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A publisher took the money in 2021 and walked. So the two men who created Rat Queens took the rights back and built the game themselves. It's called Vengeance on Villains, and the title isn't a metaphor.
Free. One tap on BackerKit and you get an email the day the campaign opens.
Short version: the money went one way and the game went nowhere.
Backers pay for a Rat Queens board game on Kickstarter. It never reaches a single one of them. Kurtis and Roc, who created the comic it was based on, never see a cent either.
Roc, who drew Rat Queens for over a decade, comes back in with him. They start again from an empty page, this time with Talespinner Games.
Five Queens, a city under siege, and something enormous waiting at the end of the night. It launches on BackerKit under a name that says exactly what it is.
The box the first one never had. This one exists.
Sign up on BackerKit and you get told the day it goes live. That's the whole ask.
A co-op brawler with light deck-building underneath. Every Queen brings her own deck and her own way of ruining a monster's evening. Hold the gates, loot the bodies, buy better violence, then put the boss down before the city goes under.
Five of them, each with her own deck and her own grudges. Nobody plays the same way twice.
Monsters pour down four lanes toward the city. You can't cover all four, and that's the whole problem to solve.
Kill something, take its stuff, buy the ability that kills the next thing faster. Then meet whatever the boss has been feeding.
Leave a friendship token at a gate and the next Queen who fights there hits harder. Helping your friends is written into the rules.
Mercenaries, technically. Palisade calls them a problem right up until something worse shows up.
Elven mage. Short fuse, big blast radius.
Dwarven fighter. Shaved the beard, kept the sword.
Smidgen thief. Fast hands, worse impulse control.
Cleric who doesn't believe in her own god.
Orc warrior. Twice your size, half your patience.
Sign up there and BackerKit emails you the moment the campaign opens. No feed to watch, no date to remember.
Takes about ten seconds. No payment, no commitment.
The demo is on Tabletop Simulator right now, free. Grab a few friends and find out whether it clicks before you back anything. After what happened in 2021, asking people to trust a promise felt like the wrong move.
Rat Queens ran at Image Comics from 2012 to 2023 and made the New York Times bestseller list. The box carries a new comic story by Kurtis and Roc, printed for this game.
The art in this box comes from Roc Upchurch, the same hand that drew Rat Queens for over a decade. It looks like the comic because the person who drew the comic drew it.
They tell this part in character, because that's how they tell everything.
I wrote Rat Queens. In 2021 a publisher raised $338,354 from our fans for a board game, then vanished with it. Roc and I took the rights back and rebuilt the whole thing ourselves.
We called it Vengeance on Villains for reasons I think you can work out.
I drew Rat Queens for over a decade. Our comic became a board game, then an evil wizard stole the gold the good people of the internet had crowdfunded, and the game never shipped.
This one we made with our own hands. Come take it back with us.
Talespinner Games is publishing this one with Kurtis and Roc, not around them. The names on the box belong to the people who made what is inside it. That was the entire point of starting over.
Maybe not you personally, but somebody did and got nothing back. This time the game is finished and the demo costs nothing. The people asking you to look are the ones who drew it.