May 2023

Our most exciting news this month is that Threads of Fate: A Puzzletale is live on Kickstarter, and was funded in just three hours! Threads of Fate is a remastered version of PostCurious’ acclaimed debut game, The Tale of Ord. Taking on the role of a private investigator, you will be tasked with finding two missing professors from the Emerens Institute, but when information is uncovered about a mysterious relic found by an archaeological team, you will have the opportunity to change the course of destiny. Provided with an assortment of letters, articles, drawings, websites, and physical artifacts, you will set out on a journey to explore the supernatural forces of Norse mythology and uncover the truth behind the disappearances. We’ve already reached our first stretch goal, which will include a refill kit in every game. Back before May 18th and help us reach our other goals!

Back now

We’re now just over a week from our second Gamefound campaign: Rocky ‘Roid. Rocky ‘Roid is a 1-6 player print at home roll & write game about asteroid mining in the belt (heavily influenced by my love of The Expanse!). It was formed out of my desire to try to create a roll and write game with more player interaction. I’ve half-succeeded, as the first half of the game is more standard as your ship is out surveying, travelling around and mining minding your own business. You will need to keep an eye on your opponents though, because in the second half of the game you are all selling into a shared market, and each time a player sells a mineral, the price drops for everyone else – so you need to balance staying out as long as possible to collect the most resources with the need to be one of the first players back, so you can sell at the market peak.

In the solo game you play a 2-player game against a robot miner that is pretty slow and steady (but also quite efficient!).

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It will be live on Gamefound from 9th – 23rd May and for only £4 you get low and high ink versions of the 4 multiplayer maps, the slightly different rules for each map and the core rules, plus the same for 3 solo maps. Pledging now will also give you access to future maps for free (I have a pirate map I’m working on that won’t be ready for launch). Four+ games for only £4 – bargain!

All our previous crowdfunding campaigns (four on Kickstarter and one on Gamefound) have been for FlickFleet and its expansions, so this will be an interesting experience!

Follow Rocky ‘Roid on Gamefound!

Night Owl is a game of carefully managing your dice to gain skills for your owl but also hunt! Players have 3 dice, they can gain attributes during the day phase to allow for more successful hunts, or hunt in the night phase to gain prey animals for scoring bonuses at the end of the game. Players will be able to block spaces and keep opponents from getting critical prey as players all play on the same sheet!

Don’t sleep on this one, Night Owl brings plenty of strategy on a one page shared sheet!

Kickstarter page

Want to find out how Crumbs! The Sandwich Filler Game was designed? The first two parts of our development blog are out now!

Crumbs! is an 18-card solo/coop game about making sandwiches for a queue of hungry customers coming to Kickstarter this Summer. Stack ingredients and make sandwiches matching your customers’ orders to refresh your actions, complete your order cards, and win the game. If your actions run out your customers will leave and you lose!

Part One introduces the designer and publisher and how they got involved in board gaming and design. Part Two details the design process behind Crumbs! and how Minerva decided to publish microgames. New parts released fortnightly!

Read the blog now

We are absolutely delighted that Cake of Doom has successfully funded! We hit a massive £6,143 which means we will bring Cake of Doom to life. We also hit our stretch goal so every copy will have 2 more alien cards with new art and unique player abilities. We want to say a huge thank you to all our backers for supporting the project.

We know that some people sadly missed the campaign window but you’ve now got another opportunity to make a late pledge. Head to our Gamefound page and pre-order Cake of Doom to get your hands on a copy.

As for our team, we are put the finishing touches on artwork, the rulebook, and the game. We are especially excited to work with our 5 ‘design your own’ backers on the art of our cake, sabotage and alien cards! After that, our manufacturer will get to work. We plan to start fulfilment in September with all copies delivered by the end of October 2023.

Pre-order Cake of Doom

UKGE and Malum Hortus – I hope that the end of May can be focused on UKGE prep. There’s plenty of stock that needs to be made up, displays to organise and hopefully demos to schedule for Malum Hortus as well as my other games. I am planning to have a lot of fuss around Malum Hortus ahead of its Kickstarter launch later this year. If you want to play Malum Hortus please get in touch now to get a demo spot scheduled in on my stand (1058-1).

Playful Pets – Something I’ve wanted to do for a long time for Playful Pets is to remove the resin playing pieces from the games. They take a long time to make which has made production quite slow for me, but also having less plastics in the game would make me very happy. I’m working on some wooden screen-printed cat and dog components that I hope everyone will really love. Wish me luck!

The Board Game Survival Kit 2.0 – All the new mini dice sets and components have arrived and I am in love with them all, I’m so happy with how the colours have turned out for the stretch goals.

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Having 6 more colours to offer my future customers is amazing and entirely down to the massive support that the campaign received on Kickstarter.

Fulfilment is ramping up now that I have everything I need. As of right now the campaign is 34% fulfilled which I think is absolutely fantastic for a campaign that wasn’t due to start fulfilment until May. I’m getting all of the May pre orders done ASAP so I can focus on UK Games Expo preparations, I won’t be taking the new colours with me to any events unless every non custom order from the Kickstarter has at least started their journeys to their backers. It wouldn’t feel right or fair to me to allow new customers to buy them when I still have some to fulfil.

Custom Board Game Survival Kits – For the custom kits I’ve scheduled Kickstarter pledges and GameFound pre orders for May, June and July. UKGE attendees will be able to order custom kits which will go to the end of the list in July. If you missed the campaign you can also order your own standard or custom Board Game Survival Kit using the link below. There are 4 kit types, 2 sizes and 15 colours to choose from now! As well as standard, custom or pride labels to pick for your kit!

