After years in development, D&D’s Unreal-powered virtual tabletop still feels off

Dungeons & Dragons’ Sigil platform, available in full with the Master Tier subscription to D&D Beyond, would be much easier to recommend if there was an asterisk in the title. The seminal tabletop role-playing game’s first internally produced 3D virtual tabletop (VTT) app is finally live, and it offers players and Dungeon Masters alike a lavish workspace to move 3D minis around in an online-connected computer interface. But it has landed without the asterisk that it so very clearly needs, or perhaps another indicator of its incomplete state — words like “alpha,” “beta,” or “early access.” Because if anyone pays for a D&D Beyond subscription expecting a complete or even fully functional experience, they’re going to be sorely disappointed.

At first blush, the app comes off as immediately handsome, with 3D-rendered miniatures, terrain, and lighting all powered by Unreal Engine 5. In motion, it capably evokes scenes from Baldur’s Gate 3. Its formal ties to D&D Beyond, which include the ability to import characters and content from Wizards of the Coast sourcebooks, shows promise but currently feels unfinished. A spin through the interface’s premade assets includes enough introductory content to excite and tantalize any longtime D&D fan. But dig deeper, and the wheels start to come off.

The bottom line is that Sigil has arrived somewhat incomplete, and the messaging from the team makes me wonder if it may ever get the additional features it so badly needs. Based on how the app feels as of last month’s launch, I can see a path that leads to that kind of future. But the Sigil of today is nowhere near the likes of Yartar yet.

The concept for Sigil first appeared in the back pages of the 4th edition Player’s Handbook, a document published back in 2008. The idea sounds simple: Create a three-dimensional play space where players can aim a camera and move their miniatures to recreate the experience of sitting at a table with friends. But the implementation is incredibly difficult, with reams of rules to mitigate and more edge cases than you can shake an owlbear at. 

That’s why over the last 17 years dozens of competing VTTs have sprung up — including some that were, and still are, officially licensed to support the rules and beloved campaigns published for D&D. So Sigil isn’t just competing against Owlbear Rodeo, Foundry, and other decent alternatives, but against mature platforms that host the same source material, including Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds. In fact, Sigil is even competing against a second internally produced virtual tabletop called Maps that got spun up by Wizards in the last few years. But while Maps is actually listed as being in beta, other than not being 3D it still does a fair bit more than Sigil does today — and that includes when you’ve paid the monthly subscription fee. 

In good news for Wizards, Sigil’s biggest differentiator is dramatic: its aesthetics. Every building block fits together to emphasize Unreal’s strengths. The dynamic lighting is absolutely beautiful, especially in terms of how UE5 realistically bounces light sources off of different materials, from cobblestone walls to ornate floor rugs. (Go ahead, move a wall-mounted lantern around to see for yourself; it’s a fun Sigil party trick.) Surfaces and props benefit from incredible texture fidelity, so that long glances at any wood plank, mine cart, or spore overgrowth hold up to scrutiny. D&D is a stop-zoom-and-ponder kind of game, and Sigil holds its own as a place for players to appreciate between turns.

Sigil’s included building blocks are themed after familiar zones like woodland villages, abandoned cobblestone structures and graveyards, and subterranean dungeons and mines. There’s enough variety in terrains, props, and bespoke items to build a certain kind of campaign, but longtime DMs won’t need long to notice missing biomes and props. As of press time, there’s no way to manually make and insert, say, a wagon or caravan.

Customization is worse for mini creation: only six species of player characters, only one face for most of these species, and a surprising limit on custom colorization for the scant selection of weapons and armor. If you expected to bring your tiny virtual paintbrush to Sigil, take a deep breath; this app isn’t for you.

The same goes for anyone who expects to seamlessly plug their sessions into D&D Beyond — the online digital tool set used to create characters and roll dice online. Sigil currently doesn’t support everything a player or DM might create or maintain in D&D Beyond — with the exception of character sheets, which I’ll get to. The Sigil silo does include the latest 5e ruleset refresh, along with every creature in the newest Monster Manual (2025), some as 3D minis, others as 2D tokens.

