Publishing Details

Designer: Adam Bell
Publisher: Adam Bell Games
Kickstarter Date: April 8, 2025
Kickstarter Goal: $10,000
Estimated Release: Late Summer 2025
Kickstarter Link

Email me with any questions or if you need anything from me to cover this game, either for the Kickstarter or leading to its broader release. 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. A copy of the rules will be available here when available.

Game Overview

Uneasy Lies the Head is a competitive tabletop roleplaying game about royal court intrigue for 2-5 players. It comes as an 80 page book that contains all the rules you need to play. No game-master is required to play. The game can be played as a one-session game, or as multiple sessions linked into a campaign where everyone will:

Roleplay the plots and schemes of members of a royal court.
Roll dice and leverage your assets when you want to get your way.
Prepare plans like Spread Rumors and Make War that resolve over time.

Uneasy Lies the Head is a whole new game system designed from the ground up to give players a framework for highly interactive political roleplaying. Unlike many tabletop RPGs, the game is at its best when the player characters are at odds with one another. You’ll make alliances in one scene, and break them in the next. That all begins with the first phase of the game, known as the prologue.

The Prologue. - Create characters and relationships - Draft titles, holdings, laws, and rumors - Create assets or steal them from other players

Once the prologue wraps up, each player will have a main character and a bunch of things in the world that they find important. 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 your most valued advisor into his own court. That advisor and all the other important things are called assets, and they’ll each play a key roll in the plans and scenes that make up the rest of the game rest of the game.

Assets and Notecards - Everything important to your characters is on a notecard - Tear marginalia off of opponent's notecards to break and change them

Assets help flesh out 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’ll have a chance to take assets from other players by taking a ward or winning a duel for them, break them by spreading rumors and starting wars, or make new ones by passing laws or introducing new peers to court.

Plans - 12 plans included like Duel, Seek Answers, Spread Rumors

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 - Use a calendar to track story beats - Set scenes and react to events - Brace yourself for the plans of other players

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.

Also Available: Hungry out of Habit - Build Your Kingdoms - An expanded version of the prologue mechanics of Uneasy - Turn your table into a map of your rival, neighboring kingdoms - Use yarn to track your shifting borders - Capture strongholds, define commanders, and build a world

While playtesting early versions of Uneasy Lies the Head’s prologue, I felt it it was taking longer than I’d like to get through the prologue and start the main game. It was really fun to play and generated a rich world to play in, but simply took too long. A few playtesters thought it was substantial enough to be a game of its own, and that’s how Hungry out of Habit was born.

Each player acts as a the ruler of rival, neighboring kingdoms engaged in a bit of a protracted border dispute. You’ll take turns making and claiming castles, commanders, towns, terrain, stories, and more. When you claim something like castle, you’ll extend the loop of yarn that represents your kingdom until the castle falls into your borders. The game is a super tactile back and forth between players moving their yarn around and staking their claim on the map. At the end, you’ll have a new and interesting world you can port into a game of Uneasy Lies the Head or anything else!

What’s Available During the Campaign?

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 Zine - Hungry out of Habit is a 32 page square zine with all the rules you need to play this companionm worldbuilding game The Cards - Get a custom deck of 54 cards designed for easy use in both Uneasy Lies the Head and Hungry out of Habit The Dice - Ten dice with custom faces designed for use in Uneasy Lies the Head Postcards - Playsheets for both games, printed on cardstock with additional references and art prints on the backs

Kickstarter pricing info

Pricing