Full disclosure: I don't love standard initiative in D&D and similar games. It's not terrible, but I feel like it can be done better. It generally only affects the first round of combat, and after that it's just a neverending circle until the encounter is over. To me, it feels like it should either be simpler or more complex. It falls right in the middle, so I'm lukewarm toward it. You may feel completely different about initiative, so keep in mind that I'm approaching this with my own bias.

While this supplement isn't groundbreaking, the authors do a nice job of gathering initiative approaches that I've seen in other games or in blogs and converting them for use with 5e. I appreciate the examples provided for each of the five approaches presented. The conversational tone of the sidebars where the authors explain their thought process and what they changed for 5e is quite helpful as well. I already use two of these methods for my one-shots or demo games vs. my campaign games, and it was fun to see them presented here (with slight differences, which were interesting to consider).

There's a nice summary page at the end, recapping the five different options in succinct language. If you make your own house rules handout and use one of these rules, consider cutting and pasting the approrpriate box from this page and including it in your handout.

The only thing that I can think of that would have improved this product was discussion of how 5e abilities/spells that apply an effect until the beginning/end of some creature's turn would interact with the options that are presented. If a PC acts at the top of round 1 and buffs her party until the end of her next turn, and in the next round she acts at the end, her party effectively received twice the value from that spell. A DM could certainly tune encounters accordingly, knowing a PC has that ability, but this is extra work on the DM, and requires that foresight. Another risk is that some classes offer more of these types of abilities than others. Will one player feel like his charcter doesn't shine as brightly becuase he can't take advantage of initiative the way others can?

I should point out that the book has several sidebars that talk about how lair actions and legendary actions would interact with these rules. I was glad to see the designers mention these explicitly, as they're a big part of what makes 5e combat different from other games, and makes it non-trivial to plop another game's initiative system into 5e.

I noticed that the print-friendly and full-color versions of this supplement are the same. It was likely a mistake when uploading files, and I hope this is corrected in a future version.

Despite my desire to see this one aspect addressed in the supplement, there's plenty of value here, and as a PWYW product, you can check it out before deciding whether or not to tip the designers. I enjoyed thinking about how these different approaches to initiative would affect the game, and recomment the book if for no other reason than to give you something to think about.