The Most Comprehensive Guide To D&D games on the iPad

Without Dungeons and Dragons the current gaming landscape would be entirely different. A lot of our favorite movies, games and music albums have been directly (or indirectly) inspired by a cozy D&D session on a Sunday evening.

I find myself yearning for a D&D session but with my current overbooked schedule I seldom find the time. This is where my trusty iPad comes in to play.

I wrote about my setup quite a few times on this blog but for those of you that find yourselves here for the first time here’s the gist: I keep an iPad next to my work setup constantly and thanks to Universal Control I can interact with it using my mouse and keyboard, without needing to lift my hands or change peripherals.

This makes it a perfect gaming distraction for when I’m working and this setup is ideal for playing heavy, story driven or turn based games.

As such, when I yearn for a D&D session but scheduling conflicts appear I turn to my trusty iPad to scratch this itch. And I’m here to tell you all about the best D&D games you can play on your iPad.

So, what Dungeons & Dragons iPad game should you play first? Let’s break it down into a list based on your preferences. Once you found the one you’re interested in, scroll down to that game’s section.

1. People who played the Goldbox Classic D&D Games and the Infinity-engine games and want to replay them on their modern tablets:
   • Everything in this guide except Warriors of Waterdeep. You’ll hate it with a passion.
2. People who play modern D&D but never played any computer D&D game:
   • If you play D&D for the story mostly go for Planescape Torment and then start with the Baldur’s Gate Series. Once you’re used to Planescape Torment you can jump straight to Baldur’s Gate II and then the rest.
   • If you play D&D for the combat or you’re used to 3E or 3.5
     • If early 3D doesn’t scare you
       • Go for Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition
     • If early 3D scares/annoys you
       • Go for Baldur’s Gate/II/Siege of Dragonspear
       • Follow it up with Icewind Dale EE.
3. People who never played D&D but are mobile gamers and are interested in the world and characters:
   • Start with Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms to immerse yourself a bit in the world and then
     • If early 3D doesn’t scare you
       • Go for Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition
     • If early 3D scares/annoys you
       • Go for Baldur’s Gate/II/Siege of Dragonspear
4. People who never played D&D, are mildly interested in it, and just want a cash grab game with decent aesthetics and horrible mobile monetisation
   • Enjoy Warriors of Waterdeep.
     • And if you ever play normal D&D remember – it’s not okay for the DM to charge you $5 for every dice roll above 15. Or charge you for a character sheet.

Dungeons and Dragons video games for the iPad

We’re starting with the games themselves since those are the ones that grace my iPad the most. We’re going to be looking at old-school heavy hitters as well as modern releases more suited for mobile gaming devices.

Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms

Idle Champions I feel is the best companion game for a busy, busy D&D aficionado. It has all the charm and aesthetic of a Dungeons & Dragons game and enough features and Easter eggs to keep you engaged.

When you see your party of heroes advancing through familiar realms you feel like a DM keeping his eyes on the party’s progression.

It’s an idle game, of course, and that’s both its strength and its weakness. There were many times when I wish I could create my own character for the game, roll its attributes, prep his inventory and have that character lead the party. Alas, that is not the case.

Where the game shines is in its colorful collection of characters, it’s graphics and an idle game progression system that’s extremely well thought out.

The dialogue and little bits of story that get sprinkled with each zone completion are amusing. My first run of the game started out pretty standard with me taking down bandits while lost in the forest only to focus my ire on a villager’s cow herd on my way to his farm in search of direction.

At the end of the mission I discovered the farmer was possessed due to equipping a cursed medallion.

If you like idle game mechanics or you want something D&D related to keep yourself busy during work Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms is hard to beat. It requires just enough focus to keep you engaged while providing an inkling sense of progression in a world created with love.

My suggestions if you want to try the game:

• Keep auto progression off and always play the first 4 stages.
• Let the characters earn enough gold through auto play.
  • Move onto the next stage when it starts looking like it’s going to take forever to unlock the next character
• Use all the gold you have to level up your party to the max. It’s very well balanced and you can go far even with your starting characters.
  • I have Bruenor in my team constantly and he’s the starting champion you get! He can still shove an axe where it matters!
• Positioning of your characters plays an important role. Watch out for how their abilities affect other members of your party. Once Celeste reaches level 100, move her to the back.
• Keep an eye out on specializations. It’s easy to miss them in the beginning.

