I've now tested bugbears and borderlands a few times. My group has mostly played 5e, after a bit of editing this game has been very fun. It is quicker to play than standard 5e, characters come together faster, combat is a bit faster, but slightly more deadly. I wish I could get Izengrim and the creator of "into the borderlands" to team up on a new "B/X 5e" Izengrims simplicity combined with "Into the unknown" running the game book is, perhaps, better than playing 5e. In either case I've been using bb&bl as my intro to d&d game.

Book 4 Running the Game makes this set worth it on it's own.

I love that it's printed in separate volumes, to be able to have a player working on spells and another working on thier character at the same time while a third looks up rules is way more useful than one would expect. The booklet format, too is nice, it gives it an old school feel to it, almost like it's own white box.

Book 6... Honestly, I don't know if it was intentional, (I highly doubt it) but the fact that a companion volume was promised but not finished echoes B/X pretty closely.

This system is a 5e game with a B/X tone to it. I personally was born 6 years after B/X was printed, and find 5e more comfortable to run. However, I recently purchased "Into the Borderlands" from goodman games and wanted to try it with a game that had an OSR feel with 5e mechanics. This works pretty well for it.

The printed book seems to be missing pages, for example it shows page 51 as having maneuvers in the pdf, but no such section was added to the printed book. Is the combined printed manual up to date?