Loved it. Fantastic Artwork - especially enjoyed the transfer between in game and IRL.

The characters were wonderful and it felt like I was right there with them playing along. +10 Charisma! So thrilled to read a story that incorporates inclusivity as a part of daily life without making it the primary plot point. Way to normalize!!

My 10 year old DM in training read along with me and was engaged and couldn't wait to find out what happened. This dynamic plot, including the flashbacks is a great way to tell the story of a D&D campaign. We will both be looking for further adventures.

A very cute and concise story about a relatable group of friends. While there were a few formatting hiccups (the cramped speech bubbles were difficult on the eyes, and the font change into the fantasy realm, while a good addition, made for difficulty in clarity especially with the E shape), overall the art was extremely charming and the dialogue natural and flowing. It was great to see the scenes flipping back and forth between the early game and current day.

I loved reading this graphic novel. It is a geeky slice of life about friendship, tabletop RPG and growing into adulthood with a happy ending. I enjoyed the drawing style and bright colors. The diversity and minority representation was amazing without feeling too niche to be relatable to EVERYONE. Each character has an experience or struggle that everyone can relate to regardless of gender identity/sexual orientation/ethnic background/how long since you attended middle school (so 12 and up).

Unless you do not like RPGs, I think you would enjoy this book. I highly recommend and will definitely read the next one.

The premise for this D&D group forming because of a failed GSA group is so adorable to me, I think the drama was a little petty but overall a solid graphic novel

Unabashedly queer and nerdy, this book is perfect for so many people. The art style is gorgeous, the characters are diverse and interesting and I absolutely love how the plot unfolded.

The artwork is great and the diversity/representation is amazing in this graphic novel. As I'm not a D&D fan, I had a hard time focusing in certain aspects of the game and got bored a couple of times. I was probably not the right audience for this but I'm glad I had the chance to read it.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

A sweet quick read about DnD and friendship - 8.4/10!
Thank you to NetGalley and Mad Cave Studios for providing me with this book for an honest review. This is a heartwarming, cute, and very relatable graphic novel about a group of friends finishing a DnD campaign they started years before in high school. As a new player/character is introduced, the group dynamic changes and some tension appears between the original players and the newcomer, which they'll have to overcome for the sake of their campaign but also their friendship. As someone who's been role-playing for over 15 years, I can relate to this narrative a lot! The plot and the characters are well-developed and I loved the LGBT, Black, and Hispanic representation. The way their past in high school, present and in-game settings alternate flows beautifully and lets us get to know all characters individually. A great read for DnD lovers!

Characters - 8/10
Atmosphere - 10/10
Writing style - 8/10
Plot - 8/10
Intrigue - 8/10
Logic - 9/10
Enjoyment - 8/10

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

The Last Session, Vol. 1: Roll for Initiative by Jasmine Walls, Dozerdraws is a boardgame-inspired graphic novel that will appeal to nerds everywhere. The story revolves around a group of friends who have played a game similar to Dungeons and Dragons since they were in high school. Now, they're about to graduate college. Will they finish their last session of the game?

Overall, The Last Session, Vol. 1: Roll for Initiative is a delightful graphic novel that friendships and games. One highlight of this book is how diverse it is. I was pleasantly surprised to see so many characters of color, and I was happy to see that. I did take off 2 stars, because I felt like I couldn't really relate to the characters. Maybe if I had played Dungeons and Dragons before, I would have enjoyed the graphic novel more. If you're intrigued by the description, you can check out this book when it comes out in July!

This was really sweet and fun comic about an alternative version of DnD. The group of characters has to overcome problems and differences not only in the world of the game but also in the real life. I think that the strife about a newbie 'invading' an already established group in the middle of the campaign will be familiar to some or in more general terms, it's a common issue of a group not gelling together as one would hope.

I really like how the two worlds: the real and the fictional intertwine and how the characters come to life in both. A few harder topics are touched: poverty, parents with high expectations and even higher demands, body shaming and general lgbtqia+ bunch: figuring stuff out and coming out. I wish some of these would delve a bit deeper because they served more as a backstory and the discussion was in one or two pages over.

Overall though, it was nice and sweet with a hella diverse cast on top of that, and while this is the first volume I think it wrapped up nicely as a stand-alone would. I wouldn't mind reading more volumes because I enjoyed this one well enough.

Thank you to Diamond Book Distributor, Mad Cave and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The Last Session Vol. 1: Roll for Initiative is a cute queer graphic novel that I adored. I loved the diversity in the characters, the LGBTQ+ representation is well done. The story was fast paced but it was a really fun story to read.

