it felt like an overcorrection. They did not come to the table looking for a seminar on modern ethics, especially by the end of 2024, at a time that we had already endured so much infiltration of politics into our hobbies and entertainment. They wanted dragons, dungeons, and that escapist feeling at the table that D&D had provided for decades. They were looking for familiarity, the comfort food that is D&D. Instead, D&D like so many franchises, was weaponized to push a political agenda.

The art direction also shifted in tone. Where older editions leaned into grim and gritty sword and sorcery, the newer books embraced a brighter, more inclusive aesthetic. To supporters, this was welcomed creativity and inclusivity. To detractors, it felt sanitized or didactic. The debate was less about rules and more about vibe. The message of the book was not about Dungeons and Dragons and fantasy, but about the real-world culture war being waged in the pages of our games, splashing its way into yet another beloved hobby.

I’m not saying this is bad art; it very clearly is done by a very talented person who has a flair for color and style, but if these images did not appear in a D&D book, no one would mistake them for representing D&D worlds and settings. It’s art that belongs in a different game. In what setting do bards dress like rock stars and play an electric base?

And that is the thing. Mechanically, the 2024 edition is still 5th edition at heart. Advantage still exists. Armor class still matters. Fireball is still fireball. But tone is powerful. Presentation shapes perception. When fans are already fatigued from broader culture battles in other franchises, even subtle changes can feel amplified.

Meanwhile, corporate realities marched on. There were reports of layoffs within the broader Hasbro structure. Longtime contributors departed. Ambitious digital initiatives such as the planned virtual tabletop platform known as Project Sigil struggled to find a stable footing and collapsed, and there was a complete lack of any evidence of the game’s success, with plenty of proof to the contrary. For a brand publicly celebrating success, the surrounding news cycle felt oddly turbulent and out of tune with the messaging. This continues to this day.

Now rumors swirl, as they always do in this hobby. Whispers of a sixth edition drift through forums and video essays. Wizards of the Coast remains largely quiet, which of course only fuels speculation further. Silence, in the internet age, is rarely interpreted as calm confidence.

In the end, what we are witnessing may be less a moral apocalypse and more a growing pain. Dungeons and Dragons has survived moral panics, edition wars, satanic scares, and rulebook bloat thick enough to stun a troll. It is unlikely to be slain by a paragraph about orcs.

But it is fair to say this: the 2024 era feels different. Not necessarily doomed. Not necessarily triumphant. Just… contested.

Rumors have now begun, from claimed leaks coming out of Wizards of the Coasts to speculation, the question everyone is asking. Is 2024 ok? And if not, what is the next move?

My Theory

My theory is fairly simple, and possibly completely wrong, which of course makes it perfect for the internet.

The RPG industry is nimble. It always has been. It is powered by small publishers, independent designers, artists in spare bedrooms, and creators who can pivot faster than a rogue dodging an opportunity attack. If the cultural winds shift, they adjust. If players want grittier rules, lighter rules, stranger settings, someone will test it, publish it, and move on before the ink dries.

Wizards of the Coast does not move like that. It never has, and TSR did not either in its prime. When you are part of a large corporate machine, you carry weight. Layers of approval. Strategy decks. Risk assessments. Brand alignment meetings where phrases like cross vertical synergy are spoken without irony. By the time a plan is approved and executed, the rest of the hobby may already have experimented, adapted, and moved on.

Being big has advantages. Massive distribution. Deep pockets. Marketing reach that indie designers would trade a legendary artifact for. But size comes with inertia. In a fast-changing cultural climate, inertia can look like tone deafness even when the intent is good.

Add to that monster-sized echo chamber in which Wizards of the Coast lives. When your interviews are conducted by your own employees, when messaging is tightly controlled, and every word goes through sensitivity experts, when the loudest feedback comes from the most vocal online minority, like the utterly incoherent and completetly diluisional DnD Beyond forum community and its moderators, you risk mistaking noise for consensus. In the 2024 update, once a direction was chosen, it was embraced completely. The tone was deliberate. The messaging is unified. If this were a space opera, someone quietly said execute order sixty-six, and the creative trajectory was locked in.