Don’t bother with the “Wild Offers” and the character unlocks unless you see a character from your favorite YouTube series or books. They are a nice addition but it’s not worth dumping money on the game in the early days of play.

Save them for when you are really engaged and want to push through. It will become a necessity at one point.

Baldurs Gate Series (Enhanced Editions)

I’ve been a game designer and developer for 15 years now. In my first 10 years in this industry I would have jumped at the chance of working for Bioware. The love I held for them as a studio comes from the early Black Isle days, developers of the original Baldur’s Gate series (of course, that love increased even more over the years thanks for Neverwinter Knights and the Dragon Age series) and only flickered out of existence in recent times.

To this day I hold great admiration for their works of art – like the Baldur’s Gate series! A series that has now found its way onto iOS in various incarnation. We’ll go over the games in this series and talk a bit about them but the general rule of thumb is: If you like one of them, there’s a 90% chance you’ll like all of them!

Baldur’s Gate

If you’re a Veteran cRPG player then you know of Baldur’s Gate, the legacy it has and the way it is designed. There’s nothing I can tell you about this series that you probably haven’t heard. But, if it’s the first time you’re introduced to it and the only thing you know about D&D is from the sessions you attended with your DM, take a seat and brace for impact.

The Baldur’s Gate series is an old one, from 1998. The version available from the store is the Enhanced Edition of the game but don’t look at it as a modern RPG.

Every. Single. Time. I show off the game to someone on my iPad it takes minutes for them to wrap their heads around the UI.

• “How do you move and why is everything gray?”
• “What do you mean drag to select everyone?”
• “I can’t rotate the camera?”
• “Wait this isn’t 3D?”
• “How do I select what spells to cast?”
• “Which is my inventory and the chest’s inventory?”.

These are common questions that everyone has as far as the game goes. But even in the pre-game, the character creation process and importing of said character is also going to take you for a bit of a spin if you aren’t used to this types of games.

Even if you are experienced with modern D&D rulesets, once you head into the character creation and class + race selection you’ll notice something is amiss. The game is based on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1977) ruleset and not on the 5th edition.

I can spend hours and hours talking about the game’s UI and User Experience and explain how it’s both great for those looking for granular control while also being horrible for an iPad user – but I’ll leave that for the full review of the series.

What’s important to keep in mind here is that this game is going to be the closest thing to a D&D Adventure you’ll have on your iPad, miss-taps or not.

If you can look beyond the old-school User Interface and control system you’ll find a game with depth that almost can’t be rivalled nowadays and an amazing story that takes place in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.

On the graphical side of things the game looks like a painting that would fit nicely in a museum of fantasy worlds. Its environments are static and all character models look similar, with minor color variations between them, a crude representation of your detailed character portraits.

The game opens slowly but quickly gathers pace as you play it. It’s expansive, sprawling and so is the world in which you will be thrown into.

If I had to pick one thing in D&D that sells the game for me, that’s the banter my friends and I have while adventuring. And Baldur’s Gate? Baldur’s Gate has banter and chats and talks. Your party members will talk and chatter. Your enemies will be gleeful of kicking and bashing your head in.

Don’t expect the same old lines to be constantly repeated. Oh no. They’ll go into great detail about what is to happen to you.

Like I said in the beginning of this chapter, if you’re an old veteran of the series you’ll know if you want to play it. If you never tried the old D&D games but you’re open to a period of learning how to navigate and interact with the game and you care about story above all else? You’ll grow to love it.

And it’s perfectly fine if you want to stay away from it because if you love D&D you’ll reach a point in which you consumed all other media and material available on the iPad. And you’ll come back to this series.

And then the enemies will bash your head in and scream “nya hahah hahaha”.

Baldur’s Gate II

A ton of people call Baldur’s Gate II the best D&D Game out there, and rightfully so. It improved upon the original game by such a wide margin that the comparison between the two games is only skin deep. They look similar and play in a similar fashion but the elements that make a great D&D Campaign are widely improved.

