My party of adventurers walks into a spider-infested cave, and my friends and I start chatting strategy about the plan of attack for each of our heroes — then we leap into the fray by controlling the action through our phones. 

This is Sunderfolk, a new roleplaying game and the debut title from studio Secret Door. Made by veterans from Blizzard, Riot Games and fantasy tabletop hits like Descent: Legends of the Dark, Sunderfolk brings board game nights to modern video games. It’s available for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch for $50.

The game looks conventional enough, with up to four players choosing between six animal adventurers packing varying skills to protect their town. The game’s combat and action play out on a shared screen, but the novelty lies in each person pulling up their phone to move their character and look up battle info.

«[Sunderfolk] is built for folks who are already genre-lovers in this space who want to bring in folks who are not genre lovers,» said game director Erin Marek. The game was designed to be intriguing to fantasy tabletop veterans, yet approachable to those put off by complex board games requiring deep dives in manuals. 

To do that, the Secret Door team started with a concept of «TV DnD,» as the studio chief Chris Sigaty explained: «It’s like [Dungeons and Dragons] meets JackBox.» That’s the party game where everyone jumps in to play on their phones, and it aptly describes the mediums Sunderfolk attempts to blend. The team wanted to bring the camaraderie of the couch to digital games, all set in an evocative fantasy world.

While Secret Door was kind enough to invite me into a Discord to connect with other players, I knew I had to experience this game with my own tabletop group. My dice-rolling battle-hardened cadre of thirtysomethings has tackled campaigns in RPG systems like Dungeon World, The Sprawl, Blades in the Dark, A Quiet Year, and Stonetop — all of which eschew the staid elements of Dungeons and Dragons in favor of more streamlined approaches to role-playing. That made them great sample players for Sunderfolk.

I attempted to get a game going in-person, but like every classic RPG campaign, we faced the greatest tabletop villain of all: scheduling. Nobody could find the same night to meet. Yet Sunderfolk’s setup allows everyone to play remotely: We just logged into the game on our phones sitting in our respective homes while all watching the same screen. 

This is also the genius of Sunderfolk: All players share one big screen. At any time, players can treat their phone screen as a thumb pad to move their cursor around to look up enemy details or battlefield features (like healing shrines or exploding rocks). But it also lets players point and gesture around the map to plan and coordinate moves. We may have been sitting in our respective homes dozens of miles apart, but it felt like my friends and I were gathered around a table in person.

Streaming Sunderfolk to the whole party

But since my party wasn’t in the same place, I used a clever workaround, running the game on PS5 and streaming it through our friend group’s Discord, which everyone tuned into. 

Admittedly, this was a bit challenging on the PS5, which doesn’t let you stream to Discord natively from the console — instead, I had to use a workaround I found online to use the Remote Play app to run my PS5 on my PC, and then stream that window through Discord. Complicated! There are alternatives, like streaming to YouTube or Twitch, but those require extra steps before you start broadcasting to the masses. Note that Xbox Series X lets you stream directly to Discord, and PC players will be just fine. 

This shows a bit of the double-edged nature of Sunderfolk’s unique setup, but at least the trouble was on my end, and my friends didn’t need to download extra copies of the game — one copy will work for a whole party. All they had to do was download the free Sunderfolk app, watch my stream, scan the QR code on screen with their phone to log into the campaign, and we were off to the races.

How Sunderfolk’s phone-controlled RPG plays out

Once logged in to our campaign, three friends and I chose our quartet of characters from the six animal hero choices — and gave them silly names, as is tabletop tradition. One friend picked the barbarian polar bear (named Bearzerker), another the lamb ranger (Big Lamb), a third the raven spellcaster (RavnAbtMagic), and I picked the bat bard (Bat Stevens). 

Like any good tabletop RPG, the campaign opens up in a tavern. Here we learned basic mechanics and ran through our early move selections, which differed for each character, before spilling out into a proper brawl outside. The local ogres had descended on the town to raid and pillage, but our brave heroes fended them off. 

Though fights feel familiar for fantasy RPGs, like using different attacks to whittle down enemies, Sunderfolk has a heavy emphasis on moving around the battlefield. Our spellcaster teleported around (and likewise ‘ported enemies hither and thither), while I used my bat bard to swap places and drop power-ups around the area, encouraging different playstyles while never staying put. 

That all led to The Moment. If you’ve ever played a tabletop RPG, you’ll probably remember the first time it became suddenly clear that you could do anything. When you tried something so spectacular that, succeed or fail, it was vividly memorable. In Sunderfolk, our next encounter had us chasing the ogres onto a bridge — and one by one, each party member found an attack or movement ability that let us shove our foes off the edges. 

«What we’re stealing a little bit from tabletop games is those moments where something that should never have happened, happened,» Marek said. «You have that moment, that storytelling with your friends that you carry through with you and try to explain it to other people, and they don’t get it because they weren’t there.»

There are things we couldn’t do that a regular tabletop game would’ve allowed, like trying to talk to the ogres or bribing them to leave. Sunderfolk trades that in for fewer but still potent possibilities — just ask my party of thirtysomething men, gleefully cheering each other to boot enemies into the wild blue yonder — and the streamlined system with codified rules that a video game enables. From personal experience, it is a joy to have the game handle all the monsters, quest progression and more, meaning our regular dungeon master could join in, too.

As we wrapped up our first adventure, we chatted with townsfolk and grew relationships, did a little shopping and unlocked new abilities — standard RPG stuff, all wrapped up in a 2-hour session, which I later learned was the target time the Secret Door team set for a night of adventuring (quests take about an hour, and every two quests should result in a level-up awarding new skills). While I had a good time with the game, I was impressed that everything worked smoothly — even though I’d never used my phone to play a game this way.