The art is beautiful, honestly the use of bright colors is my favorite part of this graphic novel.

TWs: Bullying, fatphobia

Relatable, funny, diverse af, this graphic novel had it ALL!!!

This group of 20-somethings who've been drifting apart as friends due to work and the nature of growing up, come back together to complete the D&D campaign they all started in high school with the addition of one of their girlfriend's as a new player.

This showed the difficulties of growing up and growing apart and feeling threatened in your friendships so well, all wrapped up in this really fun D&D game subplot.

This book was also QUEER AS HELL and almost, if not the entire cast are POC. I really appreciated seeing an aromantic character in a queer platonic relationship, it made me so happy.

Overall this was a really fun graphic novel which I really recommend to anyone who enjoys D&D

My feelings on this graphic novel are mixed -- and they veer positive, but it was hard to get over my kneejerk emotional response to this.

The good:
- INCREDIBLY good art. It's super charming, really emotive, and gets across both the characters and their player characters so well. I also want to say that there's a sense of love in the art? Which I know is so abstract, but it feels like the artist loved these characters and wanted to really portray all sides of them.
- The writing is very solid and all the characters feel unique and distinct.
- It's very diverse, with all-queer characters from multiple ethnic backgrounds. I think this is a really positive work to put in front of eyes of all ages!

The squeamish (There's no real bad):
I had a hard time reading this because the central conflict of it is sort of the stereotype of the genre. It's like reading a novel where the main character is a romance fan who conflates fiction with reality and treats everyone like characters in her lives who has to go through an arc of learning that people are complicated beings instead of the "good boy who isn't right for you" and "bad boy with a heart of gold". It's like reading a book where the main character is a nerdy boy into sci-fi/fantasy who gets bullied by jocks and they have to come together to realize that deep down they're both nerds who are fervently interested in their own special fields and aren't so different after all. Because this conflict basically plays off the standard stereotypes of D&D players -- that they're too absorbed into the story they're telling to be welcoming of newcomers and thus are exclusionary, but also that new players are overeager and don't spend the time to really learn how to play and dominate the game while totally changing the vibe of an existing group and that sucks.

It's like -- the thing is all the characters have reasons to be self-absorbed, and Cassandra of course has reasons to be cringey! It's written into the story that way. But I couldn't not read without thinking "ah yeah I forgot this is how people outside the hobby see us" (although I'm sure the writer and artist *are* in the hobby given how it's portrayed). As a DM and as a player I kept thinking about how nobody was actually doing anything to try to change it -- everyone was criticizing Cassandra's mistakes (even those who wanted her around) instead of helping her out with the massive rules set because she was new. The DM was Cassandra's partner and wasn't having words with anyone when things were getting out of hand but <spoiler>let them RP out abandoning her character and only THEN told them off</spoiler> -- why? I mean, I know people can in fact just hope it gets better on its own and keep playing through things, but it reached a point (when they were all complaining about her) that it was just uncomfortable to read for me as someone in this hobby. Because do I think people can act like this? Sure, there are many exclusionary groups. I've been in some. I've been in some really shitty scenarios, especially at conventions when I can't choose who I play with. But... hmm. It's hard to put into words at the point it stopped feeling like how people act and started to feel like negative press, the same way it would for having a romance fan who doesn't have a grip on reality or a nerd-jock enmity where both were annoying about it. There are plenty of real people who act like that but there are also so many who don't and I think it was maybe the fact that not one person was like "have you tried just talking to each other about it" repeatedly haha. I think maybe also that the only character whose pov we didn't get was Jay -- they were the one who was the fulcrum in the middle of these two factions and I think it would have been sold better to me as their story, in a way, trying to tell a good story and not upset either group and wanting the best for both but also ... it's been their campaign of four years, and they want it to end well too.

Anyway maybe the fact I have so many feelings about it IS a sign that it pulled off this conflict well, because I sure can't separate my own feelings about gaming groups and trying to protect both new players and old vibes from how the story wrote it out.

I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who is queer and loves D&D (which is a venn diagram with a huge overlap), with the warning that they might have to brace themselves for the Iconic New Player Problem as the central conflict.

A nicely diverse group of high-schoolers meet at a Gay Straight Alliance meeting that doesn't get off the ground, and they decide to start playing a Dungeons & Dragons-derived RPG.