However, I would not start your first game in the Baldur’s Gate series with Baldur’s Gate II. Yes, it is newer than the original and it improves upon it, but if you’re familiar with modern D&D or a fresh spawn into the world? It’s going to overwhelm you.

First of all you start as a much much higher level character, the enemies you will fight are further along in their journey. The combat in itself is much more higher level and requires higher levels of knowledge. You can play on Story mode (and I recommend it) to alleviate some of these issues but you won’t be able to understand what is happen and why it’s happening.

That being said, let’s look at what Baldur’s Gate II improves upon the original:

• Better companions, more fleshed out with more than just an introductory quest.
• Better aide quests.
• Strongholds are an amazing addition.
• Less map filler.
• A very well defined villain. A conflicted villain! A villain whose actions are justified by horrible methods!

Siege of Dragonspear

Siege of Dragonspear is the third entry on our list of Baldur’s Gate games though it takes place before Baldur’s Gate II while having been developed 16 years after the game released. It’s technically an expansion pack for Baldur’s Gate 1 Enhanced Edition that, on the iPad, is released as a standalone game.

It tries to tie in the story of Baldur’s Gate 1 with Baldur’s Gate 2 and explain some of the things you notice at the beginning of Baldur’s Gate 2 (such as magic being regulated) and, to some degree, it succeeds though it has a few of its own issues.

In short, as far as story goes, it sits between Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. It has the same combat system as the two games, built on the same ruleset, but the way the story develops and the depth and motivation behind the characters make me wish it was more of a dungeon crawler.

It does build up and offer more lore on the Sword Coast but the main “villain” falls flat of achieving the empathy that Baldur’s Gate 2’s villain receives.

It’s a great game to experience but I would treat it the same way as Icewind Dale, as a possible expansion (which it is) to the main two games in the series and I can only recommend playing it after the other two games in the series.

Icewind Dale

If Baldur’s Gate I/II is the Bard of the series (a game with a huge story focus in the D&D space) then Icewind Dale is certainly the Berserker since it’s a lot more combat focused. There is a story, yes, but most of what you’re doing is straight up a dungeon crawling experience.

A quick difference between Icewind Dale and the Baldur’s Gate series lies in the character creation process. Here you don’t create your main character and jump in. Instead you create your entire party from the get go.

If you don’t want to go into character creation, outside of making your favorite character, you can use pre-made character and the game comes with some good all-rounders.

I can’t talk too much about the story and character development of the game because there’s not too much to say about it. The story that is here is pretty cool, especially since I played Siege of Dragon Spear before I played Icewind Dale and there’s a neat little tie-in with the final boss.

You know how in the Baldur’s Gate II section I mentioned that the characters were written better than in BG, especially the companions? That is because they focused on quality and not quantity and it’s similar to what’s happening in Icewind Dale.

The are but a few characters in this game and you can tell the writers had much more to say about them since they had a lot less things to focus on.

If you want to try Icewind Dale out I highly recommend you start with one of the previous games mentioned in this guide and then, after you learn the combat system, you can jump and treat this game as an expansion or a test of your proficiency with the rule set.

Warriors of Waterdeep

I’ll have to say that the entire reason this guide exists is due to my immense disappointment with Warriors of Waterdeep.

There’s a review of the game that we released prior to this guide and you can go ahead and read it here but the gist of it is that you might want to skip this if you’re looking for deep D&D mechanics and an amazing story.

There’s a reason we gave it 2/5 stars! Yet my love for Dungeons and Dragons wouldn’t allow me to review it and move on and, instead, I wanted to shine a bit of a spotlight on other games in the series.

Warriors of Waterdeep is the weakest of all the entries on this list and the most “mobile gamified” of all Dungeons and Dragons games for iOS we’ve covered.

If, however, you’re fine with the mobile gaming industry’s shenanigans, timers, grinding and you think that “Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realm” just didn’t have enough avenues for monetization this might just be the game for you.

Planescape Torment

I have to be honest, when Planescape Torment came out I skipped it. I skipped playing the game well into the early 2010’s when Miracle of Sound released a song about the game. I loved the song so much that I ended up purchasing a copy of the game from eBay so I can experience it. And because I love the song so much I’ll embed it here.

