Another day, another trivia question! So far the Curators are leading the pack.

We also have a lot of ties for first place. How many backers will get all of the question correct at the end?

Thank you all so much for continued support and engagement of our game! It is hard to believe that we are already in the final stretch for The Unheist of Hearthburn House campaign. 

We hope you are enjoying the daily trivia! Take a crack at this one.

One of the most strenuous parts of the game design process is playtesting. Our playtesters are amazing and we want to first thank them all for their time and dedication to making our games better. Zero Strategy Games would not be the same without them.

There are two major phases of playtesting we utilize for each one of our games, general playtesting and blind playtesting.

This playtesting phase is primarily focusing on the core gameplay experience. Is the game fun? Are there any things you would add or remove from the game to make it better? Essentially asking the question if we should proceed with the game.

We typically start this play phase in Tabletop Simulator. This allows us to playtest with any of our fans from around the world at any time! It's honestly a cool tool to make games and share them with others.

Once we get further along with our art and graphic design, then we will continue playtesting with a physical prototype. Since the game is further along, we are typically asking different types of questions that relate more to the physical presence of the game. For Unheist, it was more focused on the spinning board than anything else. It's an important mechanic you can't really test out virtually!

Blind playtesting is almost entirely focused on the rulebook. While it's easy to teach someone a game when you are playing it with them, it is a completely different skillset to write down the rules in a way that everyone can understand.

When blind playtesting, we do still take people's feedback about game mechanics, but the game is mostly finalized by that point. There are some tweaks we can still make, but the game should not be changing drastically at this stage in the game.

With all that said, we did actually have some last minute tweaks to the game thanks to our playtesters!

The first change was how goodie cards are distributed at the beginning of the game. Though it is now an optional rule, we did originally have players draft the cards in reverse turn order. This was to help balance the advantage players get by going first. However, this tended to slow down the start of the game and cause confusion with first time players, so now players just draw the top card of the goodie deck.

The second change was how the lever worked on the last turn. We originally had allowed players to pull the lever throughout the entire game. However, some spiteful players figured out they could just spin the lever near the end of the game to put other players directly in front of the dragon. This wasn't fun, as players would get grubby and have no way of getting clean before the game ends. We decided to "break" the lever for the last round of the game to keep that from happening.

The last change was when Junk is added to your Team bag. Originally, we had players add junk to their bag at the beginning of the game. This caused issues if junk was the first thing drawn from the bag because there was no rhyme or reason to put junk anywhere. So some players had to waste their first turn putting junk on the ground for no reason, just so they could grab another stuff token. We decided to add junk in as the game progresses to avoid this issue.

And that sums up our playtesting experience! If you are interested in being part of our playtesting for future games, check out our discord.

The next trivia question is live.

There are two mechanics in the Unheist that we think make the game stand out from other games, the "sorta" cooperative aspect and the spinning board. Today, we are going to jump into each in depth and explain where the ideas came from!

This mechanic was actually one of the later additions to the game. We originally had each player controlling their own two kobolds from their team. However, this led to a number of issues in gameplay:

So we pitched the idea of passing one your kobolds to another player so you were forced to collaborate on teams. This fixed the issue of checking out because you are now taking twice as many turns each round. It also fixed the "right" option dilemma because what is best might be different for each player.

This mechanical change spiced up the gameplay in a unique way without needing to add many rules or complications to the game. We want our games to stand out from other games, and we think this dynamic makes for a unique gaming experience.

Ironically enough, the rotating mansion was a later addition to the game as well. It actually came as a necessity of removing the rondel we highlighted in the previous update. Without the rondel, the dragon was too predictable and easy to maneuver around.

Not only did adding the spinning mansion make the dragon harder to 100% predict, it opened up new gameplay strategies! You could push other players into the dragon, or spin yourself away from it's fire. It is honestly one of our favorite parts to showcase when presenting the game in person.


And these mechanics are the reason we never want to be too rigid in our game design process. Sometimes, the best ideas come along last minute.

And check out today's trivia question!

Today we are diving into the process for designing the kobolds for The Unheist of Hearthburn House! We've mentioned this numerous times, but we cannot thank our artist Caitlyn enough for her work on this project. While our team had our own ideas for the game, Caitlyn came in and added her style, making the game even better!

To start the process, we had to decide how we wanted our "default" kobold to appear. Since kobolds are a loosely defined creature, we definitely had a range to choose from for our character designs.

Ultimately, we wanted our kobolds to appear more lizard-like, removing the styles that were more aquatic or "bat-like" from the list. We then decided to use a mix of the other styles so that each kobold had it's own unique style and flair.


All of these design choices led to us creating this kobold as our first full render! While they didn't end up making it into the game as a character, they set the pace for the characters' appearances and expressions.

Now that we had set the general direction for character designs, we then put together our character descriptions and art briefs for Caitlyn. These briefs were simple descriptions along with a sentence about their personality. We wanted Caitlyn to have flexibility in brining these kobolds to life. For example, Wisteria's art brief was, "Cheerful caretaker, adorned with flowers, green and yellow hues. Tries her best to make sure everyone is having a wonderful day and the chance to smell fresh flowers each morning."


Then Caitlyn would provide us with a couple of options to choose from. It was honestly a hard decision as they are all so cute, but we went with option B for our character Wisteria.

And that's how we created the 12 kobolds for The Unheist of Hearthburn House! We hope you enjoyed getting to see the process and possible variations for our characters. And as always, don't forget to answer the today's trivia question!