After the success of Queen By Midnight, a deckbuilding card game from designer Kyle Shire and publisher Darrington Press, they’re back again for a standalone that doubles as an expansion; Queen By Midnight: Quarter Past. Last week we got to sit down with Shire and Alex Uboldi, Game Production Manager at Darrington Press, to talk about the new expansion including the new playable Princesses, how they balanced each character, and whether any more ideas are bouncing around in Shire’s Head.
Before hopping into the interview it’s important to explain that Queen By Midnight is a deckbuilding game where players take on the role of Princesses fighting for a chance to become Queen. Spend Clout to purchase cards from your character deck, or the shared bazaar, to build up your strength and defeat all of the other princesses before the clock strikes midnight.
The Inception And Collaboration Behind Queen By Midnight Quarter Past
To begin our interview Shire introduced himself and the history of development for Queen By Midnight. “The TLDR is wayback in the day I had this weird idea for a card game that I had kicking around for a very long time. I was working full time for a company that rhymes with shmeshminima and didn’t really think anything was going to come from [Queen By Midnight] and when shmeshminima went shmesmwaway I had a bunch of time on my hands and I needed to fill it with something to do. This game became my reason to get out of bed in the morning for the longest time.”
After some time, and returning to work, Shire explained that he had continued to work on it behind the scenes until the creation of Darrington Press as the game publishing arm of Critical Role was created. “Darrington Press came along I pitched it to Ivan and thank got someone as talented and wonderful as Alex Uboldi came along and managed to fish all of the good threads out of my tangled mess and managed to make a really great game, and now another one.”
Uboldi hopped in to offer his side of this meeting “When I started at Darrington Press one of the first projects that was handed to me was the original Queen By Midnight. I took it and I played it with a bunch of different groups and every group I played it with loved the game”
“Every group I played it with loved the game so I’m like ‘Ok, there’s something special here’”
“It was a lot of my job to basically help develop the art, the graphic design, go through all of the cards and make sure there was consistency,” Alex spoke further on his input to the creation of the finished product that we know today. “Basically it was bringing Kyle’s vision to life in the most beautiful way possible.”
Reception Worthy Of A Queen
I asked Shire what it was like having that game, that he was working on in the backburner become such a success, he said “It’s been a dream come true. Any single time I am able to go into a game store and see my game, and talk to game store owners and people playing it, and get their feedback there’s no greater feeling.”
“I love hearing all the stories of people saying ‘I won with this character, and I really want to try these other characters’”
Shire and Uboldi shared a common appreciation of hearing peoples stories of winning the game. Whether it be a slow burn through the game, taking out specific Princesses immediately, or using an ability to steal everyone’s Clout etc.
Uboldi admitted “Those stories of people playing the game, that’s why I really do this.”
How To Build A Princess
When Shire brought the game to Uboldi and the Darrington Press team he already had a lot of ideas for the Princesses, how they would perform uniquely, and what kind of personality they would have.
“We did a lot of working together to make sure the Princesses felt like they were their identities, they developed in cool and interesting ways. Neither of us expected as we were bouncing ideas off each other that these Princesses would develop into fully fledged characters that both of us are happy with.”
Speaking to the expansion Uboldi explained that the process was very similar “We wanted to make the expansion for this game because we love this world and we want to see more from it. Kyle laid out all of the design for the four new pricesses.” At that time Shire already had ideas for the vibes of each of these new Princesses as well as their mechanics to make them a unique play experience at the table.
The Princesses Of Quarter Past
Four new Princesses have been added as part of Quarter Past; Elise LeKraken, Azil With A Z, Kahurere Skyfisher, and Qasima Al-Basar.
Talking on the inspirations for these characters Shire explained that "if Ursula is to Devine, then you will have Elise LeKraken to Monet X Change. Dialing back to the original conceit behind Ursula and making that the focal point for our mermaid princess is just absolutely inspired."
For more on the mechanics and gameplay style for each of these new Princesses you can check out our full review of Queen By Midnight Quarter Past
"Azil With A Z is our wonderful nod to Alice in Wonderland. Our absurdist and surreal princess. Her whole vibe is that she's the only princess who has access to all three classes. I always tell people that she's the chaos character, if you're not interested in winning but want to cause a bunch of chaos you've got to play Azil."
Uboldi continued describing the characters talking about Qasima Al-Basar "who is our Princess Jasmine meeds Aladdin analog. By day she's a princess and by night she's a vigilante who protects her kingdom personally. We wanted to create a character who felt like she hed a lot of tools for espionage, but if she needs to she doles out great damage."
The last of the new characters is Kahurere Skyfisher who doesn't want to be Queen, but she wants to bring the whole system down. "She is Carrie Fisher's Princess Leia meets Moana. Because she doesn't have this grand kingdom she has to use more covert means. Her mechanic is laying traps for all the other Princesses. They can either keep the traps in their hand to be a dead card or play the trap to draw another card, but the trap will do something to help Skyfisher"
This deck is all about the other players making choices to have benefits together, or working against one another. Uboldi explained that what drew him to liking this character was that it's very "Interactive. It lets you talk to the whole table and it involves everyone and that's where the game is it's most fun"
While all four of these characters have their own unique mechanics Shire did explain that they designed each to be a far more aggressive character, making big moves quickly.
There Might Be Two Lost Princesses?
Interestingly when talking about how he came up with the original concepts for the Princesses that the first game would have twelve Princesses. "So I had cooked up rough ideas for 12 princesses, eventually I thought it was madness and cut it down to six that I felt like were the six most well baked out of them."
From the other six they were included in Shire's original draft of the first game for potential expansions and four of those are what we can now play. When asked if we would see these two final Princesses Shire said "I don't know, we'll have to figure that out, I have an idea but we'll see…" as Uboldi shrugged.
Creating Balance Across The Lands
As each Princess has their own unique deck and you can now play with up to ten Princesses I was curious to understand how they approached balancing so many characters. Having already created the prior six helped them have a good baseline. Uboldi explained that "We looked at the original princesses and the baseline power level. We scaled everything to match that power level, but because we were making these changes to the core deck it changes the dynamic of these princesses to be much more aggressive."
By not having the ability to block an attack, it allowed them to design the pricesses to be more aggressive knowing that they're also more vulnerable to attacks.
"Against each other they felt very balanced, but against the Core Set Princesses there was interesting gameplay for the Princesses who are holding off an assault and trying to go over the top or Princesses who are trying to race down their opponents."
Expansion As Well As Standalone
Many board games when expanding a roster of playable characters would simply release a character expansion and move on. For Queen By Midnight Quarter Past I was impressed that not only was this four new playable characters that interact with one another but that it came with all that that you need to play it on it's own.
Uboldi explained that for Darrington Press they understood that the base game retailing at $70 that was a high price point for something you might not like. "We designed Quarter Past as a great entry place for newer players"
"We really wanted it to work well on it's own, we even designed the Princesses and Bazaar cards to be simpler but mechanically deep to make this as approachable for a new entry player as possible."
Andrew has written Video Game and Entertainment news, reviews, and guides for 10+ years. As Senior Content Manager, he assists in creating and editing… More about Andrew
