Sunderfolk and the Pope!
A co-op adventure brings tabletop traditions back to screens
White smoke blasted from the Sistine Chapel chimney, mere minutes into Thursday’s edition of Here & Now. Host Scott Tong was midway through an interview on the UK-US trade deal when I barged into his headphones to tell him the news. We called up another NPR Scott — Scott Detrow — who had raced back to his microphone at St. Peter’s Square. For the next few hours, we watched as a monk from Chicago ascended to lead 1.4 billion Catholics.
The moment even reverberated through the gaming world: Morning Edition reported on Fantapapa, a video game about drafting cardinals like fantasy football stars (for the record, Robert Francis Prevost wasn’t a top pick — what an upset!).
While I spent much of the week contingency-planning and then scrambling to cover the unexpected result of the conclave, I also enlisted my wife and best friend in a very different drama. As a batty bard, bearish berserker, and antelopian ranger, we defended our underground town of Arden from a maddened Ogre queen and her minions.
Sunderfolk, which released in late April, nestles into a gaming niche that Gloomhaven once filled. While it borrows shamelessly from that tabletop sensation, it’s much easier to parse and set up.
Rather than buckle your table under a trove of physical cards, scenarios, and miniatures, Sunderfolk only requires a central screen and cell phones for up to four players. You’ll scan a QR code to join a campaign, swiping and tapping to play cards that’ll move you around a hexagonal grid, attack foes, and loot treasure. Between missions, you’ll improve Arden’s infrastructure and ingratiate yourself with its populace.
Like Jackbox, the tech works a treat until it doesn’t. It’s stuttered occasionally and once completely crashed. But unlike Jackbox, the game’s frequent auto-saves kept our campaign from losing much progress. Ultimately, the experience feels like streamlined evolution of a fruitful RPG tradition.
Let me illustrate my point. A few years ago, I completed a Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion campaign after I heard it pitched as an approachable version of a game that I’d long admired on friends’ shelves. But I soon discovered that Jaws of the Lion is only simple in comparison to the OG behemoth — and unlike the CRPGs that inspired Gloomhaven, no computer helps you track its dizzying systems. We had to manage everything ourselves: from an arcane elemental system to the behavior of its myriad enemies. After weeks running this analog game engine, one of my friends resigned from the campaign in exhaustion.
But this same friend has really taken to Sunderfolk. He’s praised its imaginative character designs and its fast-paced tactics. The game pulls the same trick that established Blizzard Entertainment’s reputation: boiling a beloved genre down to polished art and mass-appeal mechanics. How fitting, given that Sunderfolk’s published by Dreamhaven, the new studio run by Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime.
If Jaws of the Lion is Gloomhaven with training wheels, Sunderfolk is a tricycle. But it’s a tricycle powered by jet fuel, and I can’t wait to see where it zips off to next.
Mastromarino Productions
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Finally, my wife (a SCAD-trained costumer!) and I quite enjoyed this year’s Met Gala, so I was thrilled my colleague Wilder Fleming booked a guest I proposed on it: At the Met Gala, Black Dandyism takes the stage