Pre-order Board Game Survival Kits

Library Labyrinth is on general sale! We’re about halfway through sending out copies to the Kickstarter backers, and can offer the game to everyone else too!

The games all arrived last month, and we have been slowly sending them out. We’ve also been putting together a schools pack, which will be up on the website soon. With 60 amazing women from fiction and history featured in Library Labyrinth, it’s the perfect game for schools. We’re focusing particularly on women from the UK (because that’s where we’re all from) such as Mary Seacole, Ada Lovelace, and Sophia Duleep Singh.

In other news, we’re working on some quick-but-not-easy card games. Jess is very keen on traditional card games, and so our current idea is a bit of a hybrid — part Rummy, part Whist…

Buy Library Labyrinth here!

What a success! Thanks to 482 backers we raised nearly $17,000 and unlocked four stretch goals! Now we get to make The Score a reality.

The Score is a unique prompt-based storytelling game: something like an RPG, something like a party game, and all about pulling off the heist of a lifetime. One to six players generate their Talents, recruit their crew and hit a randomly generated target to lie, steal and smash their way to the prize – to grab the score! You don’t need to be a mastermind either because the cards do all the work for you.

Missed the Kickstarter? No problem. You can late pledge now. We aim to have physical copies out by October, and the print and play in the next few months.

Late pledge for The Score

Happy May Newsletter fans! I hope you’re all enjoying the Spring weather, although if it’s anything like here you’re probably more familiar with your umbrella than anything else this month.

In Unfringed news I’m very happy to announce that we’re going to be back at UK Games Expo (UKGE) this year, stand 1-327. Last year was our first time and it was a huge highlight for both ourselves and for Zuuli and I can’t wait to be back to both sell and demo Zuuli again. Meeting fans new and old was a lot of fun and we were blown away by Zuuli’s positive reception.

Excitingly we will have a ‘magical’ promo card for all new purchases this year and maybe even more excitingly is that we’ll have plushies too! Sneak previews of which we will be posting on our socials during May so please do follow along to find out more.

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In other news, we’ve been working hard to get Zuuli into as many stores across the UK (and some EU) stores as possible, and are even exploring whether it’s something that zoos and wildlife parks would be interested in. If you happen to know anyone that works for places like that please do reach out as we’d love to have a chat.

That’s all for now and I look forward to meeting everyone heading to Brummy in June!

Grab a copy of Zuuli

Well, the big news for this month is that the Hobgoblin Kickstarter is officially live! Not just that, but it funded in the first 12 hours. It’s really exciting to see Hobgoblin finally happening and being out in the wild, I remember when Mike first showed Hobgoblin to me, before even Gaslands, as an idea he was thinking of working on. Now it’s really happening and it’s a stunning book, artwork by Crom and graphic design by Greg Horton of Electi Studio. The game itself is really tons of fun, fast moving, brutal and exciting, allowing you to get a full sized mass battle game onto the tabletop and played through in the time it would usually take to play out a decent sized boardgame. If you’re a minis gamer and are looking for a system to get your minis onto the tabletop more quickly and more often, check out Hobgoblin and get onboard!

The Hobgoblin Kickstarter is live.

Spring is here and a new free game is just around the corner—in time for Mother’s Day! It’s a flip and write coloring game about beeeeeeees. Watch my Twitter and Tiktok feeds for more. While I no longer have the time to create a new free game every month, my goal is to publish something new every quarter.

Meanwhile, I’m still working hard on my ttrpg, The Space Beyond, which I got to beta rules with a gaming course offered by Central Michigan University and Gencon. I’m starting the next round of play testing, so hit me up if you’d like to try it out.

Last thought—if you are or know a game designer in the southwest US (Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, etc), please put them in touch with me. We have an event in the little town where I live and there is an opportunity to make the board gaming part of it much better. I want to start planning for next year now.

Visit for free games!

As expected April was busy. Firstly I took “Threatened!” (the native animals vs feral animals set collection game) & “It’s all mine” (the landuse game between mining, housing, & nature) to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney for their Late Night Gaming event. This time the Catalina was suspended just above the floor & I was under the tail, it was quite spectacular. The visitors enjoyed the games & thought the themes were tightly woven into the gameplay & made a lot of sense, & some players were back again & commented on the improvements made since they played it at the first event late last year.

Two weeks later I was back in Sydney again, this time for the Young Gamers Take Over Customs House event held at the Customs House Library at Circular Quay as part of youth week. It was probably the fanciest location I have ever tested in, big wide tables with lots of table lamps, high ceilings & antique mosaic tiles. I really enjoyed talking to the visitors about game design, testing, rapid iteration, why I had done some things the way I had etc.

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Coming up in May I will be at 2 local play testing days, one is monthly in Canberra & the other is a new event we are trying to get off the ground at a new game store that opened up in my nearest town. I’m hoping to get people interested in what goes into making a game as well as try to encourage the younger ones to consider designing a game & entering it into the Tabletop Game Designers of Australie Whipper Snapper Award. After that things should slow right down as I dive seriously into trying to find a new job. Wish me luck 🙂

Rarely used social media account

Our first expansion to Mission to Planet Hexx is finally here! Beyond Mission to Planet Hexx arrived during the first week of April, along with special dice, individual player play mats, special convention-only promo cards, and, of course, the expansion game itself. We look forward to bringing all new space adventure to our fans old and new in 2023.

New products available on Gamefound