Four years later, they are finally going to finish their campaign, and just in time, because most of them are moving away, for jobs or college. The DM has a partner who wants to introduce to the group, for this last couple of sessions. She tries her best, but she doesn't completely vibe with the group, underlying tensions within the original group surface and it all gets very dramatic.

I'm in two minds about this book. On the one hand it's nice to see a diverse group like this, labelling their problems and solving them neatly by the end of the book. Happy endings for everyone. On the other hand I feel like I've read a story like this a hundred times before, there are no surprises and it never really mines the drama inherent to the set-up. It feels like it's time to do something different with this kind of story.

The art is pretty great, both in the real world and in the game world.

This graphic novel follows a group of friends who are reuniting in person to finish up the D&D campaign they started in high school - but there’s a new player in the group, which causes some tension.

This was a really fun and cute graphic novel, and I loved learning about the friend group and their D&D adventures, I also really appreciated all the queer rep, especially the non-binary DM! The art was so adorable and I loved seeing both their real life characters and their in-game characters.

I do wish this had been just a bit longer/characters had been developed a little more - there were some flashbacks to when they had started out the campaign but at times they felt out of place and I wanted more. I felt like things were a little surface level at times and I wish it had dug just a little deeper.

Overall I liked the themes of friendship and the acknowledgment of characters when they messed up, and the fun D&D concept. The title of this says Vol 1 so I hope there will more volumes in the future!

rating: 4/5 stars

Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC!

As someone who plays D&D, I have a tendency to want to consume D&D media, but I don't have the attention span to the real plays. The discovery of the few D&D graphic novels I've found have hit that itch in just the right way, and this volume definitely does not disappoint!

Unlike The Adventure Zone, this series switches back and forth between the players and the characters, giving us an idea not only of the character relationships, but how the player relationships impact the in game play, which is a fascinating aspect. The shifts between character and player perspective is a bit rough and jarring in places, and while I like the flashbacks to high school, I wish they were more substantial outside of the initial setting up of how the group came to be.

Other than that, this was a fun, solid read and I enjoyed it! I hope that there's more adventures to come!

The setting for this book is that high schoolers get together for the Gay Straight Aliance (GSA) meeting, but the president never shows up to guide them, so they start coming up with other things to do during their meetings, which is play their own form of Dungeons and Dragons.

They continue to play, through high school, and a bit through college, but then they realize that after college they will all have moved on to other things, and they wanted to finish the one campaign that they never did.

Only problem is there is a new player, and she is a bit thorny. But, she also notices things that the other players don't, that the dungeon master has set up.

A good story of friendships, old and new, and what to expect and not to expect from both.

<em>Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review.</em>

A wonderful little escape. I’ve been consuming a lot of media based around DnD recently and I really enjoyed this. I loved the balance of the present life and “in-game”. I was pleasantly surprised with the art style, I thought it was gorgeous and I really loved the story each Vol. cover showed. I also loved the DnD elements added into the graphic novel through illustration.

TW: brief fatphobia, violence

This was a cute comic. The premise of a group of kid’s reuniting to play a DnD game is a little lacking in the excitement factor, considering how the dramatic cover pulled me in. It’s a bit droll, in comparison to the experience of either reading a fantasy or playing an interactive tabletop game. But it’s cute. The art is great, I loved how colorful it was. The characters especially really shined which I think is something that is often a struggling point for the first volume of short format comics. I really loved to see how each person interacted with the game and each other. I think the idea of reuniting this group of friends that only incidentally came together in high school but stayed connected is the most interesting aspect plot-wise.

I knew I had to read this as soon as I could! Queer rep, Dungeons and Dragons, and light drama between friends? A perfect read. The storyline is relatable because high school is hard and figuring out your life after is even worse. Struggling to balance their schooling and/or careers, D&D is the escape for this group of friends who formed a campaign in high school.

The art is great, and very colorful in a pleasing warm palette, and each character (both human and their D&D characters) are distinct and easy to tell apart - the artist really knew what they were doing.

The intros are a little fast so I did some back and forth flipping for a bit, but that's my only downside.

Five stars. I really enjoyed that they showed both real-life and in-game stories woven together, with revealing flashbacks to how the game started throughout. The game itself was a fun adventure that I could see playing. It made me laugh that no one read the notes from the DM because from experience no one ever reads the notes! This was much better than other D&D comics I've read. The art was perfect for the story. Unfortunately it was a little hard to tell which person was which character for most of the beginning, but it was also not a big issue.