Uneasy Lies the Head

• Designer: Adam Bell
• Publisher: Adam Bell Games
• Release Date: March 2026
• Shop Link

Email me with any questions or if you need anything from me to cover this game. I’d love to come on your shows, participate in interviews, help facilitate or participate in actual plays, or prepare some visual assets as needed.

Digital Press Copy

Here is a link to the press copy where you can download the game on itch.io. Feel free to use it in play, take screenshots for your videos or articles, or anything else. Reach out to me if you’re looking to cover the game and are interested in a physical copy.

Game Overview

Uneasy Lies the Head is royal court intrigue in the form of a tabletop roleplaying game for 2-5 players. The game is at its best as a short campaign of two to four sessions. You can also shorten it into a one-shot or string together multiple games as a longer campaign. There is no game master, so each player will:

• Plot and scheme as antagonistic members of a royal court
• Embody titles that let you rule as the monarch, love as the paramour, wage war as the claimant, pray as the absolver, and more
• Prepare divisive plans to spread rumors, enact laws, host festivities, propose duels, and more

Uneasy Lies the Head is a whole new game system designed from the ground up to give players a framework for interactive, competitive, political roleplaying. Characters will often be at odds with one another, making alliances in one scene and breaking them in the next.

The Prologue

The game starts with the prologue, where players take turns fleshing out their characters and the world they inhabit. One turn you might decide your character is the monarch, and then the next you might say that they hail from a castle on the coast. With each choice, you write things that are important to your characters on notecards. With some choices, you’ll steal these notecards from other players, setting up some good drama for later.

Once the prologue wraps up, each player will have a main character and a bunch of these notecards. They’ll also probably have a few grudges left over from, say, that time in the prologue when the king passed a selfish law and took another player’s most valued advisor into his own court. That advisor and all the other notecards are called assets, and they play a key role in the plans and scenes that make up the rest of the game.

Assets

Assets ground the world we’re playing in and shed light on what’s important to our characters. They’re not just set dressing though! Throughout the game, you might:

• Pass laws and introduce new peers to court to add assets to your retinue
• Challenge your rivals to a duel to take their assets as your own
• Spread rumors and start wars to break assets, tearing the margins off of their notecards to change them

Winning duels, spreading rumors, and passing laws won’t be easy feats to accomplish. The game’s twelve plans guide you through how and when to resolve these actions. They’ll resolve several turns after being prepared, and typically involve a dice roll that every player at the table has a chance to get involved with.

Between the plans, you’ll also set scenes to drive the story forward. Roleplay your characters as you go head-to-head to enact your visions, resolve grudges, and embroil yourself in royal court intrigue.

Plans

Winning duels, spreading rumors, and passing laws won’t be easy feats to accomplish, so it’s important to plan them out ahead of time. The characters in our game might be some of the most powerful and esteemed individuals in the entire realm, but they still have each other to contend with. The game’s 12 plans provide a framework for adjudicating these big sweeping actions, sitting mechanically somewhere between a move from Apocalypse World and a mini-game from Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands.

The Public Record

The public record tracks our turns, scenes, and plans and guides the flow of play. Players take turns setting scenes, and may prepare one of the plans after the scene concludes. Each plan gets added to a future row of the public record, which means other players have time to gather themselves and prepare for what’s coming.

A full game of Uneasy runs through the 13 rows of the public record, and ends with a special epilogue routine called The Shake-Up.

What’s Available?

The Book

Uneasy Lies the Head is an 80 page softcover book. It contains all the rules you need to play the game over one or more sessions.

The Royal Edition

The Royal Edition boxed set contains the book, custom dice and playing cards, playsheets for the prologue and plan preparation, and player tokens. It also includes the companion game, Hungry Out of Habit.