Here is the nuance that gets lost in the shouting.

The fan base does want inclusivity. We want diversity. We want talented creators from every background imaginable making incredible games. Kelsey Dionne is a great example. A married lesbian designer whose work on Shadowdark won awards across the hobby. People did not buy Shadowdark because of her identity or the infusion of a political agenda in her book. They bought it because it is a sharp, confident, well-designed game that understands dungeon crawling at its core. She understood that the people who cry war over political issues and the audience who buy RPGs are not the same people. The awards and accolades came from D&D fans and were earned through craftsmanship, not activism. She was not given any credit from the so-called woke left because she refused to play their game. It was D&D fans who stood by her side and helped promote her work; she succeeded on merit, not bullshit.

I could go anywhere in the world, show any random person this image, and ask them where it’s from, and everyone will say “D&D”. This is Dungeons and Dragons art; everyone knows this. It’s a universal style, an understood cultural identity.

That is the distinction. You do not have to signal virtue. You have to be virtuous in your craft.

Most players are not asking for fantasy worlds that feel like corporate retreats. They want danger. Moral tension. Villains who are actually villainous. They want to feel heroic precisely because the world is not safe and tidy. They want that in the writing, in the mechanics and in the art of the games they play.

The mistake, in my view, is assuming that a diverse audience requires a softened fantasy. Being part of a minority group does not mean you want your dragon-slaying adventure to turn into a polite seminar with emotional affirmation circles fueled by sensitivity training. People of every identity enjoy sharp stories, dark themes, high stakes, and gritty art. To assume otherwise feels patronizing, even insulting.

What we are seeing feels like overcorrection. As if the brand is attempting to atone for decades of perceived sins by turning the dial all the way in the opposite direction. The irony is that when everything is curated to signal virtue, it can start to feel less diverse rather than more. Narrow in a different way.

There is indisputable proof that Wizards of the Coast is perfectly capable of capturing the theme, mood, settings and style of D&D in art in spectacular fashion, as proof in this amazing image from the 2024 5e book. Adding shitty art not representative of the name Dungeons and Dragons was done intentionally.

Dungeons and Dragons claims to be for everyone. But when the aesthetic and tone begin to feel targeted toward a very specific cultural slice, some longtime players inevitably feel sidelined. Representation is healthy. It was handled well in 2014. Strong female characters. Diverse heroes. Expanded visibility. It felt organic. It still felt like D&D.

The 2024 edition, by contrast, feels different to many players. Not because representation exists, but because the tone feels self-conscious. As if every page is glancing over its shoulder, worried about offending someone. That nervous energy seeps into the reading experience and to the table.

Most players, regardless of background, simply want great games. Bold settings. Mechanics that sing. Adventures that make them feel clever, powerful, terrified, and triumphant. They expect the game to avoid lazy stereotypes and actual bigotry. That is baseline. But they do not want every paragraph to feel like a position in a cultural debate.

But of course I’m talking about players, not social justice warriors, not the Tumblr echo chambers, not this violent vocal minority who doesn’t give a shit about Dungeons and Dragons, they just want to win an internet fight and see yet another franchise created by middle-aged white men burned to the ground.

We get it, Gygax was a racist and a misogynist, but he has not been part of D&D for nearly 40 years, and he is also dead and buried. Shut the fuck up and let it go!

Look again at Shadowdark. It trusts the audience. It leans into classic fantasy energy with confidence. It focuses on play. It feels like it is speaking from love of the hobby rather than from a corporate messaging strategy, and it does not misstep and offend reasonable people. It’s just a great game; it has let go of all the bad old legacy of D&D and embraced everything that is amazing about this hobby and this game.

