D&D Essentials Kit: Unboxing and Review

Today I want to spend some time with the new D&D Essentials Kit.  I had held off buying this when it first came out.  It was only available at Target stores and it is designed to get people up and going in the D&D 5 game that does not have prior experience with D&D.  That is not me. Plus buying one means that someone new might not get a copy.  But I kept hearing really good things about it and the sales I have heard are really good.  So I opted to pick up a copy now.

Since I prefer to buy my game materials from my favorite local game store, I will pick up another one when they are released to games stores in September.  I am likely going to donate that copy to my kid's local high school gaming club.  It will be well recieved I am sure.

So for $25 what does the Essentials Kit have and what can you do with it?  According to the back of the box we have:

• 64 Page Rulebook
• Dragon of Icespire Peak Adventure
• Double-sided poster map
• DM's screen
• 6 blank character sheets
• 11 polyhedral dice
• 81 cards describing magic-items, NPC and conditions
• Access codes for D&D Beyond

Opening up the box we see:

The adventure has a familiar feel of all the D&D 5 books.

Cards.

The map of the Sword Coast.

The DM's screen.  It is similar to the DM's screen sold separately, but this is made of thinner material.

Character sheets. These are thicker paper than photocopier paper.

The rulebook covers nearly everything characters will need for levels 1 to 6.

And dice. 1d4, 4d6s, 1d8, 1d10, 1d%, 1d12 and 2d20s.

The Essentials Kit covers a bunch of material and it is a fantastic introduction to the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition game.  The rules are clear, cover all the necessary topics and items.

The Essentials Kit is designed to work with the Starter Kit, but in truth I felt the Essentials can stand on it's own.

Certainly together they make for a complete game.  The Starter Set has more monsters and another adventure. 

I think that there was a missed opportunity here to call these the Basic and Expert sets.

The easy comparison here is to the various Basic Sets we have gotten over the years for D&D.

One of the complaints of the Starter Set was the lack of character creation rules. There were some other complaints that I felt were overblown. But let's look at this new box and ask the basic question "can I run a D&D game with just this box?"

The answer is yes, of course you can.  But are the elements here? Certainly.
I went through my Holmes and Moldvay Basic sets (Metzer is similar enough to Moldvay for this) and picked out rules sections to see what they have and how the Essentials compares.

This is what I came up with:

Item/Rule/Topic	D&D 5e Essentials	Holmes Basic	Moldvay Basic
Character Creation	Yes	Yes	Yes
Ability Generation	4d6, drop lowest or array	3d6	3d6
Character Races	Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, Human	Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, Human	Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, Human
Character Classes	Bard, Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, Wizard	Cleric, Fighter, Magic-user, Thief	Cleric, Fighter, Magic-user, Thief and Race-as-class
Levels	1 to 6	1 to 3	1 to 3
Spells	Yes (Bard, Cleric & Wizard)	Yes (Cleric & Magic-user)	Yes (Cleric & Magic-user)
Equipment	Yes	Yes	Yes
Combat	Yes	Yes	Yes
Monsters	Yes, in included adventure	Yes	Yes
Magic Items	Yes	Yes	Yes
DM's Section	Yes, in included adventure	Yes	Yes
Running Adventures	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sample Adventure	No (but includes a full adventure)	Yes	Yes
Full Adventure	Dragon of Icespire Peak	B1 Search of the Unknown	B2 Keep on the Borderlands
Character Sheets	Yes	No	No* (but a page you can copy)
Dice	Yes (11)	No (Chits)	Yes (6)

All three sets align well in terms of what you have.  You can start a character, choose one of four races and one of five classes and take them from 1st to 6th level with this box. And with this box there are already blank character sheets.

Like the boxes of old, save for my Holmes set made during the Great Dice Drought, all have dice.  All have included adventures and all have character creation rules.
Will Dragon of Icespire Peak go down in history like Keep on the Borderlands?  No. But it is still a very fine adventure.

The weak point of this boxed set as a complete game are the lack of a huge variety of Monsters.  Holmes featured 58 monsters.  Moldvay had over 70, more with variants and sub-types. Essentials has 33.  Still, a good amount and all three sets cover the same ones.  I don't see this as an issue since monsters can be downloaded from the SRD or the online Basic Game.  The Starter Kit also has Monsters as well.

So. The new Essentials Kit is a great starting place for people wanting to learn D&D 5 and have never played D&D before.  It is also good for anyone new to D&D 5 but has played other games in the past; though I would direct those folks to the Player's Handbook.

At 25 bucks the entry price is low enough for a casual gamer. 

The woman at the register at Target asked me if the game was for me or my kids.  I admitted it was for me, but my kids play.  She was telling me how popular the set has been and it was flying off the shelves.  I told her I knew, since this was the fourth Target I had been at in the Chicago'burbs looking for it.  She said her son had asked for it and she got it for him.  Now he and all his friends play at her house.  Cheaper than a video game and she knew where they were and what they were doing to whole time.

I think. No. I KNOW that Wizards of the Coast did the right thing putting this in Target stores.  If this gets the word out more about our hobby, then fantastic.

My next plan is to do some sample characters.  I have a new Bard, Cleric or Druid, and a Fighter I want to try out using just this box and do the same characters with the new Pathfinder.  Could be fun to see which character creation process "feels" the best.