Inside the Game: Queen by Midnight: Quarter Past

Back in 2018, I had initially created twelve princesses in total because apparently I am a glutton for punishment. But I quickly realized I had bitten off way more than I could chew, especially as a fledgling game designer, with no money, no connections, and working entirely on my own. I knew that if I wanted this game to have a shadow of a chance at getting made, I needed to adjust its scale and scope. So I went through the painstaking process of whittling my twelve princesses into six, prioritizing the ones I felt were fully cooked, and pocketing the unused ones for a possible expansion down the road.

Flash forward several years, when I was in initial talks with Darrington Press about Queen By Midnight, I still remember the little flutter in my heart when the topic of possible expansions popped up, knowing I already had six other princesses waiting in the wings. I had rough ideas of how I wanted their decks to work, based on how they worked in 2018, but I didn’t want to get too in the weeds with them knowing the game’s nomenclature and mechanics may shift. For instance, I knew I wanted a mermaid princess who gains power by “collecting” things and messing with the other player’s access to the bazaar, but I didn’t go much deeper than that creatively.

Flash forward a few years later, Queen By Midnight has been out for a few months and Alex Ubolodi tells me they want to pull the trigger on an expansion featuring four new princesses, new bazaar cards, and a new two player mode. It was really important to not only introduce four new princesses but to also introduce new mechanics and tempos of play. Queen By Midnight: Quarter Past definitely has a faster pace than the core game. None of the princesses in Quarter Past have a Quell card (which lets you negate an attack coming your way) in their Starting Decks—instead, they all have cards that can do damage right from the jump. Damage mitigation cards still exist, but you have to look for them. The difference in play styles and tempos between the core game and Quarter Past adds a lot of depth in their interactions and to the games in general.