I suspect this tension has not gone unnoticed inside Wizards of the Coast. Across entertainment, companies that leaned too heavily into overt cultural messaging have faced financial turbulence and consequences. Executives notice patterns. Quiet meetings happen. Words like recalibration and brand realignment start circulating.

The long silence since the 2024 edition launched, combined with persistent rumors of a sixth edition, suggests something is brewing. Maybe it is a simple iteration. Maybe it is something bigger.

Dungeons and Dragons has reinvented itself before. It will again. The real question is not whether change is coming. It is whether Wizards of the Coast recognizes that one may be needed and understands where they are failing.

What 6th Edition Should Look Like

What should 6th edition actually look like?

If the rumors are true and a new edition is on the horizon, my hope is simple. Not louder. Not shinier. Not wrapped in corporate buzzwords. Just better.

Right now the wider RPG scene feels alive. Designers are experimenting. Small teams are taking risks. Books feel focused and confident. They feel like they are trying to make great games, not press releases disguised as rulebooks. If 6th edition is coming, it should study that energy very carefully.

The biggest shift I want to see is a return to trust.

Trust the audience.

Trust that players can separate fantasy from reality. Trust that they can handle complex themes without a warning label every other page. Trust that diversity at the table does not require constant commentary from the publisher. If you hire talented, diverse creators, their voices will naturally shape the game. You do not need to underline it in red ink on every spread.

Focus on design. Focus on writing that crackles with adventure. Focus on fantasy that feels dangerous, mythic, and larger than life. Dungeons and Dragons is not a public policy document. It is not a corporate confession booth. It is a game about impossible heroes standing against impossible odds.

Yes, the hobby has a past. Many of us were there. We remember the rough edges. The jokes that aged poorly. The blind spots. Acknowledging that and doing better is healthy. But doing better does not require swinging so far in the other direction that the game loses its teeth. Growth is not the same thing as overcorrection.

Look at what Kelsey Dionne accomplished with Shadowdark. The inclusivity exists because she exists. It is part of the creative DNA of the project. It does not need a spotlight or a speech. It simply sits alongside tight mechanics and a clear love of dungeon crawling.

That is the model.

The best way to be inclusive is not to sand down every sharp corner. It is to welcome everyone to the table and then give them something awesome to play. Let the diversity of creators and players shape the culture organically. Corporations are in the business of making products. That is fine. Just make a great one. If you give players a compelling reason to buy your book, they will.

Above all, trust your audience.

We do not need moral instruction in every chapter. We do not need dragons reframed as misunderstood metaphors for modern anxieties. We need perilous ruins. We need villains worth hating. We need magic that feels powerful and a little dangerous. We need victories that feel earned.

We need dungeons.

And dragons.

Overview – 10th Edition & Miniature Gaming

1. Strategems and Command Points

2. Simpler but More Impactful Terrain Rules

3. Eliminate Dice Re-Rolls

4. Data Slates – Rules Updates & Faction Books

5. Crusade Rules Should Use Legacy Architecture

6. Bring Back Organizational Charts/Requirements

7. Make Internal Balance The Priority

8. Improved Mission Design

Better Vehicle and Aircraft Rules

Faster Gameplay

Conclusion

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Overview

Components

Theme

Gameplay

Replayability and Longevity

Conclusion

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Overview

Components

Theme

Gameplay

Replay-ability and Longevity

Conclusion

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10. Forbidden Lands

9. Pathfinder 2nd Edition

8. Castles and Crusades

7. 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons

6. Pathfinder 1st edition

5. Dungeon Crawl Classics

4. 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons

3. 1st edition BECMI (Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, Immortal): AKA The Dungeons and Dragons Rules Cyclopedia

2. Dolmenwood & Old School Essentials & B/X

1. 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons

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Gender Politics and Woke Agenda

My Theory

What 6th Edition Should Look Like

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Dedicated To All Things Gaming