Designing a new way to play old games

Sunderfolk’s team is full of people who have taken games from other platforms and mediums to adapt to play on the humble smartphone. Before joining Secret Door, Marek worked on Wild Rift (League of Legends on phones) while Sigaty worked on Hearthstone (a digital card game on PC and phones). Kara Centell-Dunk, Sunderfolk’s campaign designer, has over a decade of experience making tabletop games — including working on Descent: Legends in the Dark and Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth, which have smartphone app assistants to help with play. 

On an interview call with the three Secret Door creators above, only the fourth hadn’t worked in the intersection between phones and tabletop — Daren Bader, art director at Secret Door, who didn’t play Dungeons and Dragons or tabletop at all despite submitting fantasy art for Monster Manuals and Magic: The Gathering cards. «I was kind of the perfect guinea pig for the team,» Bader explained, as someone who would need to be dragged into the game. His conversion into a tabletop gamer during Sunderfolk’s development is a proof of concept.

«My favorite thing is that we created a game that I want to play, to tell you the honest truth,» Bader said. 

Designing a game that would be «TV DnD» as Sigaty described was a process. Gamers don’t look down at their controller or mouse and keyboard while playing, but Sunderfolk would have lots of essential information on the phone app — what the team found was that players were staring at their phones instead of the action on the screen. The solution lay in another TV implement.

«One of our UX/UI designers, Hasiba Arshad, was actually looking at Apple TV remotes and how they use their paradigm … and she came up with this idea of what if you’re actually controlling a cursor?» Marek said — almost like drawing with a drawing pad.

It took years of evolution and lots of playtests with friends and family to get the controls just right (even in release form, the app on the phone tells players to look up when important gameplay is happening on the main screen). Other parts of the design took time to refine, like having each move arrayed in a row for players to tap and swipe between, like they’re holding a hand of cards — and then swiping the one they want upward to start their turn, like a sort of skeuomorphic motion. 

All of this work would amount to a novel proof of concept if the game weren’t fun to play, but it is. It’s not the most complex RPG to start, but it’s designed to ramp up — as Centell-Dunk explained, the game’s philosophy is simple parts that, when combined, become complex. So those spiders I found lurched over merchant loot that scatter when I hit them? That can be combined with other movement abilities to get the tactical advantage. 

As my friends and I wrapped up our second session, having delved in the vibrant underground worlds Bader designed — full of light and mushrooms, friendly animals and vicious ogres — we called it a night. But not before my tabletop-tested friends gave it their seal of approval by asking when we’d play the game next.

Ahead of us was the thing Centell-Dunk was most proud of: boss fights, and the systems she made for them.

«I hope players also enjoy being crushed by our bosses,» Centell-Dunk said.

How do you add more to «unlimited»? As carriers offer unlimited talk, text and data on their wireless plans, Xfinity Mobile’s answer is to launch a new Premium Unlimited plan that includes high-resolution streaming, 30GB of fast hotspot data per month and, for customers chasing the latest phones, the ability to upgrade devices twice per year. 

The Premium Unlimited plan is available now. Here’s a breakdown of what you’ll get.

More perks for Premium

The Premium Unlimited Plan, which costs $30 per line on top of required Xfinity Internet service, includes unlimited full-speed data. That’s a boost over the regular Unlimited plan, which throttles data speeds after 30GB.

For mobile hotspot usage, the Premium Unlimited plan includes 30GB of data before speeds are reduced. By comparison, the Unlimited plan offers only slower speeds, although both plans give you unlimited hotspot data so you won’t be cut off.

Also unique to the Premium Unlimited plan is 4K resolution video streaming (the Unlimited plan serves up only 480p standard resolution) and Xfinity Call Guard service for intercepting spam calls.

Xfinity Mobile uses Verizon’s network for 5G and 4G LTE cellular access, but also leans heavily on its installed base of home and business internet service with modems that double as public Wi-Fi hotspots. Both the Premium Unlimited and Unlimited plans feature WiFi PowerBoost, which can automatically hop onto a Wi-Fi connection and deliver faster speeds, up to 1GB, according to Xfinity.

The company states that more than 90% of mobile data traffic happens over Wi-Fi. If you’re connected at home (and your Xfinity service uses an XB7 or XB8 Gateway to route the data), your phone can get the faster speeds, even if you’re not paying for that level of bandwidth.

Stay on top of the newest phones

If you know someone who replaces their phone every year for the newest model, you can literally one-up them by being on the Premium Unlimited plan. The new Elite Upgrade option allows for twice-yearly phone upgrades with a «guaranteed new-device discount of up to $830 with an eligible trade-in,» according to the company.

For those switching from another carrier, Xfinity Mobile will pay up to $500 per line for as many as five lines to buy out existing contracts.

See more: Discover the Best Phones for 2025.

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Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword isn’t terribly tough — for once, the two-part clue was simple. Usually, I beat my head against the desk trying to solve those. Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? Read on. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

The Mini Crossword is just one of many games in the Times’ games collection. If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get at those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: With 7-Across, flight option that saves money at the expense of sleep
Answer: RED

4A clue: Like pastel shades
Answer: PALE

5A clue: Appliance on a patio
Answer: GRILL

6A clue: Simplicity
Answer: EASE

7A clue: See 1-Across
Answer: EYE

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Underpaid employee’s request
Answer: RAISE

2D clue: Fashion magazine with a palindromic name
Answer: ELLE

3D clue: Director Guillermo ___ Toro
Answer: DEL

4D clue: Thank God, say
Answer: PRAY

5D clue: «Will you look at that!»
Answer: GEE

How to play more Mini Crosswords

The New York Times Games section offers many online games, but only some are free for all to play. You can play the current day’s Mini Crossword for free, but you’ll need a subscription to the Times Games section to play older puzzles from the archives.