The Heroes of the Borderlands is the new, premium starter set for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition. While 5e has had a slew of starter sets over the past decade, this is the biggest one by far, with not only the most stuff inside, but also the largest scope.
Based on the beloved introductory adventure The Keep on the Borderlands from 1977, this set manages to pack far more content into the box than I ever anticipated. While I didn't grow up with the Keep being a touchstone of gaming, thousands of people did. I can't speak to the quality of the adaptation, only to the quality of what's in the box, and I'm pretty impressed by it.
If I have one quibble with the box out of the gate, it's that Wizards of the Coast is actually calling it a “board game” in their marketing materials, and even on the product page on DDB. When I asked Justice and Makenzie about this at Gen Con, they talked a lot about the amount of focus groups and testing they did with non-D&D players and tabletop gamers, using that as a way to bring them into the game, where calling it a TTRPG or even just an RPG might keep them away.
And while there are definitely cool board game-like elements that I enjoyed a great deal, this is not a board game. I still feel like it might come as a bait-and-switch to board game purists whenever they get it to the table. I've played D&D board games and loved them. This just isn't one. It's a D&D 5e starter set. A dang good one, too. But it's not a board game. That's just marketing spin.
That said, I think there's way more good than bad in Heroes of the Borderlands, so let's talk about that.
Disclaimer: Wizards of the Coast provided me with a complimentary copy of the Heroes of the Borderlands box set to get hands-on experience with, but that in no way has influenced my review.
What's in the Box
There's a lot of stuff in this box. Way more than was included in any of the other 5e starter sets. I'm a big fan of the starter sets they've done over the years, and I own them all, played them all. The adventures range from really good (The Lost Mine of Phandelver) to Passable I Guess (Stormwreck Isle), but I have a soft spot for them anyway. But they're not necessarily the most well-made box sets I've ever seen. The Heroes of the Borderlands starter set, though, is pretty well-made and includes a lot of stuff. Way more than I expected.
The old sets were made of flimsy paper, the so-called cards could barely be considered to be on cardstock, and there were no tokens, minis, or maps at all. Heck, all the content from the second starter—the one with Dragon of Icespire Peak—didn't even include all the content in the box itself. You redeem a code for D&D Beyond where you could only get part of the adventures digitally. Now, I love D&D Beyond, but that part felt bad.
That's been rectified by the Heroes of the Borderlands set. The box is filled until it's almost overstuffed with fiddly bits and doodads, and I have had a total blast sorting through it, reading it, and most importantly, playing with it with my grubby little fingies at the table.
Dozens of Tokens
The side of the box says there are 273 tokens in the box. That's a lot to pop out of cardboard frames, it's worth it. And not a single token got caught and ripped on its way out, either. I've never had that happen before.
Every enemy in there has a heavy, glossy cardboard token, some terrain features like spider webs and pit traps do, too, and every player character species has a cardboard standee. Unlike some sets I've had, the tokens are thick, so they're not going to bend as you handle them and flip them and move them around the maps. Cheap, flimsy enemy tokens suck; these ain't those.
While I like stand-up pawns better than flat circles, these are just fine in play and easy enough to tell apart. The player characters get standees, though, while all the monsters get appropriately sized circles. You also get tokens for gold pieces, hit points, motes of power that represent your ability charges and spell slots, treasure chests, and gems.
Adventure Books and Rules
There are four booklets included:
- a Play Guide, which includes rules for both playing characters and being the dungeon master
- a set of Wilderness adventures
- a gazetteer and quest book for the Keep on the Borderlands itself
- a dungeon campaign through the Caves of Chaos.
The paper is decent quality, but what surprised me the most is that these are saddle-stitched booklets and not stapled. Stapled books like this come apart fast, and these just feel better to use at the table because I wasn't scared I was going to rip a page out by just flipping through.
So Many Maps
And to go along with every one of those places are encounter maps for you to use the tokens and all the other bits and baubles. They're high-contrast, good art maps, and I love the style they're in. I can say with no hyperbole that I will pull these maps out and use them in other sessions because I like the look of them that much.
They are made out of decent paper, but not cardstock. They hold up a bit better than my printed-at-home mosaic maps on printer paper, but they definitely aren't as tough as something like the Paizo Flip-Mats. They can't be written on with dry-erase markers like some maps, either. But there are 18(!) maps in the box and 15 of those are gridded battlemaps. I've have had to pay $15-25 for only 2 of the thicker, write-on kind.
Handouts
There are also handouts with a letter from a noble congratulating you when you finish the campaign, and there are also visual aids for players who want to know what's for sale at any given shop within the Keep. They have pictures and prices, and it's a lot cooler to just hand the players that sheet than answer “do they have X for sale here? How much is it? Can I roll Persuasion to get a discount?” multiple times over the course of a few minutes.