There are two ways, then, to approach Sigil as a sandbox. The first is a fully contained D&D adventure facsimile, in which participants move minis around a 3D space, select actions, aim attacks, roll virtual dice, and let the app automatically manage the resulting math.

The second, which is the only way I’ve enjoyed using Sigil, is one where every connected player keeps character sheets, sourcebooks, and a pad of paper handy, so as to manually track everything that the app fails to do in its current state.

In the latter case, Sigil has proven to be a fascinating and sometimes capable option for a VTT DMing novice, as far as letting DMs build either flat or multi-story terrain with a simple and mostly easy-to-use interface. Scroll through pre-built pieces, ranging from generic terrain to standard TTRPG objects (traps, barrels, tables) to ornate objects like wells and fortified towers, then move and click them together as you see fit.

This is not as rich an object-manipulation environment as Unreal’s default creation engine, so it lacks crucial world-building toggles like undoing and mid-creation locking, but it’ll get the job done. What’s more, only one person in your D&D group has to pay a monthly fee to unlock Sigil for group play. (However, everyone will need a gaming-grade PC to use Sigil as individual party members, since it’s a demanding, graphically intensive app, not a breezy web-based application.)

Once players join a session, however, Sigil begins to crumble. Its general management of stats, abilities, and math is too variable and untrustworthy. The simple act of importing a D&D Beyond character leaves a bad first impression, with unclear steps as to how to couple such a character with a Sigil mini, along with the glaring issue of various elements often not importing correctly — important stuff like hit points, armor class, or even a character’s full inventory often fail to import correctly, or at all.

These inconsistencies can make combat a bit of a circus. DMs at any time can toggle “encounter mode,” at which point all players and monsters’ initiatives are rolled (including hidden minis), then turn order plays out automatically. This is when players may discover that they can ignore D&D’s inherent limits and house-rule their way to whatever actions they want — which might be fine if DMs had the option to enable or disable such chaos. They can’t, and Sigil’s tiny, hard-to-scroll encounter log doesn’t always announce these actions to fellow party members or DMs. (Related: There’s no built-in voice functionality or text chat log. You’ll need to use a third-party chat app.)

In some cases, toggling an attack for either a player or a monster will fail to bring up an expected workflow of aiming the attack, rolling for hit, and damage being calculated. Maybe the aiming reticle never appears. Maybe aiming happens, but nothing is rolled. Or maybe the roll shows numbers that suggest, based on every stat and character sheet loaded into Sigil, that there would be damage, only for no damage to be accounted for. And that’s not even beginning to address the outright missing abilities for various classes — an issue that Sigil’s own release notes address without suggesting that they’ll ever fix it.

What hope is there for Sigil? In its current state, all hope lies in ignoring nearly every built-in function and leaving the important accounting to DMs, as if Sigil were merely a set of building blocks. (Interestingly, this makes Sigil a solid VTT toolset to experiment with if you’re coming from rulesets like Pathfinder, since it still includes TTRPG tropes like built-in virtual dice rolls for all players to see and share.)

Connect with friends on Sigil inside of a DM’s custom-built map, and you really do have everything you need to manage shared vision of a 3D, mini-filled space, including a virtual tape measure and “look here” highlights and pings. DMs additionally can establish fog of war and manage the hiding and revealing of any object they see fit (monsters, traps, furniture, whatever). 

The most realistic request on my current Sigil wishlist is a premade “favorites” tab for DMs, for the sake of quicker, mid-session improvisation; otherwise, DMs must either pre-place hidden monsters or pick through a massive list of hundreds of tokens and minis.

I’m otherwise spooked by Sigil’s unceremonious dumping into the D&D Beyond subscription service in its current state, along with release notes that suggest missing features may never be addressed. On Sigil’s official Discord community, the development team is cataloguing and responding to bug reports and requests, but their current pile of issues seems pretty grand before entertaining notions that Sigil will ever support third-party content, custom-built 3D assets, or ways for DMs to customize the game’s internal rules and math.

Thanks for the fun set of D&D-themed blocks, Wizards. Until you make it easier for players to click them together in a more automated way, I don’t recommend anyone but the bravest DMs pay for them.