We Tried the New Dungeons & Dragons Immersive Experience in Plano

Dungeons & Dragons has escaped your mother’s basement and found itself a new home in Plano through early 2026. Intrepid adventurers can gather their party and take part in Dungeons & Dragons: The Immersive Quest, a D&D-themed experience that takes guests through an hour-long campaign incorporating key elements from the long-running franchise.

The exhibit in Plano marks the U.S. debut of The Immersive Quest, which kicked off in Toronto late last year. VIBRANT Studios designed the experience, which focuses on using established properties like Dungeons & Dragons to craft unique experiences for fans. 

Eric Brouillet, the president and founder of VIBRANT, says his team has been working on this project for over two years.

“We were attracted by this property because we like the idea of forgetting who you are for an hour and creating this character and [entering] this magical, fantastic world of Dungeons & Dragons,” he says. “We’re really selling here…the spirit of adventure inside the mythology of Dungeons & Dragons.”

Their primary challenge was striking the right balance to make The Immersive Quest appealing to hardcore D&D fans while still being accessible to families and the uninitiated. The team decided to streamline character creation and set the experience in the city of Waterdeep, building out the story from there.

When entering the exhibit, guests are given an RFID bracelet. You program your bracelet with the class you want to play (Fighter, Wizard, Druid or Rogue) and use it to interact with minigame stations inside the main dungeon space. It tracks your performance, accumulating experience points; you learn your “score” when you finish the experience.

The first thing we noticed about The Immersive Quest was the production design. Brouillet says VIBRANT’s focus was on designing a “movie-grade” experience for visitors — they succeeded on that count. 

The first room, where you select your class, has tomes detailing each class’ unique abilities and role. There are massive statues representing each option that tower over you; the sense of scale is quite impressive, we must say. You then step through a “portal” into a tavern, where you are given your quest: recovering a stolen gem from a dragon. Once the stakes have been set and you have your marching orders, another “portal” is opened, taking you into the dungeon where most of The Immersive Quest takes place. 

The dungeon is filled with minigames that you activate using your bracelet. For one, you need to run across stones with light-up runes on them without falling off into the “lava” below. Another has you copy a light pattern that plays on a monster resembling a human brain. Another game asks you to rub down a massive owlbear – a signature D&D creature – until you find its favorite spot to be scratched. Different classes can have slightly different requirements in these games. For example, one game shows you a rune in a spellbook and has you trace it in the air; Wizards will trace a different rune than Fighters or Rogues.

If at any point you get stuck during your experience, robed crewmembers wander the dungeon with “spellbooks” (cleverly concealing tablets they can use to troubleshoot issues). They do an admirable job staying in character, desperate to maintain the illusion that you really are an adventurer who has been thrown into a quest.

Monsters are plucked straight from the annals of D&D, and there is something undeniably cool about facing down a life-sized beholder (a floating purple monster with a giant eye and eyestalks that fire beams from) or stepping inside a gelatinous cube monster (basically a big cube of Jello that consumes anything that gets trapped in it).

Where The Immersive Quest falls short is its technology. As previously mentioned, this entire experience hinges on the use of an RFID bracelet. At the first station we visited, the game where you run across stones with runes on them, a child went before us. He forgot to scan his RFID bracelet when he finished the game, disappearing before the crewmember manning the station could stop him. This brought the line to a standstill; the crewmember encouraged people to try other stations since he had no way of resetting his, as the game remained keyed to this random child’s RFID bracelet for an indeterminate amount of time.

Halfway through our visit, our RFID bracelet stopped activating games. After some trial and error, a crewmember was able to assist, and we dove back into our adventure—until an RFID reader broke down, failing to launch an encounter where players crawl under a giant mushroom monster’s cap to admire its horrific, tiny monster children. 

Once it was reset, we tried to play again and learned our bracelet was no longer keyed to the class we had chosen at the beginning of the experience. Practically, this does not matter – you can still play all of the minigames no matter what class you are, with only mild variations. But after having such a big deal made out of choosing what class you want to be, randomly switching from a Druid to a Rogue with no explanation and no fix was a mild disappointment.

Finally, after you complete your experience in the dungeon (including a side-quest that involves finding words hidden around the room that make up a passphrase needed to exit) you are ushered into a private room. The room has a large screen and small pedestals that your party clambers onto to face the fearsome dragon you have been sent to kill. 

The battle that ensues mostly consists of karate chopping at the screen when you see the dragon flying around and holding your arms up to “shield” yourself when he attacks. It is a bit of a workout (the way we did it, at least), but it is hard to feel like you are actually accomplishing much as you flail at the screen.

When you defeat the dragon, you have finished the main portion of The Immersive Quest and are welcomed into another tavern with a functioning bar and gift shop. Upon entering, your RFID bracelet is scanned and you are asked to roll a 20-sided die. Whatever number you land on becomes the discount you can receive on a category of merchandise in the gift shop. We rolled a three, which meant a 3% discount on shirts. The elf working the station shrugged, saying, “Better than a one.” This is objectively true, but no truism on earth can make a 3% discount exciting. 

While in the tavern, you can take a photo with a paladin, posing in front of the head of the dragon you just karate chopped to death, buy t-shirts, and sample drinks from the bar before you return to the real world. Prices vary from fair ($10 for the photo op) to more-than-you-want-to-spend (roughly $15 per drink). Individual tickets for the experience itself run in the $40 range.

The Immersive Quest is a cool idea, thoughtfully designed, but pushed past its limit where technology is concerned. We enjoyed entering the space and seeing the way the team at VIBRANT realized so many iconic creatures from D&D lore, but it would have been nice if the gamification elements were on par with the production design. 

All that said, D&D diehards should find plenty to enjoy here, and families with children looking for a unique afternoon outing will likely overlook any glitches because of how immersive the environment is. What nine-year-old is going to care about an RFID bracelet glitching when they come face-to-face with an owlbear?

Tickets for ‘Dungeons & Dragons: The Immersive Quest’ are available now.