Dice
You get one set of red, plastic polyhedral dice in the Heroes of the Borderland box. They're fine. They're neither great dice, nor are they bad dice. They're dice. It's fantastic that they're included since this is certainly an “everything you need in one place” type of product, but they aren't anything special. I would have loved for them to have a special ampersand logo engraving on the D20 like some do, but since they're for first-time players, that might be confusing why there's no 20 on a d20. There is good contrast on them, at least, so they're very readable at a glance. So that's something.
A Combat Tracker
A pad of tear-away paper for initiative and monster HP tracking comes in the set, too. I didn't think about this being something I'd miss, but it was really nice showing up to my friends' house and only carrying the HotB box and not my usual DM bag. I didn't need to grab an extra notebook or erasable combat tracker. Instead, I just used this nice pad of scratch paper and ripped off the top sheet when we were done and threw it away.
I don't know how many pages are in it, but I'd guess around 50. So there's no reason not to use them. Even if you plow through them, they should last a few months, and if you weekly or less, they'll last you through what is probably going to be your whole campaign. I have no idea, though, if they're going to be offered as a product on their own to refill when you run out.
Cards, Cards, Everywhere
One of the other big draws is the set of 200+ cards that represent everything else. There's a Magic Item deck the DM gets to draw from when PCs get a reward. There are armor and weapon cards that players slot right onto the character sheets (called character boards in this set). Every NPC gets a full art card with a personality and how to roleplay them on the back, and the dozens of monsters get oversized cards with super nice art covering the whole front and the stat block taking up the whole back.
Then there are spell cards so that people can actually play the card when they cast a spell, and when setting up for the first time, players choose their species (dwarf, elf, human, etc.) and their background (charlatan, acolyte, etc.) from a series of cards that, like the weapons and armor, get slotted in right beside everythign else to make the player character feel like a fully fleshed out person instead of just a series of numbers on a white sheet of paper.
I wasn't sure how I'd like the “character board” idea when I heard about it at first, but giving players these fiddly bits to mess with during a session is a really, really smart inclusion. In many games, I can see this keeping people off their phones just because they have something to mess with already.
What's Not in the Box
This is the first D&D 5e starter set not to come with a DM Screen. I understand why they made that choice. As they said in my interview with designers Justice and Makenzie, the team wanted to remove the separation of the dungeon master from the other players. Hiding behind a screen makes it seem as though the DM isn't as much of a “player” as the other people, so the removal of that literal barrier makes it feel like a more cohesive table.
The set doesn't come with a place for players to keep notes of anything, which is done for simplicity's sake, but it actually becomes pretty annoying in practice. There are always things to note, be it for a DM to remember or for players to track as part of the world and their progress along quests.
Additionally, there aren't cards for all the items mentioned in the adventure. Maybe it was just my group, but when a wagon of supplies says there's a bag of flour, they want to nab that bag of flour. There was no card for it, and because there was no “notes” section or scratch paper they could use as they would with typical character sheets, it was just an amorphous thing they had to remember. Minor, but it's something that I can see new players also wanting to interact with everything and then not having the physical resource to do so with an all-in-one box..
Outside of those things, which were undoubtedly done for production/space/logistical reasons, I can't think of anything else that wasn't included in the set that you'd “need.” Well, I guess technically, if we're splitting hairs, it could have come with a pencil to use with the combat tracker. Even a golf pencil with an ampersand stamped on it would have made it feel special.
But How Does It Play?
In the guide to getting started, it says that each of the dozen+ scenarios in the booklets should take around 60-90 minutes. The first night my group sat down with Heroes of the Borderlands, we made it through 2 of them in 4 hours, including swapping DMs at the halfway point, along with the appropriate setup and breakdown. I guess it was 4.5 if we're including setup, because it took a while to get everyone's character boards and all the cards they need sorted out and distributed. But the adventures themselves were spot-on in length.
Some of the scenarios are almost all roleplaying/social (such as those in the Keep on the Borderlands), while others are almost all combat (as in the Caves of Chaos). And then the Wilderness adventures add in the third pillar of RPG design: exploration.
There are dozens of hours of playtime included here. To do everything included at the pace quoted, it would take your party anywhere from 30 to 50 hours. That's insane for a starter set. The Wilderness book comes with 4 adventures, and the Caves of Chaos encompasses 11 different dungeon maps to explore. The Keep on the Borderlands booklet contains 13 individual “quests” that can be done without the use of any of the gridded battlemaps, too, in addition to all the shops and NPC interactions.
It Plays Great
That said, the actual play of the set was great. The character boards, cards, and tokens are way better than simple pregen character sheets, and they were fun to use with the constant moving of power tokens for abilities, sorting through cards to find guiding bolt or ray of frost, and using the monster cards during encounters was really nice when compared to having to flip back and forth between pages in the Monster Manual.
The maps were just as great to use as I expected; the art is incredibly nice with good contrast, and it was never in doubt where they were. The encounters we've done had enough terrain variation that we were able to be pretty tactical with line-of-sight and elevation, too. It was a big step up from the single-level, generic green grass field that usually comes in boxes by default.