Let this be the game that convinces you to take these old school entries for a spin!

The way I approached Planescape Torment after the song is, as Gavin (Miracle of Sound), like an adventure book, like a story. And my little review of the guide focuses on it in this way.

If Baldur’s Gate I/II + expansions were played as a D&D challenge with the story taking a supporting and lovely role, Planescape Torment for me was “do whatever is possible to pass the challenge” so I can learn more about the story.

Now, the story is the main reason I recommend you to try out the game so I won’t go into many details about it, only to say that if you could play through a single game on this list, then let it be this one. Especially if the old-school D&D combat systems isn’t your cup of tea.

I’m going to sound a bit like a broken record because I said this twice so far but: You know how in the Baldur’s Gate II and Icewind Dale section I mentioned the characters are better written because they writers had less characters to focus on and write?

In Planescape Torment you play as a pre-defined character, in terms of name, appearance and class (though you can change your class a bit later in the game). You start off as a fighter but gain the ability to change your class. Oh and you’re immortal and you have past incarnations.

Your personality also changes and your memory disappears with every death. And you gotta find out what happened, why exactly it happened and what exactly is happening to you. You’re not saving the world, you’re looking to find out what can change the nature of a man.

So, when I said that you’re playing a pre-defined character I didn’t mean that the character has a set in stone behavior, personality, alignment and dialogue for this character. Oh no. Everything is extremely fluid, adaptive and, what’s the opposite of rigid?

All in all it’s an amazing game with one of the best stories in a cRPG ever, at least in my opinion. Feel free to skip as much combat as you want.

Neverwinter Nights

My biggest problem with Neverwinter Nights came from the fact that I started with the second entry in the series. I only went for the original NWN when I was done consuming its amazing expansion (one of my most favorite and most played games of all time) and, while still good, it paled in comparison.

As all the other games on this list by Beamdog, Neverwinter Nights’ iPad version is the Enhanced Edition of the original. Its graphics are a bit more modern in terms of technology and how the rendering happens while retaining the original models (for the most part).

The game, being on the iPad, suffers from the same issues that plague the Baldur’s Gate series with one extra caveat: an extra dimension to make things a bit more clunkier and the ability to zoom into the auto-dice roll based combat.

Luckily for players of modern D&D, the ruleset is a bit more streamlined and familiar as the game follows the 3rd edition rules and, while a far cry away from 5E, still holds up quite well compared to AD&D.

Neverwinter Nights really looks like a product of it’s time with a lot of bells and whistles tackled on. The graphics really do not hold up and move quite closely into the low poly uncanny valley territory.

But the story of the game? While it doesn’t quite reach Mask of the Betrayer level it’s nevertheless a classic Bioware story that holds up, especially with the first two expansions (Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark). If you can get past the clunky graphics and allow yourself to be immersed in the Sword’s Coast lore you’ll quickly find yourself losing hours upon hours in front of your iPad.

The game is big, sprawling and it’s really amazing to see it in action (and all of it’s modules) after all this time.

Closing Thoughts

These are your choices for Dungeons and Dragons games on iOS and specifically iPad’s. They are, for the most part (*ahem* Warriors of Waterdeep *ahem*) great games and they all stand out on their own in regards to their story or gameplay.

This guide is complete as far as video games go. We can try and cover the “board games”, game supplements or engines available (like Roll20, D&D Beyond and Lords of Waterdeep) in a future post but for now I sincerely hope I have you covered on all fronts.

Dungeons And Dragons is probably the main reason I wanted to become a Game Designer and Developer myself. In this 15 year old journey of mine in the games industry I wanted only 5 things. 3 of them were “Work for Bioware, Work on a D&D-licensed game and Port Mask of the Betrayer to modern systems”. Only two of those three things are still valid at this point in time.

And the remaining two I’ll keep for another time.

Where To Next?

You’ve reached the end of this article on Dungeons and Dragons iPad games. I hope it was beneficial to you. It’s also beneficial to us to have you stick around the blog more. We have more reviews of good free or premium mobile games, such as Metal Slug Attack or QB Planets! We also have other articles with tidbits and interesting facts, like this one – which answers the question “What is the Number 1 mobile eSports Game” sorted by the prize pool.

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