Fourth Wing Game: Every Way to Play in the Empyrean World
If you are looking for a Fourth Wing game, the official choices are all tabletop games, and none of them lets you live a cadet’s year at Basgiath War College. As of October 2026 the licensed games include Goliath’s board game Fourth Wing: Rise of the Wingleader and Hasbro’s party game Priorities: Fourth Wing Edition. Both are built for a table of friends who know the books. If what you actually want is to walk the parapet yourself, there are two other routes: a tabletop roleplaying campaign your group sets in Navarre, or a written game that plays inside Rebecca Yarros’s novel with you as a new character.
This guide covers all four, says who each one suits, and ends with how to start the last one tonight.
What people mean by a Fourth Wing game
Readers type “Fourth Wing game” for three different wishes, and it helps to know which one is yours before you buy anything.
- A game night with other fans. You want something to put on the table at a book club or a birthday, full of in-jokes about Tairn and the Gauntlet.
- A competitive board game. You want rules, a winner and a box that looks good on the shelf.
- To be there. You finished Onyx Storm, you are not ready to leave, and you want to be a cadet in that quadrant, make your own choices and see what the dragons make of you.
The official games answer the first two well. The third is a different kind of game, and it is the one this site was built for.
The four options side by side
| Option | What it is | Players | You play as |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rise of the Wingleader | Push-your-luck board game | A group | A rider racing to Wingleader |
| Priorities: Fourth Wing Edition | Ranking party game | A group | Yourself, guessing your friends |
| A tabletop campaign | Roleplaying game you adapt | A group plus a game master | Your own cadet |
| A novel-based text game | Written roleplay from the book | Solo | Your own cadet |
Fourth Wing: Rise of the Wingleader
This is the official board game from Goliath Games. It came out on July 15, 2026, the date fans know as Conscription Day, and Goliath chose it on purpose. Time Out’s launch coverage describes the play like this:
To play this push-your-luck game, you select a dragon meeple in the color of your choice and make your way around the edge of a circular board to become Wingleader at Basgiath War College.
Goliath’s own announcement says the game brings “the world of Basgiath War College to life, featuring fierce riders, legendary dragons, and heart-stopping romance”, and Time Out notes that the box includes a metal Tairn bookmark.
Pick it if you want a real board game with a winner, a short rules read and a theme your friends will recognise from the first card. It is weaker for a reader who wants story. A push-your-luck race around a board gives you the feeling of the quadrant, but you will not be choosing what to say to Xaden or deciding whether to trust a new squadmate.
Priorities: Fourth Wing Edition
Hasbro’s entry is a party game, and it was announced as the first officially licensed Empyrean tabletop game. In Priorities, one player secretly ranks a set of cards from “loathe” to “love” and everyone else tries to guess the order. In the Fourth Wing edition the card deck draws on Fourth Wing, Iron Flame and Onyx Storm, the ranking player is called the Wingleader and the guessers are the Iron Squad. Yarros worked with Hasbro on it, and her line about the game is a fair summary of who it is for: “This game is for the readers who’ve stayed up way too late with these books and still want more.”
Pick it if your whole group has read the books and you want an evening of arguing about which side character is most lovable. It is weaker for anyone playing alone, or with friends who have not read the series. The fun is the in-jokes, and they only land with readers.
A tabletop campaign at Basgiath
There is no official Empyrean roleplaying game. That has not stopped groups from running their own, because the books hand a game master nearly everything a campaign needs: a school with clear rules, a ladder of trials, a war at the border, and secrets the cadets are not supposed to learn.
A fantasy system your group already knows is enough. A typical homebrew starts on Conscription Day with each player as a new candidate, runs the parapet as the first session, and treats Threshing as the moment each character’s story really begins. The squad structure of the Riders Quadrant fits a party neatly.
Pick it if you have a regular group and someone willing to run it. It is weaker for a solo reader, and it asks a lot of the game master, who has to hold Navarre’s history, the quadrants and every named instructor in their head.
Playing inside the Fourth Wing novel itself
The fourth way is newer, and it answers the third wish: to be there. You give a narrator the novel, and it reads the book before you start: the places, the people, how they speak, what they know and what they keep hidden. You make your own character and type what you do. There is no list of choices, so you can follow Violet’s year, stand somewhere else in the same quadrant, or take a path the book never took. The narrator keeps the world consistent with what Yarros wrote.
This is what LLM RPG does. You upload a copy of a book you own, as a
.txt or .epub file, and it builds the world from the text before your first
scene. Because it works from the book itself, it works for Fourth Wing, Iron
Flame and Onyx Storm alike, and for any other novel on your shelf.
Some cadets a reader might make:
- A scribe candidate who changed her mind on the morning of Conscription Day and walked to the parapet instead.
- A second-year in another wing who saw something during Threshing that the instructors told him to forget.
- A healer who keeps patching up riders and starts to notice which injuries nobody reports.
- A cadet who was never chosen and has to decide what to do with a year that did not go to plan.
Romance readers will want to know how it handles relationships. You play your own character, so any slow burn is yours to write with the narrator turn by turn, rather than Violet’s story replayed. Our romance game playthrough shows what that looks like in practice, in a ready-made court intrigue world.
Pick it if what you miss after the last page is the world itself and you want to be a new face at Basgiath. It is weaker for players who want a board, pictures or a group. It is written and typed, like a patient game master who is always free. It also needs the book file, so you use your own copy.
Where the books fit
The Empyrean series currently has three novels: Fourth Wing (2023), Iron Flame (2023) and Onyx Storm (2025). Each is its own file, so a reader can start a game at Basgiath in the first year, or later, once the war has moved on. Starting with the book you have just finished is usually best, because the narrator knows exactly as much as you do.
What it takes to start each one
| Option | How to start | What you need |
|---|---|---|
| Rise of the Wingleader | Buy the box | A group of friends |
| Priorities: Fourth Wing Edition | Buy the box | A group who read the books |
| A tabletop campaign | Pick a fantasy system you know | A group and a game master |
| LLM RPG | Open the site in a browser | Nothing for the first five turns |
With LLM RPG you can play a ready-made world for five turns with no account at all, and signing up adds free credits. The current plans are on the pricing page.
How to start a Fourth Wing game tonight
If playing inside the book sounds right, this is the whole path.
- Try it with no account. Open a ready-made world and play five turns. A few minutes tells you whether typing your own actions suits you.
- Sign up with your email if it does. You get a one-time code, no password.
- Upload the book. Choose your copy of Fourth Wing as a
.txtor.epubfile. The narrator reads it and builds the world before you play. - Make your character. You are a new person in the book’s world, so pick a quadrant, a home province and one thing you would never tell your squad.
- Type what you do. “I keep my eyes on the far end of the parapet and do not look down.” “I ask my squad leader why the roll call was short this morning.” The narrator answers in the book’s world and remembers what you did.
If you like other worlds with dragons, our Eragon game guide follows the same idea, and the Hunger Games game guide covers another series where surviving the institution is the story. For playing alone more widely, see solo role playing games.
When one of the others is the better choice
Be honest about the evening you want. If you have friends coming over and everyone has read the books, buy one of the official games: Priorities for laughing and arguing, Rise of the Wingleader for a race with a winner. If you have a group that loves to improvise, a homebrew campaign at Basgiath can run for months and give you stories nobody else will ever have.
A written game fits a different moment. You have just closed the book, it is late, you are on your own, and you want to stay in the Riders Quadrant as yourself. That is the moment it was built for.