Despite being 5e veterans, we did our best to approach this with the mindset of new players. We also made sure to only use the rules that were in the Play Guide and not touch any of the 2024 core books. Which reminds me: Heroes of the Borderlands uses the 2024 rules updates. I figure that goes without saying, but I also don't want anyone to get blindsided by the use of the 5.5 ruleset, either. In our time with the set, there wasn't a single rule that we couldn't look up inside the Play Guide, which is pretty great.
I personally really enjoyed using the circular tokens more than I expected to. One side is labeled with letters (A through F, for example) so you can keep up with which enemy is which. Despite my overall preference for standees over tokens, I do wish the player characters had been circles, too. It was hard to see the action from certain angles with some being flush with the ground and others standing upright beside them. It never truly impeded play, though.
The terrain tokens were fun, too. My character at one point fell into a pit trap, and when the DM pulled an actual pit trap to overlay the map, it made the trap much more an experience than just knocking my standee onto its side to represent the fall. There's a spiderweb terrain token that we never ran into, and when we found a treasure chest, seeing it pop onto the map as a token while looting and drawing from the Magic Items deck was a ton of fun and added to the experience a lot.
The NPC cards and art on monster stat cards were a great addition, too. It was neat to be able to plop a card on the table and say, “and they look like this” instead of having to hold up a hardcover book and try to hide text or maps or something they shouldn't see. It's a small thing, but like everything else in this set, it adds up to make a really fantastic starter set experience.
A Few Quibbles
We ran into a few issues in the way things were set up, though. The first was that no characters came with typical adventuring supplies like rope. That severely limited the active roleplaying and exploration parts because things they wanted to do were simply not possible. The Play Guide suggests you start in the Wilderness with the Trail encounter, so the players have only what they start with and haven't been able to hit the Keep to purchase anything else.
I mean, literally the only item that the wizard board comes with is a spellbook. What this means is that this hyperintelligent sage set out on a journey to the Borderlands to stave off the forces of Chaos with nothing but the shirt on their back and the book in their hand? Mmm hmm…
More starting equipment woes were that not a single one of the characters, cleric included, started the game with a healing potion. And I'm sorry, if the cleric is knocked unconscious (and heaven forbid the hermit wizard who can cast goodberry at the same time), the game slows to a crawl and is pretty frustrating. Every single combat encounter we had ended with only the fighter still standing, and then they had to wait for the Unconscious people to wake up.
It's also a little frustrating because all the encounters we played were set up so that they didn't have to be combat-based. However, despite having a low DC (13), the best Charisma that a character had was +2. Which means a pretty high chance of things going south. Which is precisely what happened with separate instances of a sneaky hunter, a group of bandits, and a cave of kobolds.
HotB is a Starter Set, First and Foremost
But make no mistake, Heroes of the Borderlands is made for first-time players in mind and not veterans. If you're expecting something like Rime of the Frostmaiden or Descent into Avernus, you're going to be disappointed. Despite being based on B2 – The Keep on the Borderlands, this one isn't for lifelong players of D&D who have fond memories of the OG module. It's a nostalgia trip, sure, but it's meant to introduce players to the game in the same way that the original module in the D&D Basic Set introduced people to the game nearly 50 years ago.
I definitely love The Lost Mine of Phandelver from the first starter set as much as I ever have; it's still a fantastic adventure. But Heroes of the Borderlands is a much, much better starting point for new players. The 11 years of lessons learned and experience gained by Wizards of the Coast are apparent in this set, from the meticulous design of the adventures that ease players into how RPGs work, all the way to the tokens, maps, and saddle-stitching on the booklets.
If you want quick, episodic quests that you can play with friends at a game night without the pressure of a full campaign, or something that you can use to introduce TTRPGs to a total newbie, Heroes of the Borderlands is definitely that. Especially when considering that's what the set was meant to be, there's no way this product doesn't succeed with flying colors.
Heroes of the Borderlands is, down to the letter, precisely what it sets out to be, nothing more, nothing less: a premium starter set for Dungeons & Dragons.
Score/Rating
I've waffled on whether or not I should give this a 4* or 5* review. It is undoubtedly…both. So 4.5* it is!
You see, for new players and those looking to dip their toes into TTRPGs and D&D for the very first time, Heroes of the Borderlands is probably the best introduction Wizards of the Coast has ever provided for the game. And like I said, it succeeds fully at being a premium, all-inclusive starter set. That's what it's intended as. Five-stars.
But for veteran players who are looking for a box set adventure to enjoy as a full campaign, I don't think it hits the mark. The encounters are generally simpler than you'd find in a hardcover adventure path, and even though there's 30+ hours of content here, it may not hold long-timers' attention like it will newcomers'.
With all of that in mind, regardless of which side of the line you fall on, there's so much stuff in here that, even at $49.99 for the set, it doesn't feel overpriced. I've paid close to that for a pack of flat maps before without all the other stuff. I thought it was a bit much for a starter set when it was first announced. But now, after getting my hands on it, I am kind of amazed they got all this stuff in the box at this price point and managed to make it not feel cheap.