Background

I’ve been running a board game group for a quite some years now. It focuses on practicing spoken English, so I try to bring to the table games that strongly encourage non-repetitive vocal interaction between players. Or at least, that was the original idea. Nowadays, a lot of the games we play are primarily chosen according to how good they are, the communication aspect only being an added bonus. We play for 4 to 5 hours, and the games are generally on the heavier side. I found myself wanting to add more player interactions to some of these games, and opted to try my hand at making my own game instead.

Thus is born Heirless, a game where all players are going to need to negotiate with the other players to progress. And if players don’t manage to reach agreements, well, some very aggressive bandits will take advantage of the feuding lords to take over the realm (which ends the game, of course).

I don’t have a budget for it and I don’t want to make it lighter, so some compromises were taken in order to have a viable game. I’m also not looking to make a profit, but neither do I want to transfer ownership of the game to a publisher. One particularly important consequence of this is that I’m using generative AI for complex illustrations. The bar for success in this project is bringing a good quality version to my board game group and people there having a blast playing it.