The Outline:

At this point, we’ve all heard of Dungeons & Dragons. The game, which has enjoyed a dedicated cult following for decades, has lately seen its popularity lifted with the rising tide of nerd culture in the mainstream. It’s in Stranger Things, Community, and The Big Bang Theory; A-listers — Vin Diesel! Anderson Cooper! — dig it; general-interest media outlets are taking it increasingly seriously.

D&D is just one of a diverse family of games called “tabletop role-playing games” (often simply called “RPGs”), but it’s the only RPG that has managed to get significant traction in popular culture. Its fame is so far beyond its kin that multiple RPG experts I spoke with suggested that D&D’s brand has become virtually synonymous with the very concept of a tabletop role-playing game among the general public, achieving sole brand-name recognition like Kleenex or Xerox. But ironically, when it comes to advancing the popularity of the rest of the RPG medium, all this attention on D&D may actually be doing more harm than good.

While I’m a big fan of D&D and would play again in a heartbeat, I’m completely unfamiliar with any other board game RPGs mentioned in this piece. I’ve already downloaded Crash Pandas (think Fast and the Furious but raccoons).