Sunderfolk Beginner Guide Sunderfolk Game Walkthrough Wiki

1 Pick the control style first

Sunderfolk adapts to your group rather than the other way round, but the two modes produce genuinely different evenings, so decide before anyone buys anything.

The phone mode is the one that reproduces a board game night, with everyone looking at a shared screen and holding their own private hand. The mouse and keyboard mode is the one that works when your group lives in different time zones.

2 Setting up an evening

For couch play the host starts the game on a television or monitor and everyone else installs the free Sunderfolk Controller app, then scans the QR code on the shared screen. Nobody else needs a Steam account or a purchase.

Since the free trial covers the first four missions and carries progress into the full game, the first session can be run entirely on the trial. Buy afterwards, with the group already agreed on whether it is for them.

3 How a mission plays out

Missions are tactical encounters resolved with skill cards. The distinctive part is that the group chooses its turn order rather than receiving one, which means a round begins with a decision the whole table makes together.

Because of that, the strongest single move is often not the strongest play, if it forces a bad ordering for everyone else. Groups that talk before acting outperform groups of individually clever players, which is exactly the intent behind the design.

Missions escalate toward bosses that punish improvisation. Expect to adapt tactics between attempts rather than to find one reliable formation that carries the campaign.

4 Choosing heroes as a group

The full roster of unique heroes is available from the trial onward, so nobody is locked out of a role by not having bought yet. That makes the first session the right time to try several rather than to commit.

A practical approach for a new party is to spread across obvious roles first and refine later. In a card driven tactical game, the failure mode is four players who all shine in the same situation and are helpless in the others.

Encourage each player to read their own cards aloud once during the first mission. The phone app doubles as a guidebook, but shared knowledge of what the party can actually do is what makes the turn order discussion productive.

5 Coming home to Arden

Between battles the party unwinds in the village of Arden. You upgrade shops, discover gear, share hearty meals and connect with the locals, and some of those relationships can become more than friendship.

Do not treat this as a menu to click through on the way to the next fight. Shop upgrades are how the party gets stronger between missions, and the social scenes are a large part of why the campaign holds together as a story rather than a mission list.

It is also the natural place to end a session. Finishing an evening in the village rather than mid mission means everyone starts the next one at full strength and with the plan fresh.

6 Keeping the pace up

The one real risk in a game built on group discussion is that discussion becomes the evening. Tabletop groups know this problem well, and the same fixes apply here.

Agree that the turn order call belongs to whoever is most affected by it, keep individual moves quick once the order is set, and let a mistake stand rather than relitigating it. The campaign is long enough that a suboptimal round costs almost nothing, while a stalled table costs the session.