Return to a world of magicks and grief with Our Queen Crumbles

The conclusion is already in place. You have failed. The Queen is dead.

Our Queen Crumbles is a collaborative storytelling game for 2-4 players about revenge, inevitable death, and saying goodbye to those you love. On May 1st, 2025, it will be back on BackerKit for a new and revised Hallowed Edition.

The game is set in the weird-fantasy land of Halloway, where the dead whisper to those who listen and the fundamental forces of nature can be bent to your will. It is designed to be played in a single sitting, and focused on developing interesting and dynamic characters over the course of a few hours—no matter your roleplaying experience.

You play as the retainers of the Queen of Halloway, recently murdered before your very eyes. Her soul still clings to a crumbling statue as you make your way across the Queendom, a pilgrimage towards her final resting place and a quest to confront the hand that killed her. Each player chooses a playbook from the available Retainer archetypes and all together share two table playbooks: The Queen, and The Assassin. Playbooks contain an assortment of character traits, items, and abilities for the players to choose from as they travel on their journey. Instead of character advancement that makes you more powerful, Our Queen Crumbles features character advancement that makes you more interesting—every box you mark on your sheet drives the story forward, giving you a better picture of the character you play.

Who is the Little Stone God? Why does the Knight of Whispers carry the Salt and Iron crowns? What is the Tree Under the Mountain? Only you can decide.

The game trusts players to come up with conflict, intrigue, and answers to the questions they have.

Written by Jason Brown in 2019 and first published as a 24-page zine, Our Queen Crumbles eventually found its way to NessunDove, the Indie Groundbreaker Award-winning game design studio behind Crescendo Giocoso and the new Oracular Edition of momatoes' celebrated The Magus.

NessunDove picked up the game for an Italian translation: after a complete revision, Nostra Maestà Infranta was published as a pick-up-and-play boxed edition with reusable game materials, including 14 alternate characters from the Retainers expansion to make the game even more replayable.

With the help of a BackerKit campaign set to launch in May 2025, this expanded and revised 2021 edition will be the foundation for the complete Hallowed Edition, rounded out with variant playbooks for Retainers, the Queen and the Assassin, an alternate map with different backdrops for your grim adventures, and loads of extra art by the original illustrator Al Lukeheart.

The campaign will fund the production of a boxed edition of Our Queen Crumbles in English and Italian, with 30 reusable laminated cards containing the rules of the game and every handout you need to play, and a digital edition to match. Write on the sheets with any water-based marker, lead your Queen to her final rest over the course of an evening, then erase the remains of your game and do it all over again.

The boxed set will include:

• A set of revised rules, combining simplicity and depth for an intense, replayable one-shot experience;
• Two playable maps of the Queendom of Halloway, providing alternate backdrops;
• Two Queens and two Assassins to make every game different;
• Sixteen playable characters, each weirder than the last.

Join the Queen's court on BackerKit to be notified of the launch this coming May.